Heady Days

 These are heady days: on Friday, we took the grandchildren to a favourite café (where a very fine pistachio cake is available), then on to another at a little distance, and finally to yet a third, where the children took an early dinner. And at every café, we were able to enter, with minimal (or no) Covid-related fuss, sit down at a table, and eat and drink. And it was a joy.
What has happened to us over the past months that this once entirely normal and taken-for-granted amenity of daily life should seem like a rare treat, a privilege, a gift? From whom? In whose gift is this simple, basic freedom?  What have we been reduced to? Enough questions.  I wasn't asking any at the time; I was just enjoying it. It's been a long while.
And, as it this wasn't enough excitement, yesterday the lot of us (including son and daughter-in-law) were at it again, having lunch at one of our local pubs. As this was the first weekend since the Great Easing (sounds like a village in Somerset) we were expecting the place to be heaving – but far from it. The bar (where we ate) was barely a quarter full, and the restaurant maybe half full. It seems that many people are hesitant about resuming anything too much like normal life. That's the trouble with inducing a general state of fear in the population – it's very hard to get people out of it. Just as it's very hard for governments, bureaucracies and The Science to give up their control over so many aspects of our lives. 
Meanwhile, the 'Indian variant' has proved a disappointment to those who were hoping it would justify postponing the Even Greater Easing we are promised for June. No doubt they are now busy seeing what else they can come up with to keep us all in our places, and give them longer in the driving seat before they resume the nonentity status that was rightly theirs before all this came along.