It’s been said that the current situation is a great leveller for we are all likely targets for Covid-19 and the wearing of a mask (now compulsory in Italy where they are issuing two per family in Bagni di Lucca) places us even more appearance -wise in the same boat.  Now no-one will know if we are smiling, grimacing, smirking, grinning or just expressionless: one’s mouth (as we know from our emoticons) can tell so much about oneself.

Some years ago when I was a lecturer in an inner London college of further education one of my students of Somalian heritage entered my class, not with her customary hijab but with a full-face niqab which only allowed her eyes to be seen. Of course, one can learn a lot from looking into another’s eyes; they do say after all that eyes are the gateway to the soul. However, I felt rather disconcerted and, in the face (!) of any consistent college policy on dress I went to the principal to report my unease. ‘Do you have any problem with this student?’ he asked me. ‘Yes’, I answered, ‘I can’t teach her if I can’t see her expression.’ Clearly teachers depend very much on visual signs from students to tell them if the class understands what they are being taught and whether their teaching approach is working. The principal’s answer was to put the student in another class under a different teacher. She reprimanded me for my suggesting what a student should or should not wear to a class.

Luckily this situation was quickly resolved and didn’t turn out to be a major incident.  Later, nationwide, there were huge debates centered on individual cases. One of the most well-known was that involving a school girl, Shabina Begum, who attended a school in Luton.  She lost her case (her lawyer was Tony Blair’s wife) and I don’t know what happened to Shabina’s educational progress since.

The difference between my situation was the difference between a school with a defined policy on what to wear and a college of further education where such matters are largely left at the discretion of the student.

Anyway, this topic is back. It seems we are all masked now. Goodness knows what the PM, who famously said that Moslem women wearing the niqab looked like letterboxes or bank robbers, would make of it now.

Certainly there have been recent robberies where the perpetrators have worn surgical masks to disguise themselves.

But is Covid-19 the great equalizer it’s cracked out to be? Of course, the present pandemic does not really make us all equal. Some live cooped up in tower blocks with no facility to lay themselves on the sunny grass (parks are closed) while others reside on country estates with acres of private meadows. Some have no means to do a big shop and bring home enough supplies to fill a freezer (which they mostly don’t have.) Others can only afford to shop in stores which have no delivery service. It’s difficult to practice social distancing if one lives in a Brazilian favela or an inner London hostel for the homeless. Beggars must be having a particularly hard time. I noted a hunchbacked female dressed in black and looking a bit like an Italian ‘befana’ (the traditional epiphany witch) wandering outside our local shopping  centre with her customary cup to receive monetary offerings. Nobody dared approach her because of social distancing. She continued pleading, however, to an invisible public. Sometimes habits die hard.

Every pandemic in history shows that it is not the great leveller it is meant to be. For example, in the great Spanish flu epidemic after World War one it was the working classes who suffered the greatest outbreak of pneumonia -related complications and consequently the highest death toll.

So let me not hear of any talk about Covid-19 being the ‘great equalizer’ any more. I will, however, agree that with surgical masks plastered on our face, disguising too the shades of lipstick or facial hair (or not), we are tending to look rather more similar to each than ever before…