The joys of social isolation

No use datelining any more, I’m here for the duration. Even the ski lifts have been ordered to close: chiuso, geschlossen, fermé. The only way to ski now is the old-fashioned way, à la Hemingway: climb up with skins, peel them off, and enjoy the one and only run of the day. Not only is the climbing beneficial to one’s health, it’s also the only thing that’s free in good old Helvetia. Mind you, if too many people do it the Swiss will start charging for it. But for the moment, no one’s doing it as the snow has gone the way of women and children first in a sinking Saudi ship.

This is also enforced family time. The mother of my children and my son are feeling a tiny bit paranoid, and seeing virus spreaders everywhere. I was given hell for going to the next-door village, Saanen, and getting a military haircut, then stopping at the kiosk amid 50 Chinese Rosey schoolgirls and buying a newspaper. ‘They’re locked up in school. They haven’t been to China,’ I said. ‘Their parents visit all the time,’ came the response. Funny that, eight years ago, when Mers — or camel flu — hit us, the school was flush with Saudis with very bad manners. The Chinese are cold fish, but they don’t bother people. They ignore you. In fact, it’s very easy to deal with enforced family life. I actually like talking to the mother of my children and my son; live long enough, as they say, and you learn things.

Such as what my friend Bob Geldof said last week about the internet. It has, he said, turned the world into an individualistic one, with solipsism having replaced dialogue and thought, not to mention altruism.