Ruth Wishart: Society is still held captive by Covid

Think about it. During the pandemic, we got used to ordering stuff online. I still shop locally for daily essentials but can’t remember the last time I darkened the door of a high-street shop. And judging by the number of closures on most main streets, I’m far from being alone. New habits die hard!

Every so often, some guru or other is given a commission to come up with ways to revive them. To reinvent stricken town centres. I fear that cause is well-nigh lost. Most town centres are overrepresented by charity shops.

For folk like me who live in the boondocks, online shopping proved just too easy for everything from books to food. It’s not that I don’t love bookshops, but the only one within reasonable driving distance has long since closed.

READ MORE: Labour MP allegedly renting out mould and 'ant infested' flats

When I last looked it had become a nail bar. Won’t be darkening that door either. Plus, online food features all kinds of stuff that wouldn’t make sense in a village store.

The world of work has changed out of all recognition too. During the pandemic, a whole host of people decided that a lengthy commute to sit in an office all day didn’t really qualify as getting a life.

Thousands decided that working from home had attractions as well as the inevitable distractions. And concluded that a two- or three-day week out at work was quite enough, thanks.

Certainly, it’s nice to huddle around the water cooler discussing whether series two of Sherwood is as good as the original.

But I’m guessing few people are missing the time spent on buses or trains ferrying them there and back. The fall-off in rail passengers will certainly not be helped by the end of the off-peak fares experiment.

Governments of all stripes and employers of all sizes have been working hard to buck these trends, but there are still millions who just never went back to five-day weeks.

Only last week, the current UK Government floated the notion of four-day weeks with longer hours. Then hastily said it wouldn’t, of course, be compulsory – when employers inevitably cried foul.

Yet, actually, the bottom line here is not where you work, but how productive you are. The thing about four-day working week trials is that they tend not to show a drop in productivity but, more importantly, remind people of the things they really do like – long weekends and time with the kids.

As an American pal of mine used to observe, nobody spends much time on their deathbed wishing they’d spent more hours in the office.

And it must have been really tough for people with hard physical jobs, getting motivated to go back to them after months of involuntary freedom. I guess the motivation for most was the need to earn enough dosh to keep the domestic show on the road.

(Image: free)

Just the same, one of the more benign things the pandemic brought us all was a renewed sense of perspective. We did have time to stand and stare. We did find even solitary walking could be an adventure in the natural world. Having said which, it was a whole lot nicer for those of us blessed with a lovely view than others trapped in a high flat with three kids under 10.

When we were confined to barracks, some neighbours I barely knew suggested having a glass of wine in one of our gardens on alternate weeks, weather permitting. We’ve kept the tradition going all these years later. And no, the wine is not the only attraction!

My generation rarely saw their dads. Lovely man that mine was, he left for work when I was still in bed, and often came home when I was asleep. (The flaw in this arrangement tended to be dental, as he would give me sweets whenever I recited the Scotland team in the right formation.)

Crucially. we are still to find out the impact that losing all that classroom time has had on our kids. Some of them had assiduous teachers who did their level best to try to minimise the gap sites. Some didn’t. Some had parents who tried to fit schoolwork around everything else.

Some didn’t.

And we do know that there was a terrific gulf between those who could access all kinds of teaching materials online and those who had no access to personal technology. It’s not just about exam results either – there’s a whole lot of socialisation involved in sharing a classroom with your peers every day.

READ MORE: SNP 'would have even fewer MPs if Green deal hadn't ended', Stephen Flynn says

It may be that the current obsession with doing everything on screen instead of in person was born of that period when you quite literally couldn’t visit friends – or make new ones, for that matter.

For some of us, the teenage years were a time of experimentation, of falling in and out of love, of being as daft as you can be only at that age and stage when there are no serious responsibilities to keep you in check.

The pandemic teenagers were robbed of all that, as were those of who missed out on the more social aspects of colleges and universities. It will undoubtedly have made them different people from their predecessors, and we have still to find out about that too.

There is much we don’t know about that kind of long Covid, about what the long months of lockdown have meant for families, for workers, for students, for pupils and for employers. I’m guessing that for all of us, and all of them, life will never be quite the same again. It may be that part of the reason for a positive epidemic of mental illness stems from these Covid years.

Yet a different lifestyle with different priorities needn’t necessarily be a cause for regret. Of course, governments fret about the so-called economically inactive. About people they assume would be better off working, and not just financially. They too have their own priorities about growth but they tend to mean that in terms of wealth rather than personal development.

I’m not so naïve as to assume that there is nobody out there swinging the lead or using their ingenuity to dodge work rather than do any of it. But I’m also coming to believe that for many people, that awful shutdown brought some positive thinking into their lives.

Doubtless, as the years roll by, there will be learned studies into this type of long Covid where the world found itself suddenly imprisoned and forced to rely on its own devices and personal resources. There will be lengthy essays and maybe even entire courses devoted to what happened to us all after March 2020.

It’s difficult to conclude right now that we became more thoughtful given that we’ve just lived through so much disruption based on ignorance, prejudice and misinformation.

Yet I’m heartened by the thought that so many hundreds of people felt able to come out and reclaim their streets, letting the rioters know in no uncertain terms that this was not what their town or their neighbourhood was about.

Sometimes good things come out of adversity. Let’s just hope we’ve learned some useful lessons from our enforced captivity.