How do you tell your child that Covid is still a danger? | Blaise Tapp

My mini Paxman threw this verbal right hook as we made our way into the play park for the first time in three-and-a-half months last weekend.

The trip was preceded by an overheard conversation about his mum’s eagerly anticipated mercy dash to the salon and his Old Man’s plans to meet up with his pals for a pint or few.

Taking all these new developments in personal freedoms into account you can hardly blame the little fella for asking whether the virus which has rocked everybody’s world this year has finally slung its hook.

Like most parents of small children, we always think long and hard before deciding which version of a story we will present to our youngest – sleepless nights are never in anybody’s best interests.

However, in the case of the pandemic, we came clean early and explained to him why he must sing Happy Birthday (twice) whenever he washes his hands and why licking his fingers and eating toast off the kitchen floor is even more unacceptable now than it was previously.

The changes that every child has had to endure since March are unlike anything that any generation has had to experience in this country for eight decades.

Being suddenly told that there won’t be any school for the foreseeable future and that a curious bloke called Joe was going to be your virtual PE teacher is enough to turn any nipper's world on its head.

As much as any child wants to watch Hey Duggee for three hours a day, the novelty of sofa learning quickly wears off when you realise that you are not going to see your little playmates anytime soon.

Most four-year-olds are hardwired to put their grubby little hands all over other human beings.

So, being told that they cannot get within ‘sleeping daddy distance’ of people has been hard to take, but keep his distance he has.

Most of the time.

In truth, the one thing our human whirlwind wants to do is hug his friends again, which is largely why he asked me whether we were Covid-free.

Sensing his new-found hope and not wanting to burst his little bubble, I did that classic parent thing of fudging an answer, telling him in my most sincere, positive tone ‘Not yet son, but it isn’t as nasty as it used to be.’

Unlike other occasions when I fob off my children with necessary lies – usually relating to Father Christmas’s preferred form of entry when the chimney is clearly no longer viable – my response has played on my mind for days.

Why are we returning to normal?

Did I get too close to that sneezy looking woman in Marks and Spencer the other day?

Is it absolutely necessary that we go on holiday this summer?

The obvious answer is that the situation we continue to find ourselves in is far from normal, but how long can we realistically stay indoors and stare at a variety of screens for?

I have not met a single sensible person who genuinely believes that all of this, this craziness we call life in 2020, is over.

They see the statistics and the fact that the daily death toll is still hugely troubling, along with spikes in places such as Leicester and other towns and cities where the prospect of their own local lockdown is a very real one.

Many, like me, have taken the view that life is never without risk and that there is no way that we could sustain lockdown until next year, or whenever very clever people in laboratories can find a vaccine.

It doesn’t mean I am completely at ease with our new-found freedoms, nor do I plan to return to ‘normal’ any time in the near future

The day that I can tell our little lad that coronavirus has ‘gone away’ cannot come soon enough.