SOCIAL distancing relaxation? No thanks. That, it seems, is what many a great many Scots are feeling if a recent YouGov poll is anything to go by. More than half of Scots (57 per cent), it found, want social distancing to stay even after everyone has been vaccinated.

How do we interpret that? It does seem quite extraordinary that, just as we’re heading towards the joys of mixing and hugging, quite a lot of us are saying, Nah. Happy on my own here. This at the same time, that other people are desperate just to get out there. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why that might be.

We actually don’t mind a bit of physical and social distancing All that hugging and kissing is not for us, no.

This plays into that old stereotype of the stiff, Calvinist Scot, who doesn’t like to approve of any drinking, dancing or physical contact.

Scots don’t like getting close to other people – and most of all we don’t like touching them. Or, as one tweeter, the writer Kenny Pryde, put it, “Explainer: Scots and social distancing is a marriage made in heaven. We don’t want hugs, we don’t do ‘air kissing,’ we fear intimacy and any excuse to dodge such behaviour would be, er, embraced.”

But is that really true? Are we actually a nation of hug-o-phobes? I’m not sure that Scots are any worse than the English. A “touchability index” of nations from the University of Oxford and Finland’s Aalto University did find that the British, on the whole, were, in comparison to other nations like the Finns, not really all that huggy.

But, at the same time, studies often suggest that Scots are friendly. As someone who moved here at the age of 30, I can vouch for this. Scots may not be all that huggy, but they are very chatty, and the two-metre rule is no barrier to this.

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It’s not a bad attitude to have – the slowly, slowly approach – particularly given that we all know how the relaxation of last summer was blamed for this winter’s lockdown. The last thing any of us wants is to dabble in a new normal, only to be thrown back into house arrest. Of course, what’s different this year is we have a vaccine. That ought to give us confidence. What’s interesting is that it isn’t quite. It’s as if we’ve learned to view all good news with a certain amount of suspicion and distrust.

A sudden return to normal routines seems terrifying

Life might get busy again – and many of us liked it being slightly less busy. The full relaxation of restrictions could means a return to the kind of exhausting routine that some of us were glad to get rid of. Another YouGov survey found that Britons were split over whether it would be easy or hard to readjust to life ashow it was before the pandemic; 49 percent predicted they would find it hard, and 42 percent easy.And we are, at the same time, not match-fit when it comes to socialising. Some of us fear not being at the top of our game.