Not to be a down buzz but here’s how I’m reading Level 2.

Which by the way has its own catchy slogan – ‘play it safe’.

Once we got past the sheer elation of hairdressers reopening, it’s not such good news for malls, cafes, bars and nightclubs.

Hospitality, a sector battered by this extended lockdown already, can open up but with so many rules and restrictions, I’m wondering how many won’t bother.

Smaller cafes who can’t comfortably seat people at appropriate distances, cafes who can’t roster the amount of staff required to provide single servers.. may opt to keep the doors shut.

The malls, treating them like a supermarket and limiting numbers to get in, means queues of people outside clogging up pavements, businesses having to hire security to monitor the distance and spacing of those queuing, taking people’s names addresses and phone numbers for contact tracing purposes, it’s a slow and trickly way to reopen a mall, they won’t be doing anywhere near the level of business they need to be doing.

Office buildings can have people return to work but with safe hygiene practices in place, and those that can work from home still should. See the pattern here? A restrictive prescriptive list of stuff people can and can’t do, which leads to confusion, it leads to angst.

Sport is the same – some community sport can restart, some can’t.

Gatherings – outdoor ones capped down from 500 to 100.. indoors 100.

You can break your bubbles and socialise but no big parties.

Whose monitoring that? The party police?

Retail stores must ensure physical distancing.. so how many people are allowed in store at a time? Who knows.

Bars if they can’t seat people stay closed, clubs stay closed. The borders stay closed.

You can hug your family members or friends but not your office colleagues.

Do you see how needlessly complex this is?

The Prime Minister, once she’d done her standard congratulations to her team of 5 million and reminded us all yet again, how she 'went hard and went early'.. (does anyone still believe that by the way?).. actually had the audacity to also tell us how to spend Mother’s day.  If that’s not an over reach I don’t know what is.

“Send a wee local gift” she instructed, “or reach out over the phone.”

Incredible to assume we couldn’t think of that for ourselves.

But if any of us were in any doubt about Level 2 being a return to normal, the PM summed it up as a ‘safer normal’.

Which is normal but with heaps of rules attached.

So not really normal at all.