Mask discourse is the latest stupid episode in our endless coronavirus hell

I got my first cab in months the other day, in the depths of what I would call a “soul-changing” hangover, and therein lay a problem. On the one hand, the hangover needed satiating: at my knees I had a blue plastic bag filled with all the corner-shop supplies needed to take it down – 1 x pre-packaged iced coffee, 1 x 1.5-litre bottle chilled water (sparkling), 1 x generic unbranded “aloe drink”, 1 x white chocolate flapjack the size and weight of a brick, 1 x tube Rolos; an erratic bag, I’ll admit – and I intended to consume them over the course of the drive and arrive bright and bouncing and refreshed. On the other hand, I had completely forgotten I was required to wear a mask in the cab until the car silently pulled up next to me, and you can’t eat flapjack through a mask.

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I chugged down the coffee, panic-chewed some Rolos, and then got in the car for what I would describe as 40 minutes of agony: all of the potions and ointments I needed to heal myself, but no way of putting them in my body. I arrived in Clapham looking like a corpse.

Mask discourse is here, though; like a Prius pulling up to me driven by a man in Latex gloves, we really should have seen it coming. Coronavirus has been nothing but discourse. Four months ago it was whether we should lock down or not. Three months ago it was whether we were clapping hard enough for the NHS, leering at the neighbours who didn’t come quickly enough to their door. Two months ago, going to the park was a death wish. One month ago, going to the beach was fine, but a protest was not. Finally the government has declared wearing masks will be mandatory in shops from 24 July – and I want to be arch and say something about how coronavirus will just ignore mask non-wearers for the next 10 days just to be polite, but realistically more shops will be open by the end of July, so it does make some kind of sense, even if it took us weeks to get here.

Now, like clockwork, discourse: anti-mask Telegraph columns, three-webpages-of-research-that-agree-exactly-with-me local Facebook comments, and a small but loud movement from one side of the political spectrum, mirroring the one in the US, which is fuming that we have to wear a small piece of cloth over our mouths and noses if we want to live life again.

I would understand if the mask anger was coming from a justified place. If you can go to the pub now with little more than a squirt of hand sanitiser and a handing over of your email address, why can’t shops do the same? Surely if the shops aren’t safe to enter without a mask, they shouldn’t be open at all? But a lot of it, well, isn’t justified: as Tim Stanley writes in the Telegraph, “Face masks are horrible and inhuman”, and the root cause of it seems to be there, rather than with any sort of science. Over on Lockdown Sceptics, Toby Young called masks “mandatory face nappies” and threatened to never vote Conservative again if they are enforced, expressing as he did the sort of abstract feeling of unfreedom that mask-wearing seems to inspire in those against it. This is all awkward for me, because I’ve maintained a long streak of impeccable politics simply by doing and saying the exact opposite of what Toby Young is mad about this week, and him threatening not to vote Tory if they enforce entirely sensible public health policy leaves me in a quandary. I’m not happy about it, but I think that means I’m voting blue at the next election. I’ll at least wear a mask while I do it, so it feels somewhat countercultural.

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And look, the mask thing, I get it: due to being born a nerd I wear glasses sometimes, and I agree that there are problems with my lenses steaming up when I wear a mask. I walked up some stairs too briskly last weekend and took great, embarrassing, sucking breaths at the top of them, and though the mask didn’t get in the way of the breathing at all, the motion of it puckering backwards and forwards made it a lot clearer to anyone who might have seen me that I’ve been slacking with my Joe Wicks PE lessons. You can’t, as previously discussed, drink some Volvic through one. For people with sensory processing issues, face coverings are a very real panic trigger. They’re not perfectly ideal, sure. But if the alternative is “living with Covid-19, forever and ever and ever, the normality of life slowly eroding ever more as the virus lingers on, and we try to defeat it by just ‘being more stubborn’ and seeing if that helps”, I think I’ll wear a mask to Iceland to try and minimise the spread of the virus, yeah. It’s not that hard.

I suppose the question to those who have turned “wearing a mask in M&S” into an ideological crusade is this: how long do you want all this to go on? If you told me to dunk my entire head in a barrel of hand sanitiser every time I left the house with the promise that it would bring normality back a month faster than we’re currently on track to do (current track: never), I’d scrape my head on the bottom of the vat. If you tell me wearing a mask makes the slow reopening of the high street safer and easier for everyone involved, fine, I’ll put on a mask.

What are you really mad at, here: a small piece of cloth on the front of your face, or the virus that’s kept us all indoors since mid-March? I’d like to eat a flapjack in a cab some time in the next century. Please help me achieve that dream by shutting up about masks and then wearing a mask.

• Joel Golby is the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant