//I'm really sorry for NJ and his wife, but I think schools are more important than restaurants at the moment.//
So do I but thanks for your sympathy..
//Odd that some here seem to think dining out is as important as education.//
I don’t.
And I think you both completely misunderstand me (which is my fault for assuming too much). This country, we are told, is under “lockdown”. It has been imposed in an attempt to prevent the spread of the virus. Because of that people cannot “gather” indoors with anybody beyond their household. So restaurants are closed – even those which present, probably, very little risk of transmission if they are run properly. Never mind, needs must. On the other hand an ever increasing number of children are being allowed to go to school. They “gather” together from different households, they sit in the same room as each other and their teachers for many hours. After they are released they head off back home (if they go straight home, that is – the older ones are more likely to head off to the local supermarket and roam round there for a while before heading to a takeaway for some food). Then they go home. Then, having mixed with all and sundry for most of the day, they mix with the people they live with (some of whom may be their siblings who have done precisely the same thing but at different schools). But people who would sit in couples (from the same household) for a couple of hours at a table in a well spaced restaurant present too much risk.
This government’s strategy to deal with the virus, apparently, is to keep everybody away from everybody else. I accept I cannot go to a restaurant based on that strategy. But if a so-called lockdown is to succeed (and previous experience suggests that it won’t) then allowing ever increasing numbers of children to attend places so they can be looked after doesn’t fit with that strategy. Furthermore, falsely labelling children as "vulnerable" to include children who don’t have “somewhere quiet” to learn at home is disingenuous and lessens the seriousness of the situation that properly vulnerable children find themselves in. It also discriminates against those whose parents have made such a facility available but whose children cannot go to school and be taught properly.
It’s a complete mess. The whinging will stop when the government makes up its mind whether it wants to suppress the virus or support the economy and education. It can’t do both and at present it is doing neither.