Party dresses and hemlines are short, and skin is on show everywhere – what better way to signal that nights out are back?
Are pandemics always as puritanical as this one? What with it being our first rodeo, as it were, I have nothing to compare it to, but I definitely expected the apocalypse to be a bit more racy. I thought it would be more, you know, all down the speakeasy with a pet monkey apiece. Fewer jigsaws and houseplants.
If you weren’t actually ill, the bad times were strangely wholesome. Everyone got excited about this crazy new sport called “walking”. The real daredevils got into wild swimming. There was a lot of talk about how much people were looking forward to hugging their grandparents and not so much about missing dancefloors. It was all very sanitary and platonic. At home, instead of lounging in silk robes, we swaddled ourselves in full-coverage cotton jersey like convalescents.
Under our masks and in the necessarily antiseptic choreography of social distancing – the exaggerated standing aside while holding a door, the scooting away as far as possible if a fellow traveller should perch the other end of a bench – we forgot how to smile at people, let alone how to wink. The acceptable tone of public conversation became very sexless.
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