I’ve been thinking along these lines, but with a twist. I’m half British and half Italian, raised and resided in the latter most of my life. As I’m sure you kno

I’ve been thinking along these lines, but with a twist. I’m half British and half Italian, raised and resided in the latter most of my life. As I’m sure you know, both of these countries have been hit very severely by the pandemic, and Italy in particular is probably the epitome of the “hard lockdown” — or at least, it’s been one of the more prominent cases because it was the first Western country to make that move and the example everybody else seems to have drawn inspiration from. People are clearly very deeply affected on all levels by this. People have been locked indoors for, well, months now and society has become more regimented than it had ever been. Italians, a stereotypical gregarious population (though that of course varies from person to person and has some regional variation — I’m from the slightly less personally expansive North) have become accustomed to wearing masks in public and keeping strict distances from one another. ‘Touchy-feely’ has been revised to standoffish. There’s reports of people having panic attacks if they see somebody without a mask. Stuff like that (of course it’s hard to tell how prevalent that is, because broadcast & social media tend to blow such episodes out of all proportion). And now for the twist: as chance would have it, I am working in Malta (a small independent island off the bottom of Sicily, the EU’s smallest member state), so I’m actually abroad in this crucial time and experiencing a very ‘light’ experience: 440 or so cases on a population of half a million, three or four confirmed deaths. We’ve been in a “light lockdown” since sometime in late march. People basically started working from home of their own initiative and/or businesses decided to implement this ahead of governmental recommendations to that effect; bars, restaurants, and non-essential shops are shut and those that are considered essential admit only a few people at the time. People largely give each other a wider berth and aren’t seen congregating in more than the governmentally mandated three people per cluster, but it’s all rather lax, and seems to have worked (fortunately). So I can’t help but speculate about how odd everything will seem when I will finally go back to visit Milan: everybody back there has gone through a perspective-altering collective trauma that I haven’t experienced. I can imagine myself ending up doing something that has suddenly become a faux pas (or at the very least outmoded) such as putting forward my hand to give a shake, or something gauche such as (comparatively) ‘looming’ over somebody in a queue. I’m quite disturbed by this prospect, to be very honest. There might also be a bit of “survivor guilt” rolled in too (by a quirk of chance, I avoided the ordeal everybody else had to go through). We’re not five months into the Twenties yet and things are definitely very different from what I had anticipated.