Column: Post lockdown, we can't stay forever in life's waiting room

We need to change the record.

Life in lockdown is a constantly changing, increasingly confusing, often a contrary list of things we can’t do.

For the sake of our mental health and wellbeing, we have to flip it upside down - and promote all the things we CAN do.

Our homes have become our world. We are living increasingly isolated, insular lives.

The connections we once took for granted - a night on the town, a family meet-up, gigs, an office night out, supporting our team, have been severed, some of them perhaps even permanently.

From mourning our dead to toasting a newly wed couple, we’ve been left on the outside looking in.

I fear the biggest challenge has yet to come.

Finding ways to stay positive as the darkness of autumn and winter descends is going to be tough for many.

Loneliness is a very real problem for so many people.

Getting out and about on a cold, wet dark night will be so much harder than on a balmy summer evening, but if we don’t find reasons to push back the four walls which now contain both our work and home life, then we will struggle.

I know this pandemic will abate eventually. I know I will get to gigs again. I know family life will restart in all its chaotic, noisy glory. I just don’t know when.

Life is too short to be stuck in this waiting room, so we have to find things that we can do, safely and easily, to fill our schedules.

Sunday saw my other half and I in Leith for a walking tour around the old port’s incredible public murals (forget Edinburgh’s posh galleries –the very best art can be found, for free, around the people’s republic of Leith).

Pupils at four Fife schools told to stay home after positive COVID...

It was a joy to be part of a group, sharing an experience once more.

All told there were 20 of us on the tour. We wore masks, we socially distanced, we respected each other’s space, and it worked beautifully. We were probably safer than we were navigating the aisles at Asda where you still find covidiots with their face masks dangling from one ear.

The week before, we went to the Colony of Artists annual festival at Abbeyhill.

Creative folk living in the famous rows just off Easter Road usually throw open their doors and let you browse.

This year they used their small gardens, and some wonderful common sense, to curate a scaled down event.

We registered and were handed a programme with a number which was used to track and trace every garden we stepped into.

Face masks and hand sanitising were mandatory, and, once again, everyone respected people’s space.

Like the mural tour, it gave people something even more important than a day out. It gave them hope. It was a glorious, desperately needed injection of normality.

Even now as the pandemic spikes once more, we need to be a wee bit less timid.

Life is still for living. We can do that – and stay safe.

The two are not incompatible.

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Allan Crow, Editor, Fife Free Press