‘Wallet, keys, tickets, something to suck’ …the familiar checklist of the artsgoer. You may still go through this ritual, but nowadays with an impending sense of doom. At the start of the year, a poll of theatregoers of all ages by Purple Seven suggested the gloomiest group about their arts lives returning to normal this year were the over-70s – just 21 per cent could foresee a life sans masks, sans hand sanitiser, sans everything.
Is it really that bad out there? Of course not, but who knows how fast things will return to the old normal; meanwhile, the new normal can turn on a sixpence. I advise Going Out as if it were a
