I think it was John Keats who said that ‘touch has a memory’. It’s just as well, as I’m starting to forget.
My parents weren’t big huggers. We had a couple of aunts who were, but, by and large, we generally said it in words or, in extremis, flowers. And my institutional life in various male only establishments didn’t really provide for much contact either. Unless you count the English teacher’s unambiguous and uninvited lunges at my midriff during prep school film nights, or having my nose caved in by some physical titan during military boxing bouts.
So, all things considered, it took me till well into my 30s to come to the conclusion that hugging people was a good thing and that it was just as OK to hug a bloke as it was a girl. Since then, I’ve got better and better at the whole business, and could now probably sit a GCSE in ‘appropriate physical contact’.
Which makes ‘now’ even sadder.
Because the fundamental condition of a plague, it seems to me, that you have to make an assumption that anyone not from your safe house has got it, and therefore has to be treated with a doleful suspicion. Whilst this doubtless suits some of the more professionally distant people around me, it leaves me feeling a bit incomplete, to be honest. It has taken me sixty years to learn how to be open and occasionally tactile, only now to be told to keep two metres away from everyone.
Now, like you, I’m not so much of a new man that I don’t have a list of people I would cheerfully keep two hundred metres away from, but I would like to average it out a bit. You know, stay four hundred metres away from them, and get back to half a metre away from people I care for, like you.
But it is what it is, and we are where we are. One view of science prevails over the other, and, for the time being, we must do as we are told, and fight the good fight. Friends have been ill with it, and it is manifestly not ‘just a bad flu’. I find it surprisingly easy for the obliging citizen in me to trump the latent anarchist.
The biggest problem for me, ironically, concerns cricket. When we are finally allowed to play, who is going to hug me when I record my maiden century?
It is that imminent.
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