A family outing over half term was anything but ‘normal’ – so when will life as we knew it return?

Sat in a Pizza house in East London after a trip to the cinema with my daughter, I was stuck on a question: “What will this outing look like next year?”

This country may have partially emerged from lockdown but we’re still a long way from normality. A trip out with your child still looks very different to the way it did a couple of years ago.

The two of us left the house with a bottle of hand sanitiser and a mask each. Caught out by the traffic, one of the less welcome consequences of reopening, we were in a hurry but there was no getting away from the requirement to fill in a form with our contact details when we reached the movie theatre.

While this left me flustered, and frustrated (I hate missing the start of films), I couldn’t argue with the strict adherence to Covid protocols displayed by the cinema’s staff. But it served notice of an uncomfortable reality: that such outings are no longer the risk free pleasures of past half term holidays.

The pandemic means there’s always the chance of a text or a phone call ordering you to self isolate for days on end in the event of a Covid close contact. That remains the case even if you’ve had a double dose of vaccine (as I have).

This would be less of a problem for me – I work from home – than for my daughter, who’s already missed more than enough school.

I judged that rolling the dice was worth it because such outings matter. A lot. They facilitate the sort of bonding that’s hard to achieve at home. They’re a cure for frazzled nerves and the sense of living in a real life version of Groundhog Day.

But how long will it be before there’s no gamble involved? That’s a toughie.

The virus that causes Covid has displayed a devilish talent for confounding hopes and expectations.

Ministers have already dropped hints that removing the remaining restrictions we’re living under may be delayed. There is no shortage of expert opinion urging them to do just that with the delta variant running riot.

Holiday makers were, meanwhile, left scrambling to get back from Portugal ahead of its move from the government’s green to its amber list (which requires travellers to quarantine when they get home).

There’s an unpleasant sense of lather, rinse, repeat about all this because we’ve been here before. And with large parts of the world still unvaccinated it may not be the last time.

The new variants that continue to be coughed up – quite literally – are some of the wages of vaccine inequality and the West’s ignoring of the fact that a global problem like this requires global solutions.

So while it may be pessimistic to ask whether next year’s trip will still be abnormal, I don’t think it’s unrealistic. I certainly expect masks will be with us for quite some time and that’s no big deal. The bellyaching over wearing a small piece of cloth from the Dunkirk spirit brigade is risible. What would they have done had they been asked to lug a gas mask around?

At some point, we’re surely going to have to learn to live with the virus just as we have to live with their temper tantrums and all the other maladies that afflict us. What that will look like, and when we even reach that point, is, I fear, harder to predict than our leaders would have us believe.

They could at least help to move things along by getting those vaccine shots distributed more widely. Boris Johnson has issued a call to vaccinate the world. Such rhetoric – a specialism of his – is all very well but how about saying how many doses the UK plans to distribute, something most of his G7 colleagues have already done? That’d be a good place to start.