AND just like that, it is the end of Plan B Covid restrictions.
In an almost too-good-to-be-true announcement this week, the Prime Minister immediately withdrew the work from home guidance, with compulsory mask-wearing and mandatory Covid passes to be scrapped from Thursday.
And now we can look forward to getting our lives back.
It feels like a momentous occasion and we really should seize the day and enjoy every single moment of our fresh, mask-free new world.
This time two years ago, little did we know we were all soon to enter house arrest. And what a two years it has been since.
Throughout the various lockdowns, I missed so many things.
Going out to eat a meal I had not cooked myself was up there on the list. As was meeting friends on a whim and travelling. But all of us have suffered from the fact that, in essence, our liberty was taken away from us.
Even long after lockdown ended, anything we wanted to do took careful planning.
There was endless paperwork and tests to travel. And even when we did, we had the worry in the back of our mind that we might catch Covid and not be able to return.
But now the vaccination programme has saved us.
We can start roaming freely and life can finally get back to normal.
And yet it is as if we are all Sleeping Beauty waking up from a two-year slumber.
For some — teenagers who should have been spreading their wings and young people trying to leave home, among many, many others — putting life on hold has felt quite ruinous.
It has also been lonely. Groundhog Day every day, with the most exciting daily event a trip to the supermarket.
Add working from home with dodgy wifi and a house full of kids or flatmates, and it was all very stressful for many.
Some people’s lives have shrunk so much they are scared of life returning to normal.
But they must work hard to expand their horizons again and spread their wings to embrace new opportunities.
We all need to remember that we only live once, so it is important to seize the moment.
We are no longer in a cocoon, or living in bubbles. Now we can catch up on lost time.
And we can all go back to work. My staff have never stopped, of course. Football went on, and so did we.
After two years of reflection, lots of us are asking what can permanently change for the better now.
Work wise, if you are feeling stuck in your career, this is a really good time to reset your goals. Big businesses need go-getting verve.
The good news is that agile working is here to stay. I think lots of bosses initially thought working from home was a way of skiving off.
Six hours in a mask must be hard work
But, in reality, people are working smarter, harder and are happier where possible to do it from home.
We have embraced agile working at West Ham United.
Having said that, by and large we need a return to working from offices to get the high street back and people getting more confident about going out.
New starters and school leavers are missing out on vital face time with their employment. You learn so much more just from being in an office environment.
You simply can’t learn much working solely from home. Interactions and meeting new people are vital for the young starters.
So we all need to get behind the end of Plan B restrictions and be willing to venture back towards life as we know it.
That includes the fact face masks will no longer be mandatory, including for schoolchildren.
I really do not agree with the teaching unions who are saying masks should still be worn in schools, despite all the science disproving they are necessary.
Six hours in a mask must be hard work for the kids.
And teachers will not pick up on facial expressions, which are so important to learning.
We are making lives more difficult than necessary by keeping them.
Masks have been scrapped so we now have to get on with life.
In the words of Pink Floyd, “Hey teacher, leave them kids alone.”
Rebekah fit? Abs-olutely!
IT is very hard not to feel green with envy at all the celebrities managing to get some winter sunshine.
In that I include Jamie and Rebekah Vardy, who are in the Maldives.
But the jealousy I felt seeing the latest Instagram pics of Rebekah isn’t over her £700 Dior bikini or the £8,000-a-night Cheval Blanc Randheli five-star resort.
No, what I’m jealous of is her rock-hard abs – frankly unfeasible after having had five kids.
Looking that good and that fit and fabulous in a string bikini, no matter how many kids you’ve had, is something to be proud of.
Good for her.
Social media harms women
ANYONE who doubts everyday sexism is being fuelled by social media and is out of hand should read the results of a new survey of women Parliamentarians.
Well over a third – a whopping 41.8 per cent – have seen extremely humiliating or sexually charged images of them spread through social media, including faked photo montages showing them nude.
We desperately need more female politicians and wonder why they don’t want to enter into the political system (and the same goes for anywhere in the world).
Meanwhile, in Britain and the United States, a female politician or journalist is abused on Twitter every 30 seconds.
But cyber crimes are harder to investigate so often remain unpunished.
Drives me mad
All but the most severe or disturbing complaints are ignored. Those that are looked at are often when an escalation to a more tangible threat has occurred.
To remind us of how serious this can be, Labour MP Jo Cox was killed in 2016 by a far-right activist after repeated online harassment and threats.
Words like slag, bitch and whore are reserved exclusively for women and used only to degrade them. I have lost track of the number of times I have been called these on Twitter.
But if you complain or report this to Twitter, it responds and says it finds “no violation of its rules”. Ridiculous.
This kind of abuse is disgusting and unacceptable. It must stop. The police need to do more, and so do social media companies.
It drives me mad that they don’t make this their top priority.
Maybe that is why we need more women making the decisions.
