I identify strongly with the garden eels in the Tokyo aquarium. Pre-corona, they were perfectly sociable. Come opening hour, when visitors’ faces began to squash against their glass, they’d happily stare back. Every week that goes by without visitors, the eels become more fearful and these days, the aquarium reports, when the keeper arrives to
It started when, the day after the announcement of some lockdown easing, I drove five miles along the coast road. For seven weeks there had been barely another car, and now it was like a normal pre-pandemic morning. Our little town was no longer deserted, and there were queues for newsagent and bank. Many holiday
My research assistant, John Steele, is also a songwriter. A friend emailed him with the lyrics of a Fleetwood Mac number. These days Google often appends emails with a shortcut to save you typing your own answer by suggesting one or two likely responses. In the Fleetwood Mac lyric a former lover wonders whether her
Should our future permit an occupation so frivolous, historians years from now will make a big mistake if they blame the nauseating plummet of global GDP in 2020 directly on a novel coronavirus. After all — forgive the repetition, but certain figures bear revisiting — Covid’s roughly 290,000 deaths wouldn’t raise a blip on a
‘Covid-19 has been perhaps the biggest test of governments worldwide since the 1940s,’ declares the government’s command paper on the virus. The fact that the following paragraph proposes ‘a rapid re-engineering of government’s structures and institutions’ is telling. It is an implicit admission that the British government machine is, in several important areas, failing this
Sunday lunch was always roast beef and, in the traditional way, the Yorkshire pudding was served first with gravy, supposedly because if you were full of cooked batter you wanted less meat. Monday saw cold meat, jacket potatoes and pickles, while the beef bone went into the pot with lentils, pearl barley, carrots and onions
I realised things were getting back to normal when I threw away a third of a tin of chopped tomatoes last week. Back in March you couldn’t get them for love or money. I still remember the appalled look on a woman customer’s face at our local farm shop, in mid-April, when she was told
Like nearly everything named a ‘scandal’, ‘affair’ or given the suffix ‘gate’, almost nobody now remembers the Dalai Lama affair. But back in 2012, flush with recently acquired power and optimism, David Cameron and a man called Nick Clegg went to see the Dalai Lama while he was on a trip to London. Whether Cameron
When I told my seven-year-old granddaughter, over Zoom, how much I missed being with her, I added: ‘Maybe it won’t be much longer before I can see you.’ But she said that it would be some time, as ‘the government are going to stop old people seeing anyone because of the virus’. Asked what was
‘The normal grease of politics is not there,’ bemoans one sociable cabinet minister. Certainly, the whispered conversations in corridors that make up so much of Westminster life are in abeyance during this period of social distancing. The fact that the backbenches and the cabinet have deep reservations about the government’s approach matters far less than
I laughed when my Spanish midwife mentioned in passing that in Latin American countries they have a custom for new mothers known as la cuarentena — the quarantine. This was back in late February, a few weeks before my daughter Lily was born. I remember thinking it seemed not only ludicrous but archaic for a
I pulled a Canadian girl in a nightclub, back when I was in my very early twenties. She seemed very nice, if somewhat quiet. We went back to her place, where I spent an agreeable night. I sneaked out just after dawn while she was still sleeping and, upon looking under the bed for my
One of the strangest developments to have occurred during this very strange time is that the Prime Minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, may have attended a meeting of some people. Worse, various politicians are suggesting that he may have actually said something at this meeting. Very senior people are insisting that if Mr Cummings did
Locked contentedly into the rhythms of farming life and digging for lead on its Derbyshire Peak District slopes, the village of Eyam lay blissfully unaware of what was about to hit it, and propel it into the history books for ever. The Viccars family, the Reverend William Mompesson and his family, Elizabeth Hancock and her
On the day our A-level exams began some wit wrote on the blackboard: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ I thought of that again yesterday when a writer friend emailed: ‘Like you, I thought I would be much more productive but I do find it very hard to focus… and I still
Under the cloud of conformity that has settled over the land as a replacement for air pollution, heretics who doubt the wisdom of annihilating a nation in the name of saving it are obliged to navigate around numerous disputational booby traps. You hate old people and want them to die (though some oddballs questioning the
I had thought that actually getting the coronavirus would bring clarity — that there would be some satisfaction in meeting the enemy, feeling its spectral hands around my lungs. No such luck. Uncertainty is the hallmark of Covid-19. Even its origins are murky: wet markets or the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control? Who knows, and
Last week, a friend quoted a two-year-old email of mine: ‘I’m starting to root for a plague or world war to purify western culture, burning to cinders all the petty, neurotic, witch-hunting cliques with the white heat of real problems.’ Depressed by my own foresight, I wrote back: ‘The trouble with this solution is that
It’s one way to keep in touch with people. Each morning, somewhere between the first coffee of the day and the first drink, I open my computer, log on to social media and see which of my friends or colleagues is ‘trending’ today. ‘Ooh,’ I think as I see their names flash up, ‘I wonder
It all started on the day after the Brexit referendum. People who do not get the result they voted for in any election are naturally annoyed, sad, even despairing. If we sincerely believe in one political party and point of view, and lose to the opponents, we feel doomy and gloomy and say so. We
