LAST weekend, very quietly, without a huge amount of fanfare, the chippie near my house opened up again.
Maybe it was just the excitement of having proper chips for the first time in three weeks, but I don’t think I’ve had a better haddock supper in my puff.
What was really exciting, though, was that it felt like a little bit of normality had returned.
It wasn’t quite like the olden days. You couldn’t just go in and ask for fish and chips, you had to have it delivered, or pre-ordered for collection.
It’s not the only business near me that’s taken down shutters in recent days, either.
There’s a coffee shop not too far from my flat that’s opening again on Saturday, selling flat whites and overpriced vegan cinnamon buns to the hipsters of Glasgow’s Southside.
And earlier this week, my pal stood in a queue for the best part of an hour so he could get some wood from the newly re-opened B&Q in Aberdeen.
These are all outliers perhaps, but there has almost certainly been a change in how we approach the lockdown.
READ MORE: No place for herd immunity in Scotland’s lockdown exit strategy
The extension last Thursday, was inevitable but it also maybe dashed any lingering hope that the chaos of the coronavirus was fleeting, that we could just shut ourselves away for three weeks and that would be it.
The key message of the Scottish Government’s framework on easing restrictions is that we have to accept that there’s no real end in sight just yet, that we’re not anywhere close to returning to the way things used to be.
This is a deadly, highly infectious disease, and until there’s a vaccine (which could be at least a year off), or a treatment, we’re going to have to learn to live with it.
Adapt. Adapt. Adapt.
For some businesses like B&Q, or the fish and chip shop, that’s an achievable aim. For other firms it’s a very big, if not an impossible ask.
So what happens to them? Well the Scottish Government’s paper, quite deliberately leaves the reader with more questions than answers.
This is a living document, the First Minister said, which will change as circumstances change and develop as the evidence develops. One of the benefits of the UK and Scotland being a few weeks behind other European countries is that we can learn from how Germany, Spain, Italy and France all ease their respective lockdowns, and how businesses there head back to work.
But one lesson the Scottish Government already seem to have learned (perhaps belatedly) is that there’s no way we can live with coronavirus until there is a a serious ramping up of testing, contact tracing and isolation.
We can’t run or hide from coronavirus, but we can, at the very least, slow it down.
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