Masking up will be a test of Scots' willingness to help others

We started with hair elastics, staplers and folded-over kitchen roll; the moulded black foam jobs eventually came through on delivery. I get a frisson of anarchism (or is it Gotham City?) in the mirror, before I trudge out for dishwasher tablets and Lavazza.

But as this spring has beautifully landed bright and clear, “looking like a child that knows poems by heart”, in Rilke’s lines – the mask-wearing has gotten tougher, weirder. The first thing to be sacrificed was my beloved over-ear headphones. Between wearing that, the vintage Gregory Pecks and the face mask, I felt like a struggling diver.

So now I can hear the birdies, as I deal with the stares of the 90-odd% of people around me (my calculation) who are not wearing facial protection.

Some, mostly men, are openly scornful. Uncovered families steer round me, as if I’m clanging a bell at them. Fellow mask wearers look briefly, and away; there’s at least 10 stories about what we’re doing here, what’s actually happening, churning through our heads.

In short, as the Scottish Government suggests that “facial covering” should be adopted in crowded spaces like shops and bus stops, my personal report (and you’ll have your own) is that mask culture is not easy. It makes me feel like Somewhat Annoyed Max. That is, I’m not exactly hacking my way through a tyre-burning apocalypse (the two-metre minuets we perform in our still-clean streets can be quite elegant, I find).

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But I am bubbling with a deep anger about how we’ve let things go so badly, systemically wrong. Why am I listening to my muffled mouth-breathing on this glorious, blossom-strewn day?

So I suck in, blow out, and fantasise about green techno-utopias, while wondering exactly how those incessant workies on the site at the corner are really doing.

Yet there’s good stuff about mask wearing. Not least that the science behind it says we should wear them primarily to help others, much more than to immediately defend ourselves. Because we’re still not exactly clear about the incubation time for Covid-19, most doctors tell us we should act as if we already have it. As such we should erect as many barriers as we can against being a transmitter of it.

Like handwashing and wipedowns, masks do seem to inhibit transmission of the virus from droplets produced by coughs, sneezes or even vigorous talking.

Go online and find a New England Journal of Medicine paper entitled “Visualising Speech-Generated Oral Fluid Droplets with Laser Light Scattering”. It does exactly what it says on the tin.

There’s a 42-second video at the top, which shows the contagious spray from someone declaiming “Stay Healthy!” When a damp washcloth is placed over their mouth, the droplets are completely prevented from spraying.

What some scientists are calling “natural experiments” with face masks show promising results. On March 31, Jena was the only German city to compel its population to wear face masks. Cities around it had rising infection rates. Meanwhile, the Jena authorities recorded no new infections.

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The Czech Republic enforced face masks in public from March 18. Its Covid-19 growth rate, compared with neighbours Austria, Germany and Poland, has been considerably slower. However, what’s also been highlighted is the self-mobilisation of the Czech citizenry, willing to fabricate cloth masks at home. Such make-do-and-mend resilience is maybe a legacy of survival skills from the communist era.

So should Scots be content to rail away at our poor national organisation (choose your nation) and our general inability to manufacture and distribute the instruments of our own safety?

Or should we go Czech – hunt down the sewing machines (and seamstresses), tear up the cotton T-shirts and pillowcases (this fabric is a good density for blocking the virus, we’re told), and keep up the spirit of mutual aid unleashed thus far?

AS the First Minister is wont to say, most responses to Covid-19 are experimental. At the end of all this, no-one should be expected to have made no mistakes. But even short of sewing them together, mask-wearing could well be quite an acute test of Scotland’s communitarian spirit. How much are we prepared to suffer personal inconvenience to benefit unknown others?

A comparison with Asian societies will make the test even sharper. Sociologists and anthropologists have produced some fascinating accounts of mask culture in Hong Kong, mainland China and Japan. It’s arisen over the past two decades, in response to both epidemic scares (avian flu, Sars) and rising pollution in their mega-cities.

There are some ab-fab consequences of a mass culture of mask wearing. About six years ago, catwalks in Shanghai and Tokyo started to show models, male and female, draped in a sci-fi couture that absorbed mask wearing into its designs. They strode down the runway in bejewelled and cross-hatched face coverings, geometrically-patterned scuba-jackets with sealed-in filters. Perhaps, in a Devil-Wears-Prada-like osmosis, they’re wending their way to your favourite retail store. You go first.

Historians also tell us that safety masks have long been an indicator of modernity in south-east Asia – signalling the overt use of scientific over traditional medicine. Yet, at the same time, they also note that Asia’s readiness to wear them may also may be deeply rooted in native philosophical traditions.

Qi, a central concept in Chinese cosmology, is often rendered as “air”, “atmosphere” and “odour”. In these traditions, breath and breathing are seen as a central element of good health.

In all of this, there’s a little perverse delight for me. We have had to endure these fetid culture wars about facial covering, Muslim women and civic virtue. Now, we may all have to find ways to “efface our faces” – and find it socially acceptable.

But I’m also interested in how mask-wearing – if it’s done to prevent you potentially harming others – becomes a very overt expression of solidarity. The Dutch sociologist Peter Baehr first noticed this in Hong Kong in 2003, the year of that city’s Sars outbreak.

“By disguising an individual’s face, [masks] gave greater salience to collective identity. By blurring social distinctions, it produced social resemblance”, writes Baehr in his paper City Under Siege. “Mask-wearing activated and reactivated a sense of having a common fate. It was a mode of reciprocity – under conditions that supremely tested it.”

As Baehr says, mask-wearing is a demanding social ritual – making, cleaning and replacing them, finding them muffle your speech, throwing them off with relief when you’re finally backstage. But in the streets and locales of many Asian societies, they became (and have become) an expression of “complex solidarity”, in Baehr’s words.

(History proceeds with great irony at the moment. Hong Kong’s recent protestors made a great virtue of their mask-wearing, and the current regime – which banned masks in public – is now struggling to square the circle).

Finally, Baehr’s study prompts a suggestion for the First Minister. Throughout the Hong Kong Sars crisis, health secretary Dr Yeoh Eng Kiong refused to wear a mask, “saying that the virus was only transmissible through intimate contact. This was a social gaffe of the first order”.

We’re all juggling weariness and expert advice, personal resources and mental health in this infernal, unnatural process.

Mass mask-wearing need not be regarded as yet another crazy imposition. It could be a way for Scots to hang together better.But First Minister? Quite soon, I think you’ll have to do a public coronavirus update ... with a mask on.