Deadlines for returning to normality look increasingly doubtful

Apart from two blissful years as a teacher at a Sussex prep school I have been a journalist all my working life and have therefore had a life of deadlines. Deadlines, by the way, that cannot be breached or extended or abandoned. If you have to write a story and file to the newspaper by 4pm at the latest, then 4.15pm is not going to do it. The coronavirus pandemic has been about deadlines too. Boris Johnson has almost based his offensive against Covid-19 by announcing sometimes arbitrary deadlines which have in equal measure lifted the spirits of the nation and then dampened them within short order. Never more so than with the beginning and ending of lockdowns and the likelihood or not of foreign summer holidays. The last time Boris and his health secretary Matt Hancock set a series of new deadlines, international travel and beaches and swimming costumes and moules frites in French seaside cafes etc etc looked to be on the cards from May 17 onwards. Bookings spiralled. Travel companies desperate for cash started smiling again as the phones began to ring. Then the EU struck. Lacking sufficient vaccines and resenting the Brits for being so vaccine-organised, the Brussels hierarchy wants to stop any Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine doses made in a Belgian factory from being exported to the UK and a third wave of the virus is sweeping across many of the EU countries, driving millions of people back into lockdown. Boris is determined that the UK lockdown will come to an end whatever is going on in Europe but we all know that's nonsense because we can't go to to France, Spain or Italy or wherever if their pandemic is still rife because of the risk of catching it and bringing it back home, thus reviving the flagging virus in the UK. A vicious circle. So now officials are warning that perhaps after all there will be no foreign holidays this summer. So holidays cancelled or vouchered. Until when? I know this is not a perfect science especially when virus variants keep popping up. But deadines no longer have real meaning. You plan ahead based on what your political leaders dictate but, unlike my journalistic deadlines, political deadlines change whichever way the wind blows. Looks like a stay-at-home summer ahead.