The Hexagons of Social Distance

Consider a person – a normal person, someone who feels, looks, needs and loves, who farts and toilets just like anyone else on the planet; we are one species after all. But that person is now an island, who has to be two metres away from anyone else, an imaginary cage around them. Social distancing we call it in the newfound argot, or perhaps that should be self-cellation? Because if you picture it, a person surrounded by others all two metres apart forms a hexagon.

So one person can be surrounded by six others, each covering their own two square metre patch of ground, an imaginary cell of 12 square metres imprisoning the lot. But each side of the cell is the wall of another, and so on – the cells forming the edge of more cells, and so on, spreading across the countryside like a mutant form of Christaller’s central place model.

So 31 people are now entrapped, seven hexagons mentally formed in the mind, 84 square metres of anguish. You can dehumanise it and put it in numerical form: 4n+3. So consider a small town, 10,000 souls. 4n+3…… That’s 2499 full hexagons, 29,988 square metres of incarceration. Scale it up again to the 60 million or so in the country – 15 million cells, 180 square kilometres of nothing – you could socially distance the UK inside South Gloucestershire. But would you want to? Imagine the anxieties seeping out, spreading from person to person, just as invidious as the virus. Some of the vertices will break, dots disappear, a minor statistic to the holistic view, a deepening dark hole in the fabric and wellbeing to others. Will the breaks grow and cut completely off?

But it will burn out – vertices can snap and form other shapes. It will get better.

Eristalis pertinax

Hoverflies are out too - Eristalis pertinax.

Andrena flavipes

And here is another - Andrena flavipes, the yellow-legged mining bee,

Andrena scotica

The sun comes out, and so do the bees - this one is Andrena scotica. Note the little golden coloured lump projecting out of the lower band - this is a stylops, a parasite of bees.