Recently, while out for drinks and sharing plates, a friend reached over and took a sip of my cocktail. There are key parts of this anecdote that still, two years into the push–pull of pandemic guidance, strike nervousness into me. They include the words “dinner”, “friend”, “sharing plates”, not to mention the thought of a bathroom where there’s nice soap but the water from the tap still comes out cold and for some reason there’s no dainty way of opening the door once you’ve washed your hands, so you just have to grab the door handle with your newly washed hand, which seems to instantly negate the point of washing the hands. But the crucial information here is that I had a very nice negroni in front of me, and they wanted to try it, so they took the glass and raised it to their lips and took a sip.
In 2019, I would not have minded. That’s because All This hadn’t happened, and I considered myself fairly normal. This is no longer true. I have forgotten how to talk to anyone. How to greet people. How to meet new people. How to sit in an office. A lot of people forgot how to talk back to me, too. Restrictions are easing up, but people aren’t necessarily doing the same. So I spoke to some experts to get some guidance.
Gossiping
If you were on any local Facebook groups over the various lockdowns, you will know that, deliriously starved of day-to-day gossip, people became obsessed with the comings and goings of their neighbours, reporting whether they wore a mask and gloves to put the bins out, or how many Amazon parcels they were getting every day. This is because, lightweight as it is, gossip is vital. “Gossip is social currency,” says Jessica Barrett, an editor at Grazia, the gossipiest magazine in the biz. “If you have some, you hold power.” Recently, it’s been hard to know what to do – and how hard to go – with gossip, but Barrett has some guidelines. “There are three things you need to consider when it comes to gossiping IRL: who’s it about; who told you (and are you allowed to relay it); and how far you want to go when it comes to the details – as in, how will it affect them? The perfect piece of gossip won’t damage someone’s relationship, say, but will be entertaining enough to keep you chatting for an entire round of drinks.”
Gossiping about friends can be a bit of a minefield, she says: “Some people don’t want to do it, and others can’t be trusted not to feed back as soon as they get on the bus home” – but that’s why celebrities still play such a vital role in society. “Love Island unites us all every summer for good reason: we love talking shit about people we think we know inside and out.” If you still don’t trust yourself to gossip properly about people you know, try having an opinion about, say, Julia Fox.
Shaking hands
We all more-or-less understand how Covid spreads, now. It’s in the air, right? It’s sort of … around? And that all that panicked hand-washing we did from March 2020 onwards was hygienic, sure, but not entirely effective. Has that made handshaking any less fraught? No. Despite my best efforts, shaking hands isn’t going to go away for ever, so it makes sense to relearn how to do it in a way that makes everyone involved feel secure.
“Everyone is comfortable doing different things,” William Hanson, etiquette coach and co-host of the Help, I Sexted My Boss podcast, tells me. “I personally am fine with a handshake – we are more informed now about Covid, and people are not maybe quite as touch-phobic as they were at the start – but if you are not comfortable shaking hands, then I would say you need to be proactive in giving a contactless greeting.” This can be anything from an elbow bump or a namaste or a regal wave, but fundamentally, if you don’t want to do a handshake, you have to be first to fire. If you do? Old rules still apply. “Imagine you’re going into a fruit bowl, you’re going to squeeze a peach or nectarine to see if it’s ripe,” Hanson explains. “That’s the sort of strength you want to use.” Stone fruit season doesn’t really kick in until August, so you might just have to practise this one on actual hands.
Eating in public
There was always something mildly embarrassing about eating on the go – “Yes, correct,” your meal deal seems to announce, “I, an adult person who is nominally in charge of myself and legally allowed to vote, mistimed my meals so badly that I have to eat a sandwich between the next three stops on the train” – but the additional hurdle of the mask, and the intricate dance you have to do to eat through it (unhook one side, bite, re-hook, chew; repeat), has made public consumption the refuge of the desperate. “There are two types of people in the world: those who feel seething rage when a stranger three seats away eats a samosa, and the rest of us who have better things to do,” says Justin Myers, who dissects this magazine’s blind date column every week on his Guyliner website. “If anything, I’d hope the pandemic might inspire scolds to give empathy a go: we all get hungry; we’re all short on time; it might be someone’s only chance of a seat all day. Respect the commitment of someone chewing a tuna mayo baguette behind a surgical mask – the resulting trapped cloud of bad breath will far outlast your mild inconvenience.”
Making small talk
For some people, small talk is an effortless social tool that helps warm up the cold gap between two people when left alone abruptly at a party, or makes the time go faster when for some reason your card is taking ages to be accepted at the till (“There’s money on it, mate! Ha, ha, ha!”). For others (me) it is not, and they have to make a deliberate effort to get small talk going, something that’s become harder and harder without practice. It’s been a good run, but abruptly asking, “Did you get Covid, then?” to people you haven’t seen for 18 months is no longer a cool small talk starter. (One of my party go-tos – “Have you ever seen anyone break a bone?” – remains effective, though.) The key to small talk is the same now as it was when you were also hopeless at it, pre-March 2020: ask questions, ideally open-ended ones, but don’t pepper them in as if you’re trying to figure out their mother’s maiden name, their national insurance number, and the street they grew up on. If you’re really stuck, try, “What incident led to you having to have a ‘special assembly’ at your school?” Nobody in this country can resist answering that question.
