It’s actually an ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in times when you have to look up what a statutory instrument is, and how it relates to law passed in parliament.” If you don’t want to listen to my botched synopsis of Priti Patel’s new quarantine rules, there are online video explainers. Obviously you do, though, so here it is: English people, you may go on holiday (it is droll how fast the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish quietly stepped away from English rule, when its full rubbishness unfurled. After all these centuries …). But when you come back, you have to self-isolate in the fullest possible sense, which is to say, no going out at all, not for supplies, not for exercise, except in exceptional circumstances.
Yawn, I thought, when I read this. Nobody will do that. They will think of Dominic Cummings and Barnard Castle. Or the Isle of Wight MP, Bob Seely, and his barbecue attendance. They will remember the lame excuses, in which the eye-test was actually surpassed, for absurdity and unrelatability, by Seely’s claim that he only had half a sausage. Seriously, who does that? Who do they think is going to eat the other half?
I can make up a lame excuse as well as the next man, so no biggie. Except it is quite a biggie, because if you get this wrong, you will end up with a criminal record. The forces of law now have a huge amount of discretion, in so far as they can basically adjudicate between one lame excuse and another. I personally would take a punt on the government’s competence, that it will outsource quarantine enforcement to Serco, hopefully even put electronic tags on us, and after that nobody will ever be able to say for certain where we are again.
And anyway, it is actually my civic duty to defy this stuff, I decided, as I was scrolling through the weather forecasts for everywhere I have ever been, thinking: “Wow, who knew Amsterdam was so hot?” Perhaps quarantining returning travellers from specific countries would have made sense in January and February. What could its rationale possibly be now, except: “You’re more likely to get a disease from another country than you are in England”? And since, demonstrably, the opposite is true, what could the foundational logic be, besides “foreigners are mucky”? When I am browsing Eurostar timetables, I am not looking for a holiday; I am resisting xenophobia. With browsing. Call it online activism, if you will.
There is a kind of lockdown-signalling, where you demonstrate your commitment to the nation’s wellbeing by constantly voicing your desire never to go anywhere, ever again. “I don’t think I ever will go back to the office.” “I’m not getting on a tube until 2025, soonest.” “Who needs to go abroad?” “Why should we impose our filthy urban germs on those rural folk who, by dint of living further apart from one another, are relatively less infected and, apparently, morally better?” “Yea, gladly will I eschew the call of the wild, in favour of the HBO theme music.” Sometimes it has a top note of schmaltz, and you have to pretend that you love your family so much that you don’t care where you are, so long as you are together.
This is what passes for solidarity at the moment: because some people cannot go on holiday, being especially vulnerable, or totally skint, everyone pretends holidays are so last century and right-thinking people never needed them. I do not think it helps. It’s a Facebook version of solidarity, where you take an image that was two-dimensional in the first place and crop everything unsightly from it. All self-indulgence, all hedonism, anything needless, anything self-interested, it all has to be scrubbed off your character.
To channel Phoebe from Friends, I need to live in a world where people can spill. I need to at least be able to fantasise about going somewhere different, and not having to work at a nuclear plant, or a space agency, in order to be allowed to come home. (These are two of the exceptions to the quarantine rule, along with post office workers, and people who commute between countries for their job, and anyone involved in a clinical trial. The list would be quite amusing, but for the terrible klaxon it sets off: “Christ, there are children in charge, and they’re writing actual law!” To which you can self-soothe with: “It’s not a law, it’s a statutory instrument.”)
Mr Z has chronic cabin fever and wakes up every morning with a different, urgent yen. He needs to smell heather. He wants to hike in the Caucasian mountains. He has to visit a distillery. He must drive to New Zealand. He wants to hear a cicada, outside of a zoo. Or any other insect, or animal: he wants to hear anything that isn’t our own dog, or a fox having sex. I want completely different things. I want a drink with an umbrella in it, not ironically. I want to hear a really loud, preferably five-way conversation in a language I don’t understand. I want to be far, far too hot, and then sunburnt. I want to watch a couple I don’t know having an argument. I would kill to see a buffet. I will not go softly into perpetual lockdown.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
