I love pubs so much I recreated mine in VR but I’m staying home on 4 July – The Guardian

Pub? A great question. So concise, yet so evocative. A single word in itself more persuasive than any thesis. Pub? An irresistible proposition asked only when the answer is all but assured, or, at least, immediately rendering alternative commitments far less appealing. Pub? Nobody has heard the siren call for months, not since they were cruelly shuttered by the coronavirus. The pub became accessible only through fading memory, reduced to little more than an imagined Peter Kay routine. (Remember pubs?! What were all that about?)

My own commitment to pubs cant be questioned: at the height of lockdown, and in a fit of quarantine delirium, I embarked on a needlessly elaborate project to create a 3D replica of my beloved local (Skehans, south London), just to have a drink in virtual reality. Just to feel something. Just to remind myself pubs really happened, and that I didnt hallucinate them. The whole exercise only served to make me miss the real thing more. For weeks now, Ive been dreaming of waltzing through those doors, slapping my contactless down on the bar, and supping the most cathartic first sup of unremarkable draught lager in history. And now Boris Johnson is offering to make that a reality. Pub this Saturday? hes asking England.

It is incredibly galling then, to find myself with no option but to turn him down, for the simple fact that he is Boris Johnson and there is an active pandemic on.

In my post-lockdown pub fantasies, the Covid-19 situation is actually over. Any objective observation of the present suggests it isnt. The speeding up of lockdown relaxations apparently motivated by business secretary Alok Sharmas prediction of 3.5m job losses and abandonment of even talking about the R rate means public health is now considered secondary to the economy. Its a grimly efficient bit of politicking, allowing the state to forgo further financial support to the service industry by covering the wages of its workers, while grasping for a grubby poll boost for the reopening of our precious drinking holes, as though theyre doing us a favour.

Of course, the actual experience of visiting any pub observing the necessary safety precautions sounds entirely abnormal. One-way systems, reduced capacity, rigid time slots, partition screens, staff in PPE: it all seems to be in conflict with the point of a pub as a relaxing and communal social environment. With the unspoken possibility of death lingering over proceedings, youre effectively drinking in a fully licensed hospital waiting room. In pubs where these are all but abandoned for instance, in rooms of heavily inebriated punters youll need to develop an unwavering commitment to deluded optimism, in order to stave off falling into any a deep and debilitating paranoia with each sip of San Miguel, wondering if you should have just bought a couple of cans and sat in a park instead.

Tellingly, Johnson has declared it our patriotic duty to return to pubs. This quasi-conscription into buying jingoistic Jgerbombs for Britain is yet another extension of the Tories psychedelic and historically illiterate evocation of the blitz spirit. Here the virus becomes an ideologically motivated militarised combatant that we find ourselves at war with, intent on destroying the our way of life by forcing us into quarantine rather than, say, a highly transmissible virus with no discriminate aim whatsoever that Johnson has failed to suppress because of an austerity-depleted local sphere and overly centralised political system.

In this garbled understanding of the second world war, our enemy is defeated by our stoic refusal to let it win by altering our everyday lives in the way it seems to demand. Who do you think you are kidding, Mr -19? Were not staying in lockdown forever. The 4 July date for England appears to have been picked for similarly incoherent reasons, the significance of the date (when another country actually liberated itself from British rule) glossed over.

Embracing this return to the pub as a patriotic duty also needs to be resisted because it gives the government a get-out-of-jail-free card: transferring responsibility for controlling the virus from a mixture of the state and the public entirely on to the latter. If there are further serious outbreaks, ire will be directed at the careless hedonism of patrons, who were following wilfully ambiguous government guidelines and active encouragement to go for pints, for Queen and country.

If pubs start going under en masse, it will be the fault of those puritans who priggishly stayed home. The government knows full well that for those who have been missing their friends dearly, and who have been deprived of fun for months, cries to ignore official relaxation of rules to stay at home will sound like absurdly unfair moralistic scolding; while those with health concerns, particularly those who are immuno-compromised and their loved ones, will view pub-goers as grotesquely selfish.

Despite keeping abreast of as much coverage of the crisis as I can bear, Ive noticed Ive started developing a mild suspicion of myself as possibly being overly distrustful and crankish for ignoring various relaxations of lockdown while others in my social circle take full advantage. The more things get back to normal, even before they ought to, the more those trying to keep themselves as hermetically sealed as possible seem faintly ridiculous, and with them, their criticisms of the government, too. After a while, perhaps we will relent, one by one, tuning out the horror and joining the others in a blissful unreality where we pretend everythings fine.

Whats farcical is that this is the best-case scenario. Those like me have to hope that were overly cautious wrong, even and that the Conservatives grossly negligent series of Hail Mary gambles pay off, because theres no contingency otherwise. We need pubs, restaurants, theatre, cinemas and everywhere else to have enough custom from the get-go in order to survive, and for this to have as few consequences for the health of their workers and the public as possible. If not, the ramifications for public health, the economy, and the very existence of the pub are dire and the Tories expect us to believe we only have ourselves to blame.

Tristan Cross is a Welsh writer based in London

Originally posted here:

I love pubs so much I recreated mine in VR but I'm staying home on 4 July - The Guardian