Apologising
I have found that, with my rusted-up social skills, I have had to apologise fairly often since the world reopened. But though the frequency of apologising has changed, the fundamentals remain the same. That is, saying “Sorry you were offended” or just, “Soz” doesn’t quite cut it. In 2012, Prof Beth Polin of the Eastern Kentucky University co-authored a paper called The Art of the Apology, which specified that a good apology includes at least one of the following six components: 1. An expression of regret (the actual “I’m sorry” bit); 2. An explanation (but, importantly, not a justification); 3. An acknowledgment of responsibility; 4. A declaration of repentance; 5. An offer of repair; and 6. A request for forgiveness. Sadly, the glowering feeling of “being a toddler forced to apologise because you have frightfully misbehaved” never really goes away.
Sharing food, or indeed drink
Etiquette expert Hanson is reassuringly outraged by my negroni story, but responds with an idea of how to respond next time this happens with something so gloriously passively aggressive that it makes me feel as if he’s walked over and slapped me sharply – but not unlovingly! – in the face. “If we were out and I said, ‘Oh, my gin and tonic’s delicious,’ and you said, ‘Oh, can I have a sip?’ I would say, ‘Of course – let me order you one,’ and beckon the waiter over as nicely as I could.” Myers is slightly less elegantly vicious, but still enforces boundaries. “Sharing food can be a bonding experience – an opportunity to explore the farthest reaches of a menu together, especially with tapas or meze – but Covid has exposed our previous cleanliness hypocrisy. We’d demand five-star hygiene ratings from restaurants, but then spend the entire meal sticking unwashed hands into each other’s dinner.” If you want a nibble of someone else’s plate, “you should wait to be asked”, but do think how much you actually want to try their pasta. “Consider a fork in your pie or a bite of your burger to be their tongue in your mouth,” Myers says. “If you’re unwilling to accept their saliva, everybody’s mouths and hands need to stay on their own side of the table.”
Flirting
Flirting is fun, isn’t it – adding a flicker of electricity to what is often a normal, even banal conversation (“No way one of your top three biscuits is a digestive, sorry! No!”) – but it’s been hard to do in the last two years. First, when it was basically illegal to touch people’s arms in a significant way, and second, since we’ve all been released, there’s been a feral edge to it. “Historically, flirting felt fun and pleasantly aimless, a sport that prioritised taking part over the podium,” Myers laments. “Now, after so much time lost, people are reluctant to waste it; if they don’t feel an instant connection, they scoot on, in search of someone to tick their boxes.”
Annie Lord, a dating columnist for Vogue and contributor to the Guardian, treats flirting like a contact sport. “Touch works as well – obviously after you’ve assessed they’d be comfortable with that,” she says. “But like a little shove when they make an annoying joke or nudging them when you’re both leaning at the bar waiting for drinks, it warms things up.” Another thing worth bringing back is “looking at people”, something that feels especially intense in a post-mask world. “The sort of thing that works on me is intense eye contact,” Lord says. “It makes me go all shy and giggly, and I start playing with my hair. It feels as if they’re seeing who you really are. It makes you feel special. Since the pandemic, I’ve felt this even more because we went for such long periods without anyone looking at us, without being noticed.”
Taking public transport
People acting bizarrely on public transport is a cherished tradition in this country, and something I think we lost sight of during the first few lockdowns. Recently, I was on a bus that turned its engine off because a woman was shouting at the driver so much, and I was oddly soothed by the interruption: it felt like normality again. Public transport is a place where people can be their most authentic selves, so I am loth to enforce any particular rules over it, but it’s worth using this space to remind people to wear masks if the service demands it and – because I can’t believe how often this happens, still – have your payment method ready before you set foot on the bus or towards the barrier. How do some of you not know this yet? How?
Saying no to things
All of that said: is it still OK to be anxious about the outside world? After absorbing months and months of messaging saying that it’s a place that can hurt you: yes, a bit. I, for one, have been guilty of using, “Sorry mate, can’t: pandemic” as an excuse not to go to things I didn’t want to go to anyway, and it’s still a fairly useful get-out, but – as with a lot of these new social rules – playing it by ear and leaning into what you’re comfortable with is key. If there’s a new variant doing the rounds, feel free to welch on dinner. If there’s a mask-less bowling party happening and you don’t feel great about putting your fingers in there, don’t. And if someone tries to drink your negroni, then pull it away from them. They’ll look like fools, not you. We’re still feeling out what society looks like in a post-vaccine world, but saying, “No thanks – not for me!” is still a fairly vital part of it.
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