What I have come to miss most is spitting in each other’s faces, otherwise known as talking

Zoom meetings, although necessary, are void of the comfort that comes with shaking hands or kissing someone before a conversation.

By Ian Leslie

Customers queue to enter a TK MAXX clothing store nside a shopping centre in Walthamstow, east London on June 22, 2020. - Britain's current social distancing guidelines set the distance between each person at two metres to avoid the risk of contamination to coronavirus. There is pressure on the government to reduce this distance in order to give a boost to bars, restaurants and hotels, which are scheduled to reopen next month. (Photo by Tolga AKMEN / AFP) (Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images)

I must confess that I hadn’t realised, until recently, quite how much of human social life involves people spraying each other with spittle. We now know a little more about how Covid-19 spreads than we did at the start of the outbreak. The virus jumps from one body to another along different paths, but its vehicle of choice is the saliva droplet. That rules out a surprising number of activities, such as football crowds, pubs, restaurants, Zumba classes, and nightclubs – basically, wherever we congregate to sing, pant or commune at close quarters. We can dance, but not with each other.

This pandemic, an economic and geo-political crisis instigated by rogue proteins, is a reminder that we are still fundamentally biological entities. That is easy to overlook, since we live our lives at the intersection of two modes of existence. The biological one is messy and textured and fluid, literally and figuratively. The digital one is ordered and precise, consisting of discrete units in certain quantities. Lockdown, itself a response to a biological event, has moved us further into digital mode: a world of straight lines, grids and scripts.