SO, it looks like we are back where we started.

After a month of being stuck under the most severe form of lockdown along with the rest of England, Oxford is now set to be released into the same level of freedom we had beforehand – tier 2 (albeit with some minor changes).

Thankfully, this time, the entire county is also in the same tier, meaning no confusion about whether people who live at one end of the Botley Road can go and sit down with their family for a meal at McDonald's, or go for a drink with all their friends at a pub in Kidlington.

As city council leader Susan Brown said yesterday, this 'release' (when it happens on Wednesday) will mean that we have slightly more freedom at present: we can go to the pub (so long as we have a full meal while we are there...) and we can go to non-essential shops again.

What's more, we can look forward to seeing slightly more of our family in one place at Christmas than we've been allowed to sit down with indoors since the first lockdown started in March.

The challenge now is - can we all behave ourselves?

The whole reason, essentially, that the Government plunged us back into lockdown at the start of November was that, having been released the first time in July, the spread of the coronavirus got completely out of control.

The blame for that was partly pinned on young people, and especially students, socialising on a huge scale with complete disregard for the rules.

However it wasn't just student parties: if those students had just been getting too close to each other then it wouldn't have spread to the rest of the population.

As always, every one of us must share some of the responsibility for making sure that those numbers don't get out of hand again, partly so we don't get stuck in another lockdown, but partly, and much more fundamentally, in order to save people's lives.

Surely that is reason enough.