What do strangers mean to you?

Love interests or lethal threats

Things are definitely better in the movies, which we would know if it was legal to go watch them right now.

Alas, all we can do is remember.

I’ve started a new job and have for the first time in over a year, visited an office, and it’s got me thinking about the redefinition of the word stranger.

Here’s what stranger used to mean, courtesy of the Cambridge Dictionary:

Someone not known or not familiar

Perhaps after a few more years of a global pandemic, this will be updated to what it appears to mean today:

Someone who will almost certainly infect and make ill or dead yourself and your loved ones

The irony that the definition means someone not known, and that the Powers That Be profess to know everyone is an asymptomatic carrier of a virus that boasts PR campaigns, marketing departments, helplines, legal indemnity for its treatments and can apparently be symptomless, is not lost on me.

There’s nothing like unity to tear us apart, is there?

Our newfound shared experience of endless lockdowns, mask mandates and the dubious merits of the internet information age should have us enjoying more in common than ever with our old friends the strangers.

Instead, far from bumping into someone when not looking and enjoying a meet-cute, we turn away from them when we cross their paths, pulling masks even further up our faces lest some of their deathly particles infiltrate the cracks in our countenances.

Being a writer-y type, I’ve always quite liked strangers: observing, meeting, laughing and drinking with them. In 2020, 2021 and no doubt in future years too, this makes me something of a criminal or depraved lunatic.

Maybe one day the great pandemic love stories that I refuse to believe don’t exist will be brought to us in cinematic format, and we’ll watch with tears in our eyes as:

• employees of the Department of Work and Pensions fall in love with the strangers claiming benefits from them because they’ve lost their jobs
• masked barbers propose to their regular client who they’ve learned to love without ever really seeing their face
• children communicate in blissful ignorance through the literal gate in their community that separates rich from poor, healthy from sick, and happy from sad

and I’ll be proven wrong in my belief that we’ve learned to revile and call the authorities on our neighbours instead of loving them.