A week ago, I kissed someone for the first time in a year - exactly a year. Once, on her left cheek, but it reminded me what I had missed.
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My previous kiss was on March 13, 2020, when I parted from my partner in London. She walked to work and I went back into Oxford Circus tube to go to the airport to fly home to Queanbeyan just before the border was closed.
We kissed outside All Soul's Church and said, "See you in June".
June's come and gone and now she has booked a flight for November, but I am still not convinced. It's a flexible ticket.
Last Saturday's kiss was to one of the cast members in the marvellous The Sound of Music at the Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre. It was one of those "Dwaarling, you were wonderful" kisses, straight out of thespian central casting.
As I walked home, I realised how important that kiss was. It made me feel better. The absence of physical affection hurts, but not in an immediate, stab of pain way, more like a continual dull thud of throbbing pain which never quite goes away.
I once met an Italian Contessa who complained that men would slide their lips around towards her's. She shuddered as she said it.
I see my partner every day - on Skype. We lean into the camera and gossip. It seems intimate but it's distant - a bit like it must be communicating through one of those thick screens in a prison. The hands touch the glass but not the other hand.
Don't take my word for the healthiness of hugs, kisses and physically shared romance - the scientists agree. Researchers studied two groups of people. In one group, partners (husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends) held hands for ten minutes as they watched a romantic film, followed by a 20-second hug, The second group just sat in silence with no touching.
In the utterly unromantic language of the scientists, "individuals receiving pre-stress partner contact demonstrated lower systolic BP diastolic BP, and heart rate increases compared with the no contact group".
In plain English, the people who hugged and shared romance together had their stress reduced by it. Blood pressure fell.
It may be to do with oxytocin, a chemical in the brain associated with pleasure. Its level rises when we hug or sit close to someone we like or even love.
Forbes magazine quotes a family therapist, Virginia Satir, saying, "We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth."
On that score, I am well short of even survival levels - that would be 1460 hugs I'm owed for the year - let alone the 9380 for growth (and rising as year two of COVID unfolds).
As the vaccine and the marvellous contact-tracers and health experts do their work and the epidemic wanes, I see that handshakes are coming back. All that joggling of the elbows is disappearing, and good riddance - I preferred the Asian bow.
But I dream of the return of the kiss - but not too much.
I met an academic at the ANU the other day who said she would only kiss close family members in future. I feel the same.
I will not return to that affected kissing of barely known acquaintances, in that clumsy way where you lurch for the cheek, and you don't quite know how many cheeks to do it on.
By the way, I blame the English for this unfortunate ritual.
The posher English mimic the French to show how cosmopolitan they are, so it became fashionable in England to adopt the French way of kissing. The snag is that French people kiss with a clear etiquette. They know the rules - how many kisses for an uncle, that kind of thing.
I once met an Italian Contessa who complained that sleazy men she barely knew would slide their lips around towards hers. She shuddered as she said it.
And the leaders of communist countries used to kiss each other full lips on full lips in a hold which any teenager would recognise as a slobbering clinch or what used to be called a French kiss. The Contessa would not have liked that.
You may remember (if you are an ageing film buff) that Michael Corleone gives his brother Fredo Corleone a "kiss of death" in The Godfather Part II. Fredo had betrayed the boss and the kiss was the signal that he would be executed. It may be related to the betraying kiss of Judas.
I do not know the rules and I do not intend to learn them.
I have resolved that when kissing comes back, I will not kiss anyone whom I do not know (or might get to know) well. That awkward jig with a relative stranger is over.
But I yearn to kiss those I love. It makes scientific sense.
Steve Evans
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
