Terry Prone: Crowds throng open spaces to lap up liberation post-lockdown

As the vaccination rollout continues and restrictions are slowly lifting we will devote ourselves to the trivial, the inconsequential, and the shared pointlessness denied by lockdown

Queues of people outside Penneys store on Henry Street Dublin on the first day of shops reopening on May 10. Picture: Leah Farrell/RollingNews.ie

Madam Roland and Tony Holohan have something in common, not including being guillotined, a privilege enjoyed only by the former, who murmured, just as she was about to be done in by the Revolution, “Oh, Freedom, what crimes are committed in your name…” 

Dr Holohan’s weekend tweet about crowds in Dublin city centre had a flavour of Madam Roland.

Nphet and perforce the Government have to deal in morbidity and mortality statistics and behavioral warnings. 

The general public, not so much. Hence the complaints about the 105-minute rule and others, which have frequently taken the form of public outrage at “being treated like bold children,” as if the thought of acting like bold children never crossed an Irish mind. 

Dr Holohan might point at the crowded city streets and go “See? SEE? Is that not behaving exactly like bold children?” 

He would certainly not admire the chutzpah of the folk who want Nphet and the Government told that we can be trusted, when the thesis is disproven by a drive through any major city after dusk or the dramatic footage accessible by a random keystroke.

The treat-us-like-adults cohort really want what Jimmy Porter wanted in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger: “Oh, heavens, how I long for just a little ordinary enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm, that’s all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I’m alive!'.” 

That’s how I felt, listening to the crows scoffing at each other outside a discount supermarket on the day the restrictions lifted. 

The queue ran around three of the four sides of the car park, neatly spaced out, trolley by trolley, the trolley pushers standing firmly on their little yellow squares on the path. 

Impressed by the numbers, I raised my eyebrows at the woman behind me, which wasn’t easy, post-Botox;  I may be the only woman you know who makes an old-lady-effort noise when I have to raise an eyebrow.

“Gardening tools,” she responds.

When we went inside, it was clear that more than gardening tools had attracted the crowds. 

So deep a crowd was milling around one area that, like people who come late on a car crash, the people on the outside were gawking to find out what the other gawkers were gawking at, convinced by the mass of them that it must be worth a gawk. 

One woman, coming the wrong way down the aisle, was giving as good as she got from people politely and impolitely telling her that her sense of direction needed a tweak. 

She had her hand out as she passed me, as if for a donation. “Congestion charge, congestion charge,” she called out, to eye-rolling and laughter and I realised that the last time I saw a crowd in a shop giving each other such stick and enjoying every minute of it was the evening the very first lockdown was announced. 

The evening when everybody thought they’d be short taken if they didn’t buy three hundred toilet rolls. 

The evening where you could see made manifest the conviction that, absent ten sliced pans in their freezer, families would starve. 

But they were having a laugh at the same time, bantering with complete strangers waiting in the long slow queue for the checkout.

That went away, during the lockdown. We continued to grocery shop. 

In fact, let’s be honest, we grocery-shopped like it was the Eurovision and we were in the final. 

We grocery shopped like it was a new form of worship. Instead of dipping our fingers into the holy water font at the door, we sanctified our hands at the squirting dispenser before following the person in front of us in the spaced-out procession. 

Oh LIDL we greet thee with PayPal today. 

But we did our grocery worshipping with our eyes averted from one another, walking around each other as if each was surrounded by a penumbra of virus. 

Anyone going the wrong way in an aisle was looked on as Typhoid Mary, egging to infect the rest of us.

We were all grown-ups behind our masks, trying not to breathe in the loose threads. 

Children were never seen. Conversations were never had.

That’s SO over. Partly because of the weekend sunshine, the public attitude has measurably changed. 

Once you’re alive and vaccinated, even setbacks become jokes. 

One client mocks the “first world problem” of not being able to book an outdoor breakfast anywhere in the capital. We might be forced to have a lunch meeting instead. Such a challenge. 

Much the same happens when I contact Peter, who is in charge of bookings, cappuccinos and general irreverence in my local hairdressers, Suzanne Murray’s. 

With what I perceive to be admirable restraint and generosity, I text that I can wait for at least a week if they’re still snowed under with the hair consequences of the pandemic.

Back bounces a text telling me I’m going to wait for at least a month-and-a- half, so I am, unless they get a cancellation, in which case they’ll look kindly on me.

During the lockdown, conversation was kind of the gateway drug. 

Say a few civil words to someone you didn’t know, and you were half-afraid that the next thing would be you partying wildly and mask-free indoors. 

So we went silent, conveying nods of generally good intent over the top of our masks; now, we can engage with strangers, at least out of doors and masked.

So liberated do I feel by this that, last week, spotting a man on the beach with a metal detector after the tide went out, I ran downstairs, through the garden, across the sand and pitched up in front of him. 

He turned off his machine and we discussed metal detectors. 

We also discussed what he had found since he invested in his gadget upon retirement. Not a lot, other than ring pulls off beer cans, but deterred he was not. 

He told me all about the restoration detectorists have to do if they dig anything up and showed me his haul for the day, a tiny heavy drop-shaped weight off a fishing rod. 

When I suggested he might like to have a go in the garden around the Martello tower where I live, bonding doesn’t begin to describe what ensued between me and this stranger. 

He even texted me, after we parted, to say that of course anything he found on my land would belong to me. 

I texted him back telling him we’d share and share alike. 

Doesn’t matter if it’s ring pulls or a Viking hoard he digs up. Doesn’t matter if it’s medieval Arabian coins or another Derrynaflan chalice. I’m not grabby.

Unspoiled by failure, the two of us will muster just a little ordinary enthusiasm, and, rather than reaching for some definitive insight from the last year-and-a-half, we will devote ourselves to the trivial, the inconsequential, the shared pointlessness denied by lockdown. 

The sun warm on our backs, we’ll hunt for treasure. Not letting on to have already found it.