England Awakes-Slowly.

This weekend I went to Newcastle-under-Lyme, a market town around three miles away from my home to do a little shopping.

At any other time, the sentence above would be so mundane as to be not worth the bother of typing. In the strange days we are living through just not it has almost become a statement of intent, a way of saying that I am coming out of enforced hibernation.

My last visit to the town was during the strange, panic-stricken weekend that preceded the imposition of lockdown back in March. An elderly woman I passed on the Stones, the street where the town’s market has been held every Saturday for the past eight hundred years, was saying to her friend ‘it doesn’t seem real’.

It didn’t’; in most ways it still doesn’t some three months on. Everything had changed and yet the world also seemed to be carrying on as normal. People in supermarkets were panic buying toilet roll and pasta, here though everyone was carrying on as if it were an ordinary Saturday.

For the next three months, of course, nothing was normal, the busy, intricate clockwork of everyday life came to a grinding halt. Work, pleasure, sports, even the market on the Stones went into enforced hibernation, the longest hiatus in its history.

As someone granted, somewhat spuriously in my opinion, key-worker status I was able to leave home for more than the permitted trips to shop or exercise, it was not a pleasant experience. Familiar streets had been turned into the set for a creepy sci-fi movie, silent spaces the few people out and about scuttled through as if running from one fox hole to the next.

What brought me back to Newcastle this week was the government’s decision to allow outdoor markets to resume operations from the first of June. Another small step in lifting the lockdown and taking tentative steps into the new normal.

Unsurprisingly the town looks much the same at a surface level, its architecture is still a jumble of the genuinely old with intrusions from the concrete crassness of the sixties and a sprinkling of latter-day corporate blandness. The market still operates under the kindly shadow of the eighteenth-century guildhall.

Similar to the town I have known all my life, but not exactly the same. Most of the shops are still closed; as are all the pubs. The shops will, probably re-open on the 15th June, the pubs maybe in July. On the pavements there are by now familiar markers for where to queue for particular shops and reminders to keep two meters apart.

For the most part people put up with the new restrictions and inconveniences with a weary resignation that is becoming familiar in most aspects of daily life. We have passed from disbelief that this could be happening, through outright fear into the stage where we are just putting up with things.

The challenge for the government and for all of us is to work out what comes next, reasonable concerns have been expressed about the speed with which lockdown is being lifted, but we can’t hide indoors forever. Expert opinion is starting to suggest that coronavirus could be something we have to live with in the long term.

In which case my trip into town givens me grounds for hope, for all the awkwardness of life as we are having to live it people seemed to be if not cheerful then at least coping. Finding ways to accommodate each other within the rules with a minimum of fuss.

That is probably the best route out of this and something the government should be putting at the heart of its recovery plan. The difficulties of the past few months have taught us that what we value is what is close to us, be that people or places.

They need to rebuild around towns like Newcastle and all the other small communities across the country making it easier for people to shop, work and socialize locally. We may have discovered a virtual community through Zoom, but ask most people and they would say that when its safe to do so they want to be more engaged with the real one around them.