Covid forced Britain into lockdown – now, overpriced rail companies are doing it on the sly

This week, I walked through a bustling Borough Market one evening; paused, on my bicycle, to hear the fabulous no-notes oratory of Mick Lynch in Trafalgar Square on May Day; mingled with the crowds waiting for a platform announcement at Paddington, and I wanted to go round and thank everyone.

Thank them for being there. Thank the sippers in the bars and pubs, the banner-wavers and the weary commuters. Congratulate them for simply showing up, for being out and about, for leaving the house. Because these days it isn’t easy.

Once, way back when, we had a lockdown imposed upon us, televised press conferences urging us to stay at home and police vans with their loud-hailers yelling at sun-bathing miscreants to pack up their towels. But now we have a new lockdown, a stay-at-home message written, as it were, in invisible ink; subliminal messages coming at us from every direction. And we need to fight it, to find a way to swerve the bombardment that comes at us when we try to leave our homes and to avoid the siren call to lethargy.

As the great Loyd Grossman used to say on Through the Keyhole: ‘Let’s take a look at the evidence.’ There is, of course, the endless assault on the commuter. The fares, the delays, the torture of the compensation scheme, Delay Repay.

In Japan, the ticket inspector enters a carriage of the clean and speeding on-time train, bows and checks tickets. When he reaches the end of the carriage he turns, bows and exits. It’s a sight and a spirit that once seen is never forgotten.

Here in Blighty, and I’m not talking from some general blasé experience over time but of precisely Wednesday this week en-route, as ever from Taunton to London, when our nice inspector entered the carriage. He was jaded already from his announcements, during which he was trying to understand, out loud, quite why the 08.23 from Taunton was already 20 minutes late by the time it had reached Exeter that morning; quite why the powers-that-be had decided to let his late-running train allow another to edge in front of it before his then got wedged behind a freight train.

Another morning of apologies for the poor brute who could offer nothing but the suggestion we claim refunds on the GWR ‘Delay Repay’. As he checked my ticket, I was attempting to claim for last week’s delays, but the ‘upload your ticket’ button wasn’t functioning. “It’s a nightmare,” he conceded. “I hear the voices of people complaining about it before I go to sleep at night.”

A good reason to stay at home, for him and us, you might think.

And look at the analysis by MailOnline into the annual cost of commuting to London. There is not a single annual ticket from any popular commuter area, from Canterbury to Colchester, that is less than £6,000, and if you want a 12-month ticket from Norwich to London on Greater Anglia, it’s £10,244. Although you do at least, on that service, get a nice bar with a smiley server, as opposed to the trolley of carb doom on GWR.

And the report is a nail in the coffin to those who want not just to leave their homes, but to sell them, to quit the city for their rural dream. “Moving out of London can be a false economy,” said personal finance expert Martyn James. Property may be cheaper but you get clobbered by the commute cost. “The grass isn’t greener outside of the city,” he said. And I think he might have been sobbing when he added, “because there’s no grass.”

What the government needs to do is encourage, or insist, that train operators offer pay-as-you-go flexible seasonal tickets, tickets for most of us who do not nowadays, schlep to London every day, but might do it twice, or even once, a week.

Then, as we look out of the window at home, wondering if it will ever stop raining, and we pause to consider a holiday away from it all, reality also bites. Airports are now enforced retail experiences, shopping centres with flights in between. I get queue anxiety which rather obscures the thought of building sandcastles with my little boys. Better to hope for some sun this summer. To stay at home.

And post-Brexit, the dream of a place in the sun for so many Brits, the villa in Puerto Banús, the apartment in Nice, the renovated farmhouse in Chianti, is torn to shreds once you realise you have to set the stop-clock on 90 days.

Meanwhile, where is the motivation for the younger generation to leave the house and venture forth to do something like a ski season? Pre-Brexit the European ski resorts operated a virtuous economic circle; the Brits worked the chalets and bars, then partied and invested their cash back into the local economy.

Now visa requirements make that virtually impossible. A friend who runs bars and restaurants in an Alpine ski resort tells me: “There are no Brits here to liven things up and the Eastern European workers save or send their money home.”

When it comes to eating out, town and city dwellers are encouraged to stay at home and use Deliveroo. You can stay wedged into the sofa, there’s no wretched service charge, no tube or taxi bill to pay, no chance of being mugged – or worse. And so many of us are now bewitched by that dreadful slogan of ‘Just Eat’; a filthy company that should be banned for conning people into thinking it’s better not to cook, it’s better not to go out.

And what of the rural communities, seemingly barred from leaving their villages because there’s no bus service? Or, if there is a bus service, it’s not at a time that encourages nice economic behaviour.

A caller to Iain Dale’s LBC show put it succinctly this week. Charlie and a friend from Cannock in Staffordshire took a bus to Stafford for the evening. After the cinema they nipped to a pub around 8pm: “My friend was about to look at the menu,” he said, “but I had to tell him, ‘We’ve got 10 minutes to get our bus’. The evening was just getting started and we had to call it to a close.”

With wall-to-wall Netflix and Apple TV and Amazon Prime and BBC iPlayer, it’s cheaper to get a big telly and stay at home. And you can stay at home and ‘doom scroll’, trawling social media for videos of people bursting huge zits, or watching large ships crashing (my favourite).

But we must fight against this, lobby for better bus services, put down our phones and cadge a lift to the pub. Hospitality dies when we shun it, or use the creations of dark kitchens, delivered via bike or moped.

And thank God that the lunacy of the 15-minute grocery delivery service died a natural death. Get out of the house and get Britain moving.