Posted 2.15pm UK time

The Daily Telegraph has published an excellent article today by a pub-owner in Cornwall who has spent the last three years turning a crumbling seventeenth-century building into a beloved social hub. ‘Turning it around involved a lot of hard work,’ owner Amy Newland writes, ‘which was starting to pay off until Covid [or, better put, the Government’s lockdown] struck.’

The pub — like so many others across the country — has been forced to start selling takeaway food and groceries in order to make a slight profit: ‘I can’t say we’re making any money, but even £10 a week is better than nothing.’ Customers could buy milk cheaper at the supermarket, Mrs. Newland writes, but ‘I think they know that if they don’t use us, they’ll lose us’. This, at least, is encouraging. But it clearly isn’t enough.

The most dispiriting line was this one: ‘One of our regulars is 86 — he has been coming to this pub every single day for 63 years. He came in on Sunday to collect his roast dinner and he didn’t want to leave.’ How many times do we need to say that the question of whether or not to ‘lock down’ is not a matter of lives versus money, but lives versus lives (and livelihoods).

The publican ends with a stark warning for the Government: ‘Restrict our business much longer, and there won’t be any pubs left.’ Quite right.

For Mrs. Newland, like many others, all this talk about our Christmas freedoms is just that: talk.