Back to work today.

We've had months of lockdown. Months of taking refuge in our homes and keeping an authorised minimum of two metres from anyone we met outside. That didn't apply to those we live with, of course, but there were times, within the prison-wall confines of our detacheds, semis, bungalows and flats that we wished it did. New words entered the language; social distancing, isolating, lockdown, furlough. Some of them were real words, some of them made-up. A few of them, like PPE, were specialist words and acronyms, hitherto known only to workers on building sites and in factories, but, suddenly, were on everyone's lips, as if we had known what they were all the time. If that wasn't enough, there were essential workers, front line staff, briefings, the battle, the fight, the war. Suddenly the lower paid and ordinary were our heroes. Celebrities and millionaires were useless to us.

Forgive my British levity. We laugh at everything. We can't help it. I know full well that people died. Thousands of human beings, gone. Lost. There was no telling if the virus's touch would be light, or fatal. There was an undertow of dread. This was something few of us pampered post war generations had faced. A real, immediate enemy who meant us real, immediate harm.

Everyone spoke or were interviewed from the safety of their front room, staring downwards so there was little eye-contact because instinct made us look at the images on our laptops, not at the camera. Our features were slightly fuzzy round the edges, our voices tinny and missing some vital spark that made them human. We occasionally froze mid-word, lips no longer in synch with our words.  Everyone became a Skyper, a WhatsApper, a streamer or a Zoomer. The mystery of social media was ripped away. Pensioners snapped at the heels of computer-savvy teens and happily communicated over network, web and Twittersphere.

We'll look back on this as our Blitz. Rose-coloured spectacles perched on the noses down which we peer at future generations of soft, spoiled youngsters. "You lot don't know you're born," We'll chant to our rigidly bored grandchildren. "I went through the lockdown. I was furloughed. Have you ever been furloughed? No, so stop whinging and grow a spine like we had to."

But that's all the just-finished and yet-to-come. Today is today. Today is Normal Day One. The moment normality returns. The day we go back to work. The virus has been defeated. The war is over. We should have had a VC day. Victory over Corona. We should all have got royally pissed and crowded into Trafalgar Square and sang the pop songs of the lockdown era, all misty-eyed with nostalgia, and grabbed and kissed random nurses.

We didn't.

Last Friday evening the Prime Minister said, back to work on Monday you lazy peasants, so back to work we go. There was a vague feeling of relief over the weekend and some sort of quiet celebration in the air. Yet, as I lay here in bed, next to the wife I have woken beside for the last ten years and under whose feet I have been tangled for uncountable months, I realise that I don't want to go back to work. I like being at home, indulging my hobbies, reading, playing football with the kids, building a radio-controlled aeroplane from scratch (well, from a kit, but it was nothing more than a box of a million components), actually spending time with Julia. Julia is my wife, by the way. A pretty name for a pretty woman.

What will happen today? Will there be marching bands and banners like there were when the miners returned to work after the great strike of 1985? A New York-style ticker tape parade, perhaps, for us brave workers as we stroll to bus stops, sit in traffic jams or weave our bicycles through cars and lorries?

Probably not. Us Brits like to think of ourselves as being cool and tough. We're stoic souls, not given to displays of hysterical emotion like excitable foreigners or overwrought Americans. It's over. Let's get back to work. Get on with it.

I don't want to get out of bed. It's warm. I'm not used to this. It's still dark outside. The clocks have gone back. The summer has somehow fallen through our fingers like sand and it's cold again.

Oh well.

I shove back the duvet and sit up. My wife moans and scrabbles it back over herself. She has another thirty minutes before her Normal Day One starts. Our three kids are all still in bed as well. School resumes today, but like all kids everywhere, they like to leave it all until the last minute. A lay-in, they call it. Maximum festering time, I call it. It's all right for them. I have a factory to get to. A machine to blow the cobwebs off and try to get started again.
Up. Bathroom. Shave. Shower. Teeth cleaned.

