Sunday, blessed Sunday

May 24, 2020 by

by Neil Lyndon, The Conservative Woman:

NO sport on television. Pubs, restaurants, shops, theatres, cinemas all closed. No boozy lunches with visiting friends and family which leave everybody bloated and comatose for the rest of the day. No family jaunts into the countryside that turn into wretched rows about who let the dog run away or caused the kite to crash, before you sit fuming for hours in the traffic jam on the way home.

Sundays during lockdown have come to resemble the Sabbaths of my post-war childhood, when the entire country was given no choice but to stay at home between church services. Everybody who lived through that period will remember the stupefying boredom of that barren stretch of imprisonment. The lifting of those puritan restrictions in the second half of the century did feel like a liberation from a pious Establishment which knew what was good for us better than we could ourselves.

What I had forgotten, however – or was perhaps too young to enjoy – was the loveliness of savouring a day of rest which is separate and distinct from the rest of the week. This perception has been progressively borne in on me during the coronavirus crisis.

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