Social Distancing is Relative

Anecdotal

It’s 2:30am and I’m in my office working.   Did I mention  I do peculiar hours?  That’s one of my ‘cures for the self-confined’.  More on that soon.

Anyway, it’s 2:30am and I’m working.  I have the window open so I hear the sound of agitated pacing clearly.   Around my neighbourhood, if you are out at that hour you are either drunk or a housebreaker, so I check this guy out.

Of course, there’s always a third possibility…

He walks twenty paces up the pavement, turns and sort of sashays his way back.   He is nervous, for one reason or another. Standard thieving duds, jeans, old trainers, hoodie pulled up.  But no.

My next-door-but-one neighbour is new, by which I mean he moved in a few months ago.  Our loiterer-with-intent seems focussed on his front gate, and on his next pass he pounces upon it and stumbles to my new neighbour’s door, rapping the knocker urgently.

“Toby!”

No answer.

“Uncle Toby!”

No answer.

I have seen Uncle Toby – he is old, older than me.  And he is none too well.

I lean out of my window:  “Maybe he’s out,”   I suggest helpfully.  “Or maybe he’s asleep?”

The hood is withdrawn a little as the nocturnal nephew stares vacantly up at me.  “He’s my uncle,” he articulates, as one to whom words give pain, and he taps on a window to reinforce his point.  “Uncle Toby!”

No answer there came from Uncle Toby, and eventually, mumbling a few lines from one of his walking dreams, his abject relative stumbled off into the night.  I went back to work.

When I made enquiries of another, genuine relative of ‘Uncle Toby’, I was able to ascertain, as I suspected, that he has no ‘nephews’ nearby.   He does, however, conduct a very discreet night-time trade.

There was a time when the next step would have been to report the incident to the police.  No more.  But from a personal perspective, I find myself thinking that for certain people – like Uncle Toby’s addicted ‘nephew’ – self-confinement must be so alien a concept as to make a total nonsense of ‘social distancing’.

Like the rats of the Black Death, they run unseen beneath our feet.  We can never inhibit them, never control them.

Photo credit: Philip Lanssing on Unsplash