Kitchen. Tea. Toast. Cornflakes.

Work boots on. Coat on. Car keys off the hook.

It's like nothing happened.

Front door.

And out.

Yes, I've been out before. We all have, for our one exercise outing a day, or the trip to shops for Essential Items. The time is six-thirty-four, precisely. The morning is dark and cold. There are several lights on in the other houses in the cul de sac. There are also a lot of lights still off. I make for the bus stop. Julia has the car. Suits me. I read on the bus.

It's good to walk. I'm waking up now. The cold air freshens my face and sparks up the lungs. It is lockdown-clean and clear. I wonder how long it will stay that way.

Birds are singing. It's the dawn chorus. Life is good so far.

I reach the main road. A few yards the left and I'm at the bus stop. There are two other people there and yes each of us takes up position at least two metres from the other. It will take a while I suppose.

One of my bus stop companions wears a medical mask. A little extreme, I think. The virus has been defeated. No need for that, in fact it's a bit antisocial, if you ask me. Makes the rest of us feel unclean. I glance at the other unmasked person, a middle-aged woman in a dark coat. She shakes her head and rolls her eyes, the action almost imperceptible.

The bus lumbers out of the dark, headlights blazing. It stops and rumbles on tick-over. The doors hiss open. I step back to allow the two ladies to get on first. In they go. It's my turn now. The doors close behind me. I feel trapped. Instinctively, I stay at arm's length from the driver as I buy my ticket.

I turn to find a seat.

And panic.

The bus is almost full. The seats are crammed with human bodies. Men, women, young and elderly. They are all huddled into their various coats and jackets, tired looking and wearing an expression somewhere between terror and disdain. People try to Distance from their neighbours. They contort awkwardly to prevent their arms, shoulders and knees making contact with other arms, shoulders and knees.

I decide the stand. But even that doesn't keep me far enough from other passengers. I'm unavoidably close to a, office type in light mac and pinstripe trousers. He glares at me, no doubt angered by my proximity.

I want to tell him that it's okay. It's over. It's safe.

If only I could believe that myself.

These other bodies crammed into this vibrating, noisy metal box, are made of flesh, and organs that are riddled with microbes, bacteria and viruses. Someone sneezes and you can hear the combined intake of breath. There are no blessings. Instead, you can feel the daggers that are stared at the sneezer, a young skinny woman with a red nose. She mouths the word "Sorry." No one is fooled by that.

I cling to the overhead rail, my hand on metal that others have probably touched, tense and nervous and more than a little disgusted by the heat and humidity of human contact. The bus stops. People get off. People get on. People brush past me. I feel them recoil just as I flinch away from them.

At last we reach the factory gates. I resist the temptation to barge my way off. I wait for two women to disembark and a large man I recognise from countless pre-lockdown bus journeys and encounters in the factory, but whose name I have never learned.

Off the bus. Feet on Mother Earth

Another pause, so I can take a breath. This one drenched in the fumes from the departing bus. Now there's a scent I haven't experienced for a long time.

The factory entrance is a huge dark mouth. I've never seen it that way before but that is what it is. An entrance to a fiery, clanging inferno. I must go in. No more free money dished out by the Government and poured into my bank account every month for staying indoors and doing nothing. Now I must earn it again. I need to go into that place and pick up where I left off.

Deep breath. Steely resolve. Here I go.

I try not to touch anyone, but the main entrance is not intended for Social Distancing. It is intended to let people in and out of the factory. I brush against arms and bump into the people. Few greetings are exchanged. Even when I arrive into the factory floor unscathed, I can feel the after-touch of multiple contacts on my arms. I realise that I've been holding my breath.

The noise.

I had forgotten the relentless hammering, droning, metallic, crunching, crushing racket produced within the walls of this place. The rattle of compressed-air drills. The shuffle of the conveyor belt. The uncompromising and unforgiving energy of the robot arms that swing to-and-fro, welding and spraying, picking up and putting down. The constant movement. The urgency.

