As much as I loathe lockdowns and masks, I did see the point of them. But now that we have returned to normal, I find that I have come to prefer, and even be a little bit proud, of Britain’s relatively lax ways. I still wear a mask on public transport and in Waitrose, but generally I enjoy the feel of air on my face and the knowledge that nobody will tell me off for contravening some Covid guideline. It can be a shock to travel abroad and find that most other countries are not so laid back.

Indeed, Covid has really highlighted our cultural differences, and none are more pronounced than those between New Yorkers and Londoners. I found myself giggling last week – well, giggling with a healthy dose of eye-roll – at an article in the New York Times by its theatre critic Laura Collins-Hughes. She had come over for a week of London theatre in February but had been driven into fits of anxiety – and had even walked out of one play – because so many of her fellow theatre-goers were “barefaced”.

Lucky enough to get to the West End production of Cyrano de Bergerac with James McAvoy, Ms Collins-Hughes’s main response was that: “the audience was, hands down, the most overwhelmingly barefaced I had seen”. She could not understand “how anyone could be so reckless as to gamble with [the actors’] health. That’s not a right that a ticket ought to buy you.”

Reading the list of plays ruined by maskless Londoners reminded me of aspects of cosmopolitan American culture I don’t envy: a persnickety need to see everything in a political light, to see all unknowns as massive, panic-inducing existential health risks, and a terror of contagion. Growing up in Massachusetts, my friends were all brought up awash in antibacterial soap.

In fact, the horrified Ms Collins-Hughes might have drawn different conclusions: a society as slapdash about masks as ours is surely bound to have good immunity; actors must feel safe or they wouldn’t work, and so on. Above all, she might have relaxed. Yes, masks have a role in reducing Covid risk, but at this point in the pandemic it is a fairly manageable risk – and it is one that we can finally afford, by and large, to take.