Only 7% of British people are heading to the pub. Here's why I'm one of them

The pubs reopening should be the most exciting thing that ever happened to us. In March, I was pledging to arrive at 11am on this sacred day, and keep a seat warm and a tab open for everyone I’ve ever cared for, even a small amount. But freedom has dawned the way we knew it would, from a government whose potency has drained away with its competence: restrictions have been lifted to exactly the degree that people had unofficially decided to lift them weeks before.

Pubs were already open. Some have been since the middle of May. You could buy a pint. You could sit in the park opposite (sorry, pubs that didn’t have a park opposite, I can see things were different for you). The only thing you couldn’t do was have a glass made of glass or use the toilet. In theory, this should have made people go home earlier; in practice, everyone just went behind a tree. It was as if the entire pub genre had been reconfigured for hard-drinking toddlers. We should have counted ourselves lucky we weren’t given our pints in sippy cups.

So I’m seeing a lot of static from cautious citizens about how pubs will be full of the most risk-seeking personality types in the country, and do you really want to drink next to those people? What if they bring a snake or their blowtorch? But the real daredevils have been drinking for six weeks solid, especially the young ones, and are about ready for their beach-body detox.

The risk-averse, meanwhile, are still stacking up benefits against costs: a lovely foamy head v their continued good health; the camaraderie of strangers staying studiously apart v those same strangers, four drinks in, initiating a conga. This is most people. Support for pubs reopening has dropped over the past week: if we had a referendum on whether or not to go to the pub, the nos would not only win, they’d have the kind of victory that would allow them to be generous, and maybe let some of us go to the pub occasionally somewhere down the line.

Take out the delinquents, then, and take away this moral majority, and who’s left? Only 7% of Britons, according to yet another poll, planned to go out at all this weekend. (Have we ever had our opinions solicited quite so often, about this one thing? It has something of the parlour game on Just a Minute about it: “And, madam, how many pork scratchings do you envisage eating?”)

But who are the 7%? Anyone whose local was not opposite a park, presumably. My Mr and I drank from time to time at a boozer we’d never been to before called the Brown Derby, opposite a churchyard, which had a great sweep of steps up to a shuttered church. It had loads of sort of seats, and, for a while, it was sunny – plenty going for it, in other words, except the many, many teenagers, making the very cogent case (using only their angry eyes) that they’d been snogging there for years, and really didn’t need a bunch of middle-aged arrivistes mucking up the perfect album cover that was their early-evening tableau with their plastic pints of lager. And I totally got that.

But now I want to go to a regular pub on a main road. I want to go somewhere teenagers wouldn’t be seen dead in. Last week we did, actually – went to our local and sat in its front garden with two Heinekens we’d bought in the Co-op opposite (one of us had to go back and buy a bottle-opener); and Mr Z’s condition of the whole enterprise was that it couldn’t be just us – there had to be other people – or it would just be sad. As stunning good fortune had it, there was a family, playing cards and drinking Fanta, and it kind of worked, except when we accidentally looked in the windows at the deserted and dusty interior, and then it was like being in a dystopian novel from the 1950s or, worse, a Simon Pegg film. So, yes, just to erase the memory of that, I’ll be going back.

So, who else is part of this 7%? Anyone who misses the bar staff, and wants to check they’re still alive; also anyone who has no interest in or even concept of data privacy, and doesn’t care what app they have to download, or what details they have to give, in order to get served.

And finally – this is where the trouble will come from – anyone who likes a sense of collective occasion, the people who lead perfectly blameless and moderate lives until there’s a royal wedding or Wimbledon starts or the clocks go back or forward, or the Grand National is on, or le beaujolais nouveau est arrivé, or there’s a leaving do, an Olympics, a World Cup or any given game of sport. This is where all the pent-up energy is. These people, accustomed to a year of miniature punctuations, have had their dreams punctured for months. They’re going to go quite wild, I predict.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist