We may speak the same language but ...

In her new book The Palace Papers, Tina Brown writes that the Queen refuses to discuss three topics: cold, temperature, or fatigue. After my trip to London last week, observing the behaviour of its residents closely, I would suggest adding a fourth item which shall not be broached in polite conversation: COVID. Obviously, the virus is still circulating in the UK and the political ramifications of its mismanagement continue – Partygate is surely among Boris Johnson’s longest hangovers – but Londoners, at least, have decided they’re done with the pandemic.

Now the only people wearing masks on the Tube are American tourists. As one of them, sort of, it was with trepidation that I went to the theatre, to see & Juliet, a riotous reimagining of some of the biggest pop songs of recent decades.

By the second half, I’d peeled off my KN95 and was singing along to Can’t Stop the Feeling! before joining the rest of the remarkably exuberant audience for the final number, Katy Perry’s Roar, or as I thought of it in my head, “To Hell With Droplets”. It was the kind of moment I’d spent dark days dreaming about – an act of collective joy that had, at certain points in the past two years, felt all but impossible.

Not especially worried about committing a faux pas, I took to asking Londoners how they had arrived at this simultaneous and unanimous “post-COVID” state. A barrister I met at a dinner party spelt it out for me: “The government enforced very strict lockdowns, which we all followed, and then when they were done, we went out and lived our lives.”

She was vaccinated, of course, but didn’t seem to care much about boosters; she wasn’t eligible, anyway. And unlike every parent of small children I know in the States, she didn’t know much about the approval process for the under-fives vaccine; she didn’t see how it would change much about her kids’ day-to-day existence anyhow.

I see a few reasons why the US and UK – which Shakespeare might have deemed “both alike in dignity” – have gone in such different directions at this stage of the pandemic. For a start, the UK has the benefit of an adult population that is 75 per cent fully vaccinated, which is almost 10 percentage points higher than the US. Then there’s the fact that the US is so much bigger and much more decentralised, with attitudes varying widely from region to region.

What struck me most, though, was that this was a society which, for all its faults, is more cohesive than the States, where a series of malevolent actors in government, Big Tech and elsewhere have found a path to power and profitability by seeking to tear it apart at the seams. An American living in London we met while out to dinner – only Americans would dare chat with strangers, of course – described the sentiment in the UK as “whether we get COVID or don’t, we’re all in it together”.

That’s certainly how I felt while dancing poorly with the rest of the slightly sozzled crowd at the theatre. It was, for want of a better word, relaxing to be in a place where people still looked out for other people. Also, the weather was perfect and, consequently, I refuse to believe London isn’t always 24 degrees and sunny.

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