QUARANTINE hotels, a lost generation and the lost art of flirting in lockdown were the topics discussed by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.

The Daily Mail

Richard Littlejohn said any attempt to lock up international travellers in hotels was doomed to failure.

“Look at what happened when the Home Office put asylum seekers in a disused Army barracks in Folkestone, Kent,” he said. “Some of the inmates attacked staff and then torched the place after complaining about the conditions. And these were refugees who had travelled halfway round the world in unimaginable squalor.”

He asked how those pampered first class airline passengers returning from a luxury hotel abroad would cope.

“I wonder how that will play with the legions of ‘infuencers’ currently lounging by the pool in their various ‘celebrity’ hellholes,” he said. “Still, I suppose that instead of staging I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! in a Welsh castle, ITV could cut their losses by hiring a cheapo airport hotel at Stansted for the next series, filling it with returning Z-list personalities and surrounding it with armed guards.”

The Daily Express

Stephen Pollard said not a day goes by without debate raging over ‘the most catastrophic element of the pandemic’ - the enforced closure of schools.

“While some stellar schools offer a near full day of online lessons, others have barely managed a few prerecorded videos a week,” he said. “Whatever your perspective, we can surely all agree on one thing: the pandemic has been disastrous for children. By half-term next month, British children will have lost at least half a year of classroom time since the first lockdown began last March.”

He said that would inevitably mean lower skills and qualifications when they leave, which will mean lower income.

“Above all, we need to treat revitalising education as a national priority,” he said.

The Guardian

Maeve Higgins was once an accomplished flirt but was now completely out of practice, she said.

“ Of course, there is an endless number of much more significant phenomena to mourn today, but permit me to pour one out for this most enjoyable of activities,” she said. “Flirting fractures the veneer of an ordinary day to reveal a new connection, however improbable or ephemeral, and I have yet to find a satisfying substitute.”

She said flirting represented a flitting connection between strangers that would never be repeated, an ‘encounter that was barely consequential except for the slightest, sweetest lift in both of their hearts.’

“You remember what a heart is, don’t you? It’s that silly little organ inside us all, the one we thought had forgotten how to flutter, the one that one day just might surprise us all again.”