Louise Roberts: Lockdown is miserable enough without the fun police

The fun police don’t like it when you enjoy yourself in our new world, even if it makes no difference to Covid infections, writes Louise Roberts.

It’s not enough to be locked up and have our freedoms ­curtailed.

Evidently we now have to be miserable in order to conquer Covid, let alone learning to live with this virus and its ever-mutating ­variants.

Masks don’t have to mean misery. And being grim and glum does not beat Covid.

If we are now on a mission to suck the joy out of life, we really have let the pandemic beat us.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian has thankfully called out the lie that is the possibility of total Covid elimination.

But we can never get back to normal if we forget what normal is.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian has anandoned the goal of zero Covid. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Even certain premiers can’t play nice, with Daniel Andrews sniping at NSW’s recent six million vaccination milestone and plan to allow limited household picnics while his state Victoria was not getting its “fair share”.

“Because the national plan is about all of us moving together. Not a ­national plan for picnics, just quietly,” Andrews said.

And whatever health interventions may be required, let’s remind ourselves that banning music or sneering when people fall off a cliff or cheering when the police fire pepper balls at protesters is not normal.

Yet all this and more has happened in recent weeks.

Volunteer piano players were tickling the ivories, and no doubt the senses of grateful, proactive and responsible citizens who queued for their vaccines at a Melbourne hub.

But the music was silenced. A spokesperson said that “operational changes” had to be worked through.

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has taken a number of swipes at NSW. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Wayne Taylor

So the piano program is now “on hold” after weeks of performances at the Royal Exhibition Centre where the soothing music was previously not a problem. One of the pianists, John Arthur Grant, summed up the killjoy factor: “I am very supportive of the health guidelines because I want us to get back to a situation where we can have gigs, concerts, and festivals.

“But I think the music can settle people. Having a vaccination doesn’t have to be stressful but some people do get stressed.”

I wasn’t aware that keyboards were a disease vector.

It just doesn’t add up.

Just imagine if the orchestra on the Titanic had been banned from playing Nearer My God To Thee as the great ship sank.

Who would dare to cancel Wallace Henry Hartley and his eight-piece band as they tuned up and then assembled on deck serenading passengers with hymns in an attempt to calm a rather tense situation as the lucky few passengers leapt onto lifeboats.

Taliban fighters patrol along a street in Kabu. Picture: AFP

Also, look who else is banning music at the moment – the Taliban.

So let’s not use them as a cultural guide.

And there is cause for optimism here. We’re now halfway to that first major vaccine target in NSW of 70 per cent to end lockdown.

But for some lockdown enthusiasts, civility as a concept was binned 18 months ago when the pandemic erupted.

Take the case of the young couple who fell six metres from a cliff at Sydney’s Balmoral Beach recently, a horror finale to a shimmering August afternoon.

The 19-year-old woman slipped on the grass and her companion, according to an eyewitness, then lost his footing as he leant forward trying to see where she was and if she was ­injured.

Why am I mentioning this? Because some trolls thought they deserved it.

Yes.

They deserved to fall and endure those unravelling moments of fear and the sort of pain that takes your breath away.

They should have known better than to relax in sunshine for a short blessed time because we are in ­lockdown.

“Were they vaccinated and masked?” got plenty of smiley emojis, the slacktivists’ endorsement of choice.

“Stayed home, wouldn’t have happened,” got plenty of thumbs ups.

Likewise “Standing on the edge taking selfies I assume?”, and: “Were they on a Covid 19 tour adventure?”

In fact they were legally exercising, but that doesn’t matter.

Come back, Covid Karen – your irritating busybodyness has nothing on this condemnatory mindset.

Our way of life. Our freedom. Our chicken schnitty, we cry as we vow never again to take for granted the things we regret taking for granted.

But we have also presupposed a genteel and generous mindset that ­allowed us to glide through our glorious lives down under while the rest of the world went to hell on a Covid handcart.

It offers quite the picture to the perspicacious resident of Australia. Schadenfreude hangs low like a fog over the harbour.

Balmoral Beach, where a young couple recently fell six metres off a cliff.. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Gaye Gerard

Freedom is not going to come quicker if we are vile to each other or remain ideologically opposed to having fun or just other people having fun.

It’s easy to dismiss the lockdown protest idiots.

There’s no QR code for a march.

It’s much harder to reconcile the helplessness and family disintegration swelling around us.

The mental health shadow pandemic is a reminder of what people should be getting angry and upset about, not whether someone looks like they have broken the law according to a photo on TikTok.

The NSW Suicide Monitoring System found that 8489 people under 18 were rushed to hospital for self-harm and suicidal thoughts this year, to July 29.

This equates to 40 children a day, 31 per cent more than over the same period last year and a 47 per cent rise from 2019.

If ever there was an argument to end the lockdown now and make an effort to be kinder to each other, this is it.