By the time you read this, ‘Super’ Saturday will be over and it will be ‘What the heck just happened?’ Sunday.
Pubs open again, eh? It’s either gone one of two ways. Maybe people went out in their socially approved groups, drank for their allotted time slots and then quietly went home.
Or maybe it’s gone the other way, and months of pent-up carnage have been released in an alcoholic frenzy and the rest of this newspaper looks like one of those Gin Lane paintings from the olden days.
Maybe we’ve exercised restraint. After all, when the beaches were reopened that went well? Didn’t it?
But maybe I underestimate our resolve and overestimate the lure of licensed premises.
I read something about only seven per cent of drinkers planning to go to the pub when doors open.
The research says we’re put off by the virus, the complicated new rules, and the fact that it will be an all-round odd experience.
I’m not convinced that’s going to stop people. Look at the other side of things.
There’s a pub in Margate that opened at 8am. Some even started at 6am.
The Government has spent weeks ramping this up.
Now Boris Johnson is telling us not to overdo it. More mixed messages.
I reckon at least some of us are going to overdo it. Hard to tell though.
But most people I speak to this Friday night have a sense of impending doom.
My mate reckons it will be carnage. His nephew runs a bar in Southampton and they’ve just taken on 20 Polish mixed-martial artists to handle the crowds.
That is not, by the sounds of things, the kind of climate where you can start an argument over getting the racing turned up.
There’s also this two-hour thing. No-one is going to react well to that kind of pressure.
No one is going to be drinking like Emily Bishop. You know, a sherry and a catch-up with Rita. It is going to be against the clock type stuff. This is happening, by the way, on the same weekend the NHS celebrates its 72nd anniversary.
Unfortunately, they are going to have to mark the occasion by beefing up staff and security in A&Es.
Mr Johnson’s decision to open things up on a Saturday is one of his strangest – and there have been quite a few.
Why not some weekday when people have got to do a bit of graft rather than go on an all-dayer?
None of this affects me, by the way. I still can’t get into my local even after trying to book a time slot under the name Kirk St Moritz.
“I know it’s you,” said the landlord.
He’s still angry since I was caught sneaking back into a private Christmas party I’d been thrown out of.
“There was no, as you claimed, medical emergency.”
“No but...”
“And there wasn’t,” he added, “Any jacket. Or any insulin. I don’t even think you have diabetes. Not the way you were drinking rum and Coke.”
Safer all round, I reckon, just to stop at home for a bit.
