I had some spare time last week and took the opportunity to visit the RHS Garden Bridgewater in Worsley, which opened its doors to the public for the first time earlier this year.

If gardens and gardening is your thing, I can highly recommend it and it will only get better in time as it develops and some of the planting matures.

It has a lovely ‘welcome building’ reception, a café and garden centre and despite our visit being on a weekday afternoon, it was fairly busy.

Now don’t forget we are still living in a time of Covid and of course, there were the obligatory signs on the entrance doors asking people to wear facemasks while inside the building.

You will all be aware that since so-called Freedom Day in July, the legal, mandated requirement to wear masks indoors in public places has been abolished so it’s now down to individual consideration.

So how many people exercised their ‘rights’ to go maskless? Of the hundreds of people milling around inside the building, just one couple decided they were fine to ignore the request.

Absolutely everyone else had on a face covering of one type or another. Now I don’t want to stereotype people here but it’s fair to say that most of the visitors could reasonably be described as belonging to the Baby Boomer generation (me included) and there is a fair chance that the vast majority of people at Bridgewater had been double vaccinated.

Nevertheless, they all considered it important to wear masks and I applaud them for that.

What a sharp contrast to a pub I went to a week earlier.

Having looked at the weather forecast, I decided to go to the pub for my tea. I did my research and found I could sit outside, use an app to order from my table and wouldn’t have to go into the pub.

But when I got there, the app wasn’t working, which would have meant queueing at the bar to order and then queueing at the bar to pay.

How many people were wearing masks, you may ask. None. Not one.

I’ll spare the pub’s blushes and not name it but I was less than impressed by the attitude of the staff who seemed to think I was a little odd for wanting to sit and eat outside and not stand elbow-to-elbow with people I don’t know in the middle of a pandemic.

In a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise, I can tell you I felt much more comfortable inside at the RHS site than in the pub.

I don’t blame the pub owners or the maskless customers. There are no restrictions and you only have to look at pictures from the House of Commons or from Boris Johnson’s cabinet meetings when there isn’t a mask in sight to see the message the Government is sending.

But in reality, the sad thing is no one has bothered to tell the virus the pandemic is over. (Spoiler alert: the pandemic isn’t over.) In effect, Johnson and his cabinet ministers are basically shrugging their shoulders over the coronavirus incidence rate and the increasing number of deaths.

I can’t help but think the Government obviously has a death rate it considers acceptable to them, and apparently to the rest of the country, so they’ve abdicated all responsibility and it’s now down to you and me.

After my aborted trip to the pub, I very much thought that the anti-maskers had won their own little ‘you can’t tell me what to do’ battle in the culture wars.

But my faith in human nature was somewhat restored by all those masked-up at RHS Garden Bridgewater.

Perhaps there’s an inherent difference between people who go to pubs and those who go to gardens. I wonder what that difference could be.

While I’m on the subject of wearing masks in an attempt to mitigate against the pandemic, I thought it was interesting that the leader of Cheshire West and Chester Council has called on the Government to re-introduce a mask mandate.

Cllr Louise Gittins said she thought that too many people were not wearing face coverings, saying: “The hospital figures are really reassuring and it is demonstrating that the vaccination does work.

“My biggest issue at the moment is people not wearing face coverings. Our messaging continues to be really clear across Cheshire West about wearing face coverings in crowded indoor spaces.

“I really do believe people should be wearing them when we’re asking them to do it.

“Hopefully the Government might mandate it soon, but we might have a while to wait for that.”

Well said, Cllr Gittins. Well said.