In these unprecedented times, lots of things have been re-examined and changed for the better. Some of these changes are welcome and will remain in place; electronic prescribing for one. Can you believe we now live in a world without the daily struggle of having to get the tracker on the GMS printer to line up? Some of you are thinking: “I don’t even notice not having to fix the printer anymore”. Stop! Do not be an apologist for an abusive relationship. You are the victim here. In a few months I’ll be making enquiries about launching a class action lawsuit against printer companies and seeking damages for emotional distress. 

Changes in physical contact are more of a grey area; I was never much of a hugger anyway but I’d be sad to see the handshake go. Perhaps it might return after the pandemic has subsided. The handshake was a real litmus test of personality and we were all pretty adept at reading the significance of a variety of grip strengths. 

Now the limp-wristed and weak shakers are prowling among us undetected. There are so many new implications for body language that we need an almanac to help us navigate them all. In Regency-era England the sight of a lady’s ankle was indecent. With all this covering up, will social anthropologists observe a change in focus for erotica? Will there be a new titillating body part? Will the sight of ungloved tips of the fingers in the frozen goods section soon become taboo? 

You’d have to admit that you miss the patients too. There are just some things you can’t do over the phone. Sometimes we need to offer comfort in person. I’m thinking particularly of mental health consultations. If isolation is exacerbating the patient’s feelings of anxiety and depression, it’s hard to reassure them from a distance. This can be hard enough to do in the flesh.

A couple of weeks ago a woman came in for a mental health chat and immediately there was a tension in the room. I was grateful when she named it: “Sorry, this isn’t going well. I’m being defensive. You see, I don’t know you and I’m finding it hard to be vulnerable with someone wearing a mask.” It’s a reasonable point. How can we be the friendly faces of community medicine without the use of half our features? The negatives associated with masks are as plain as the nose on your face, so to speak. The challenge of emoting now falls to the eyes, eyebrows and the forehead.

On the positive side, there will be financial savings made, cosmetically speaking. With a reduced need for lipstick and lip gloss and with just a bit of attention to the eyes, you can create the illusion of wearing full war-paint with only half the effort and product. What’s more, it is now easier to maximise expressive impact with furrows and crows’ feet; wrinkles are back, baby! Hard luck for the botox bunch. 

We had become lazy with our facial expressions. I blame a combination of the global acceptance of the American hospitality industry’s excessive smiling and the ubiquitous use of emojis. Many of us no longer trust in our own ability to compose a piece of text that can convey tone; we have to spell it out with an emoticon. Almost everything has been simplified into a smiley face or a sad face, resulting in the neglect of more subtle forms of emotional display. 

Smiling is expected almost constantly when dealing with the public. True smiling is exhausting. The energy-conserving customer service smile was never designed to make it to the eyes. Now the eyes are all we have. We are forced to rehabilitate the atrophied muscles required for an authentic twinkle. Over 10 years ago, Tyra Banks, supermodel-turned-supermogul, was the first to raise global awareness of ‘smeyesing’, or smiling with your eyes, on her television show America’s Next Top Model. How prescient she was. 

I welcome the opportunity to get creative with how we make personal connections during this impersonal time and this includes finding new ways to identify ourselves as individuals despite our identikit outfits. It might be a short-lived period in fashion history, but we need to get PPE right. Rocking the pandemic look isn’t easy. I can’t be the only one who could benefit from some inspiration. 

Have I completely misunderstood the styling tutorials the ICGP have been putting out? Are there really only two looks? You’ve got the ‘Mini-Nuala’ for summer days and the ‘Full-Nuala’ for the colder winter months. Any chance of a bit more variety? Maybe an ‘Office-Nuala’ and a ‘Casual-Nuala’ for starters and for that special occasion, what about an ‘Evening-Nuala’? What about sparkling shoulder pads or a single curled forelock à la Michael Jackson? He was wearing gloves and masks decades ago.