I reach my own workplace without incident.  I am out of breath and tense. My head aches. I can't think for the noise. Other men and women have taken up station at their own machines. I see a pile of metal plates adjacent to my machine. The settings are displayed on a print-out taped the sheet at the top of the pile, which means that other humans have dabbed their fingers over it.

I should be wearing gloves but I can't bring myself to pick them up. They've been moved from their normal place on top of the machine. Someone else has touched them. I'm not putting my hands inside them. I'm not exposing my fingers to ten little Petrie dishes of another person's virus and bacteria. Same goes for my ear defenders and safety glasses. The panic is back. I can't remember, I can't bloody remember how to start up the machine - wait, yes, there's a sequence. These buttons, this screen. A touch screen that, no doubt, others have smeared their fingers over. Someone from the skeleton crew of maintenance men perhaps, at the height of the pandemic.

I wipe my hand on my overalls and hope for the best. I should perform my twenty-second hand-wash, measuring the time by singing Happy Birthday or the National Anthem or the first verse of Black Sabbath's War Pigs.

No need for that anymore. The Prime Minister said so.

The machine whines into the life.

I try to work. I try to concentrate, but Brian and Karina, the others who work in my little niche of the factory, are right next to me and it's making me nervous. I can smell them. I can feel them. I don't speak (or rather shout) to them and they don't speak to me either, or each other. There was banter before. Laughs that made the day go faster. The trouble is, you have to get close to hear what the other is saying.

I fumble the first of the metal sheets as it emerges, cut and shaped, from the machine. I try to pick it up with the tips of my forefinger and thumb. I can't bring myself to simply grab it. I drop it noisily onto the concrete floor.

The foreman appears

"What's the matter with you?" he snarls. I feel the mist of his breath against my face. "And why aren't you wearing your gloves and where are your ear defenders and eye protectors?"

"I'm okay," I yell back at him. "I'm fine without them."

"No, you're bloody not," he yells and his raised voice is not entirely an effort to out-shout the factory. "Put them on."

I shake my head and turn back to the machine.

"Are you disobeying a direct order from your foreman?"

"What do mean, direct order? I'm not in the fucking army," I yell back and regret it straight away.

He moves in on me. He's a bantam cock of a man with all the strut, arrogance and aggression of that particular fowl.

He moves in.

He moves in.

I keep my attention fixed on the machine, but he's close, red-faced and breathing hard.

"Shut it down. Now."

I push the next metal sheet in the machine's slotted mouth. My mouth is dry and I'm scared. Not of the foreman's wrath. I don't care about that. I'm frightened of his laboured breath, of the spittle that flies out of his mouth when he repeats his latest Direct Order.

"Shut. It. Down."

I feel that spittle against the side of my face. His spittle. Moisture from his body. Contaminated. Lethal.

Panicked, I swing round and push him. My hands touch him, but it can't be helped. I want him two metres away. He stumbles back, wide-eyed, then red then purple-faced and fiery-eyed. He is shouting at me. Screaming almost. Virtually foaming at the mouth. He takes a step towards me, his fists clenched. Brian grabs him from behind to hold him back. I feel other hands on my arms and shoulders. Karina. She is shouting into my ear. Warm, damp breath.

I wrench myself free and snatch up a spanner to ward in them off. There are other workers arced around us. Some have to come to help, others to sight-see. There is more pushing and shoving. People getting to close to each other, inadvertent contact. I can't take this. I can't be here in this claustrophobic, suffocating, germ-ridden prison. I can't take the noise. I can't take the hurry and heat.

I want to go home. I want to shut my door and lock myself in.

I run.

Out into the autumn sunlight. I blink. There are cars and vans and lorries and buses. I can't go out onto the street. I can't go back. I stand there, spanner in hand. Unable to move. Unable to take one step, because there are people everywhere and all so close.