WHAT a bizarre country we have become.
The Government has spent recent days trying to decide whether we should be allowed to celebrate Christmas this year. And for now it seems like we can.
Though watch out if you have any plans from Boxing Day onwards. It looks like much of New Year’s Eve could be off.
And if that sounds like a phrase you never thought you’d read, just consider some of the oddities of our country today.
Last year we had the great debate over whether or not a Scotch egg constitutes a substantial meal — a peculiarly unspecified amount of food we had to order if we wanted a pint.
We couldn’t drive too far for our daily stroll in lockdown in case some over-zealous police force in the Peak District sent up a drone and zapped us with a laser (or a fine).
Sex was banned if couples didn’t live together. But you could go to a hotel instead.
Strangest priorities
You could go to the supermarket to buy enough booze to sink the proverbial battleship but try buying some clothes for your kids in there and you’d be sent to the gallows.
And remember that jobsworth copper who told a family they couldn’t stand around in their own front garden because “people died yesterday”?
On and on went the madness.
A year on, and nothing, it appears, has changed.
Take the Government’s Plan B rule that allows people to remove their face masks when they are singing in a place of worship.
As was immediately pointed out, there is something odd about being required to wear a mask in a supermarket but not in a church.
Could someone be permitted to go maskless around the local Co-op if they sing as they do so?
Downing Street said this would be “hard to justify”. But then what isn’t these days?
After all, we live in a country with perhaps the strangest priorities of all.
At present in England, we are all told by the Government that if we can work from home we should.
But we can also attend parties.
We largely got into that mess because it became clearer with every leaked story from No10 that the people who have been making the rules that govern our lives have been breaking them.
While the rest of us were being told we couldn’t even visit dying relatives, the Prime Minister and his advisers were allowed to gather in the garden of No10 and enjoy wine and cheese.
What a shame that the nation’s hospices weren’t made aware of the wine and cheese exemption.
But because of the Government’s repeated embarrassments we now have this grand, national embarrassment where partying is given more priority than going to work.
It’s even worse in Scotland and Wales. In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon is once again trying to prove she is “tougher” than the Sassenachs in Westminster.
So she has introduced limits on crowd numbers at public events. But not on crowd numbers at private events.
She has absurdly insisted that inside nightclubs the 100 punters allowed in must obey a one-metre rule — there goes the “erection section”!
It is more baffling in Wales, where the authorities have banned people from working outside their homes — and there’s a £60 fine in it if you’re caught “unnecessarily” working from the office.
So the best place to work from is the pub.
Though perhaps the people of Wales should count their blessings.
Across the world there have been even nuttier regulations throughout the pandemic.
In South Africa, a fifth ban on the sale of booze looms, with the government saying alcohol leads to “reckless behaviour”.
At least we can still drown our sorrows in Britain.
And for now couples can leave the house at the same time.
A small mercy, perhaps, but in Peru and Panama the authorities ordered that men and women were only allowed to leave the house on alternate days.
Men could go for a walk on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, while the nation’s women could stretch their legs on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Around the world, governments and citizens struggled in the early months of this virus.
But we are not in those early months any more.
Most of us in Britain have done what the Government has asked of us.
We stayed in our homes for months at a time.
We isolated and cancelled the most crucial things — such as a normal education for the young — until the vaccine arrived.
Then most of us took the vaccine, having been assured that this was the route back to normal life.
Now the scientists and modellers have once again been warning of dire results if we don’t lock down.
But the truth is that we need to consider other things apart from Covid.
We have to think of the education and wellbeing of our children.
We need to think of a country that can’t keep grinding to a halt.
We need to think about how to rebuild our economy after this virus.
And we need to reacquaint ourselves with the concept of risk.
That is why senior minister Jacob Rees-Mogg was completely right this week when he was reported to have told the Cabinet that it is time we, again, trust the public to do the right thing.
Of course, some will take needless risks.
But most of us have shown we can be trusted to make sensible decisions, weighing up the levels of risk we and our loved ones are willing to live with.
This country has become a madhouse of regulations and rules.
It is time to try to live normally again.
If anyone can remember what that was like.
