Do You Want To Take This Outside?
Boris is undoubtedly a twonk.
My stance on the current Prime Minister of the UK is not outrageously rebellious, nor is it against the common consensus. He deliberately styles his hair like a man-child that has just slept fourteen hours straight on a futon. His manner of speaking makes you want to shove a kazoo in his mouth just to momentarily relieve your ears of his vain babbling. And any scandal that he is linked to invariably has some morally dubious — but somehow lawful — truth to it.
I am not fond of him as a person, but he was the only unified voice to lead the country over Brexit and that is why he is currently kipping on №10’s couch/pull-out-bed.
Each of his policies concerning the pandemic has been suspect and open to ridicule. However, the only policy I can wholeheartedly agree with him on is the staggered opening of businesses. Namely the deferred acceptance of customers that can drink indoors at our favourite homes away from home, our pubs. On April 12th our first drinking freedoms were re-established when we were allowed to take merriment at our local’s beer garden — if they were lucky enough to have one. It wasn’t going to be the same. We all knew that at least. But it was something akin to pre-pandemic public revelry and we damn sure needed it.
Our new’s outlets, as always, were the bastions of outrage when comparing the freedoms of other businesses to the harsh, debilitating restrictions on serving patrons indoors. They weren’t wrong. It was unfair and seemed to punish the hospitality industry excessively. But deep down we all knew that this slow roll-out of lockdown easing made sense. It made sense because no one knows their country better than the people of it. We are a vast multi-cultural pot of religion, attitudes, biases, and line-forming over-indulgers. Specifically, alcohol. We will drink to excess because we consider declining a drink a faux-pas; a base insult to the person that is offering you that eighth-straight shot of Sambuca.
This is where the outside-drinking rule starts making sense. Were drinking establishments to reopen without restrictions, then it would be an alcoholic free-for-all — probably with alcohol poisoning accounting for more deaths than Covid-19. Like a half-starved person, we need to slowly introduce ourselves into the world of social interaction again, not rush in with full wallets to catch up on lost time. Slowly normalising our return via outdoor settings would be the safest option. Sating our alcoholic tendencies just enough before the full restrictions end, so that the inevitable barrage of consumers aren’t all crowded around a bar at the same time and the ‘Rona would be less likely to flare through our country once more.
Having these few weeks to settle back into things means we all have a little more breathing room in the long run.
Richard Davis.
