Toby Neal: I can't mask my bemusement but I'll do as I'm told

We are the featureless, faceless, facemasked ones, turning our shops into alien environments with humanoids devoid of any social interaction and, when they do try to converse, having trouble understanding each other.

This weird and unfamiliar world is taking us closer to "normality" and, we are assured, giving those who have been staying away from the shops more confidence to resume their custom.

Top scientists have discovered, or at least are now asserting more assertively, that wearing face masks helps catch potentially virus-carrying droplets in your breath as you breathe out.

What is amazing about this breakthrough is that if you had asked a primary age child at the start of the pandemic about the potential benefits of wearing a face mask they might have intuitively come up with the same answer.

As for the trajectory of the scientific and political propaganda, face masks have been elevated from a status of being of no scientifically proven benefit, or even possibly worse than useless, to our latest weapon in the coronavirus battle.

They are now considered so vital that for the first time in British history (and I stand to be corrected) ordinary people going about their ordinary business are being compelled by law to cover their faces.

Dramatically reduced

So what has changed? Despite vague talk about evolving scientific opinion there still seems to be a paucity of hard and reliable research.

Apart from anything else, the timing is odd. This new order from the State is being introduced at a time when the level of coronavirus cases has been dramatically reduced without any compulsion to wear face masks.

And the psychology is contradictory. Just as the mood music has been encouraging us to get out more, create little bubbles, and take safe steps towards being the social creatures that by instinct humans are, friendly faces in shops are being superseded by haunted eyes peering suspiciously from the top of masks, barriers to normal human interaction.

Face masks are a tool of profound division and erosion of personal identity. They also empower those who exult in self-awarded moral superiority to cry "You idiot!" at anybody not wearing one in any setting.

Personally, I shall, of course, wear one, as ordered by the State.

It's going to be alien. In space, nobody can hear you scream. In Britain's shops, nobody will see you smile.

Britain might be marginally healthier for wearing them, but it will be a less pleasant, less friendly, place.

The second biggest coronavirus story beyond the disease itself is that, from Berwick-on-Tweed on the North Sea to Greta Green on the Solway Firth (give or take a mile or two), a Tartan Curtain is descending and nobody is taking any notice.

Now let me say at the outset that I fully admit this is a ridiculous exaggeration, and just a way for me to be the first to get the phrase "Tartan Curtain" in print so that I can copyright it.

But nevertheless Nicola And The Nationalists have been making strides in their independence campaign.

Nicola has refused to deny – that's a wonderful media device to give a veneer of credence to outlandish possibilities – that if the coronavirus situation deteriorates again, people arriving from England may be forced into quarantine.

"There is no border between England and Scotland," Boris Johnson has thundered, amid mockery from those pre-programmed to mock everything he says, a case of playing the man and not the message.

Don't be silly, says Nicola, of course there's a border between England and Scotland.

Well yes, but more importantly, no. We live in the United Kingdom, the clue being in the title. There are internal borders, which delineate administrative divisions within the UK. Once you start treating people who come across these invisible lines as foreigners, then that is an entirely different order of border.

It would mean the end of freedom of movement by UK citizens within the UK.

For Nicola to "refuse to deny" that there may be circumstances in which the English-Scottish border could be hardened naturally should be seen in the context of coronavirus restrictions.

However, the entire coronavirus response has given her the opportunity to assert Scottish separateness. Now all she needs is a referendum to give her the rubber stamp.

That statue which went up in Bristol this week was a temporary think piece and statement rather than a real commemorative statue.

Nevertheless it was still bizarre to hear the lady concerned explaining why she was deserving of having a statue to herself, and the artist saying why he had the self-given right to put it up without asking Bristolians first.

It's probably for the best then that it has been carefully removed in a respectful and dignified manner. In the current atmosphere being on a pedestal, with the inference that people should literally and metaphorically look up to you, is an uncomfortable place to be.