Coronavirus: Perhaps a lockdown can bring back joys of hingin’ oot – Aidan Smith

Scotland was known for its neighbourliness – Covid-19 can be a catalyst for a comeback, says Aidan Smith

Do what Guy Garvey of Elbow tells you and ‘throw your curtains wide’ – even if the weather’s not great (Picture Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)

It’s getting really serious now. We can’t be trusted to social-distance so Boris Johnson is threatening us with total lockdown. And do you know that will mean? Total singing.

We have to do this. Everyone else is. If you can’t sing, then bang a pan with a wooden spoon. “It’s not like we’re maestros,” says Emma ­Santachiara in Rome. “In a time of anxiety this is a moment of joy.”

Joy is the word. Just about the most uplifting, moving and life-affirming images of Covid-19 have been camera pans round apartment blocks in stricken cities where people under house arrest form spontaneous choirs or impromptu bands and sing and play their hearts out.

A banner with lyrics from the Beatles' song "Here comes the sun" hangs from a balcony in Rome (Picture: AFP via Getty Images)

You may feel you cannot do this; it’s not the British way. You may be forced to admit you’ve barely ­spoken to the folks next door so singing would be embarrassing. Well, Tobias Jones, an ­English writer exiled in Parma, says of the great communality: “We’ve got to know our neighbours more in recent days than in all the previous years.”

Do you know, it used to be the ­Scottish way. Maybe not the ­singing but the neighbourliness, a chat across open windows. Some gossip, a bit of nosiness for sure, but ­everyone looking out for each other. It happened in the tenements and it was called “hingin’ oot”.

Nessun Dorma

In the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak is believed to have begun, there were chants of “Jiayou”, meaning “Keep up the fight”. When the virus moved to Italy and everyone was ordered to stay inside, singing broke out. Volare became a popular choice, the chanson favourite about feeling like you’re flying when you’re with your lover. Memes popped onto social media from blocks of flats both ancient and modern, song bouncing off several different floors.

The more adventurous, and more accomplished, tackled opera. “We’re Italians, and being vocal is part of our culture,” says Giorgio Albertini, an archaeology professor in Milan. But whatever the song – or the tune performed on accordion, trumpet or makeshift percussion – the message has been the same: the “love and hope” mentioned in ­Nessun Dorma, another big number from the balconies.

When Covid-19 moved to ­other countries, so did the singing in beautiful defiance. Spain rose to the challenge and in cities like Madrid they devised their own repertoires. In Italy, entire blocks turned to disco-dancing, fitness classes and bingo while children painted rainbows to put in windows. Yesterday in The Scotsman I spoke to Roger Mitchell, a former football chief in Scotland now ­living by Lake Como, about the future of the sport and what it’s like being stuck indoors in ­Lombardy, Italy’s most affected region.

Only allowed outside to visit the supermarket and the pharmacy – and needing a pass for that – he talked about how home’s best for Italians. In Anglo-Saxon countries, he said, people might suffer cabin fever but in his adopted land they eat and laugh “and get innovative and creative”. All this singing, he added, was like the Renaissance in the wake of the Black Plague.

Also from the balconies of Europe there has been, at appointed hours, flashmob-choreographed bursts of cheering and clapping – grateful thanks for health professionals and the emergency services. Maybe the funniest meme I’ve seen showed police in Mallorca ­roaring down narrow cobbled streets, sirens blaring, then screeching to a halt to offer thanks for the thanks, with one officer jumping out of his car with a guitar and the rest ­accompanying him in yet more ­serenading.

On Thursday at 8pm we’re being encouraged to #clapforourcarers. From front doors, windows and gardens mass applause for the NHS should echo across our eerily-still, nearly plane-free skies. I am sure we can do this, but can we sing? Maybe not. A clip titled Italy vs Spain vs Britain has Puccini sung in ­Florence, the Titanic theme played on an electric piano on a Madrid balcony – while here a flat-dweller warbled Bohemian Rhapsody only to be told from the flat above: “Why don’t you shut the f**k up?”

We should keep at it, though, and if you’re self-conscious go for safety in numbers, like in the stirring rendition of the Proclaimers’ Sunshine on Leith by residents of the port’s Cables Wynd House – the Trainspotting-immortalised Banana Flats.

Latin temperament

You can look at the footage from the continent and tell yourself that, well, our European friends have got that expressive Latin temperament which makes singing a more natural thing. Not just that, they also have the weather encouraging people to, in the words of the Elbow song, “throw those curtains wide”.

They also have the balconies. Their apartment blocks, whether classical or chic, appear more conducive for singsongs. Did we get the concept of homes, one on top of the other, wrong? If you remember a terrific Christopher Booker documentary from the 1970s called City of Towers you might say so. Booker damned the obsession with modernist high-rises, councils for getting into bed with property speculators and ­perfectly good housing being demolished and replaced with ­multi-storeys which quickly became hellish places to live. Then, wouldn’t it be nice to be back on the ground with a garden? A housing developer, with the help of a square-jawed actor in a helicopter in the TV ads, promoted the dream of living in your own castle, drawbridge not visible but there in spirit.

This is, I know, is a simplistic summation of how we’ve lived these past 60 years. I’m not getting romantic about tenement life, there were hellish bits about that, too. But grainy photos of hingin’ oot – housewives with their elbows on the sill, shooting the breeze – are evocative of a community spirit that’s been lost.

Maybe, if we come through this, we can get it back. Now, wouldn’t that be something to sing about?