How are rules about not stopping being enforced in rural areas? I live in a village in the middle of nowhere. If I wanted to go out and eat a huge picnic, I know places I could go and never ever be found. I could walk all day and nobody except my family would have a clue I'm not saying I would dream of breaking the rules, just that it would be easy for me to do so compared to people in big cities.
I can see why it would be a bad idea to stop in a busy central London park, packed with people on a hot day. I can see how it is easy for police to go and move people on, but not so much if someone is picnicking in a some of the fields where I live, there are so many places you could sit and eat a sausage roll.
So while people may consider that the rules apply equally to people who live in central London and people who live in an almost deserted part of Scotland, in a moral sense, in a practical sense they simply don't. Today I saw a woman sat by a river, feet in the water, miles from any houses. She could have done something much more against the rules than stopping for five minutes to eat a sausage roll, she could have spent the whole afternoon there. She probably did for all I know. I also saw people who looked like they lived on a canal boat, having a barbecue.
I just thought it was interesting reading this and thinking about how normally people in cities have so much more freedom than my village with no pub, no public transport. We have nothing much. Yet now the situation has flipped. The isolation that once meant lack of amenities and having to travel for jobs now means freedom, because there simply are not the resources for the police to be checking up on us and searching through every field in case there might be a person breaking the law by eating a sausage roll.
I'm not suggesting that we should break the rules, but people in my village will know if they do, there are not likely to be any consequences, reassurance Londoners don't have. Therefore you could not pay me to live in any city ever again.
I was just thinking it is interesting how the virus has totally flipped my concept of freedom. I went to University in London and thought, wow, now I've left, I have so much freedom. I came back to my parents, because I couldn't afford to stay post graduation, and wondered if I have lost some of my freedom. Reading this post has made me realise that this virus has meant the more rural you are the more the more freedom you have, the opposite of what I once thought.