THE IMPLICATION OF A THING

“Covid’s over, Big Man,” said someone to me the other day, passing by. I was wearing a face mask in a room where a lot of people weren’t.

I froze for a while. It would have been nice to have had a witty comeback, or something deep to say in reply, but to be honest, I was just a bit stunned at the implication. Funny. Sometimes the implication of a thing can hit you before you’ve worked out exactly why it hurts. You feel the emotional blow. And then later you realise that they think you’re being fussy, or stupid, or old-fashioned, or fearful. And that’s not very nice. And they’ve wandered off.

Now. I let that go. I know why I still wear a face mask, I know why I don’t believe Covid is by any means ‘over’, and I know whose business that is, and whose it isn’t.

But what’s been churning through my mind is the idea that I could still be intimidated by the status quo. It used to be called peer pressure, and it used to be a bit more obvious - you could say no to smoking behind the gym with the cool kids because you knew that it was wrong and you’d already decided firmly. That was easy.

But these days, the peer pressure is a bit more subtle. For adults it creeps and skulks on the other side of the playground fence, it uses instagram and pokes you at parties. It talks politics and reason and it coils around nice people with good intentions.

And there it was - wanting me to fit in, to not be the odd-one out. It was asking me to compromise on my reasoning by agreeing with the prevailing wind, to stop being so silly and to take off that mask: to be more 2022 and less 2020. Get with it, Big Man.

Why ‘Big Man’? I wonder. Is that what big men do? And what is a big man? Someone who puts his elderly relatives at risk just to look like he fits in with the crowd? Someone who compromises his beliefs for the trinket reward of popularity, or conformity? I don’t think so, dude.

I think that kind of thing gets you behind the gym in puffs of guilty smoke. And I’ve never been up for that.