A close friend of mine was speaking to me the other day, and he mentioned going from town to town in his work, and finding place after place closed and boarded up, businesses shut, opportunities lost. After a while, he said, it starts to get to grind you down.

On 2/3/20 I wrote this: “God only knows what will happen with COVID-19. One thing I know for sure though, is that the second-order effects of the disease, will be worse than the disease itself. The foundations our world are being shaken, softly, gently, by this COVID-19 plague. It is not close to an apocalyptic vision, but what this respiratory disease brings in it’s train is not the Four Horsemen, but shrunken economies, collapsed markets, lost sales, lost opportunities, missed chances, reduced travel. These second-order effects are worse than the disease.”

This week and recently we have witnessed the spectacle of the Prince Harry and Megan Markle media circus. A media feeding frenzy – over what? Why are these people even in the news? On 13/3/20 I wrote: “It’s quieter now and quieter still it will get. Yet, there is a news frenzy. Information has never been more readily available, yet the news media are like that pack of monkeys in some city in S.E Asia, scrambling and fighting over a single banana. They scramble for the tiniest scrap of news, hyping everything, hyperventilating, creating nothing but hyperbole. It is just extraordinary. And yet, opportunities for writers arguably have never been greater.”

“One who looks forward must see this: that things will not remain as they were” – Tolkien’s character Hurin, speaking the wisdom of the ages to us here and now. On 24/3/20 I wrote: “The first morning of the lockdown. There is a late frost; the sun is shining, there is no cloud in the sky. Notwithstanding the human element, the slow-down, nature continues toward Spring, with her slow, inexorable repair of the ravages of winter. Grey turns to infinite varieties of brown and a hint of green.”

On Easter Saturday last year, 11 April, I wrote: “What with all the clapping, and the endless announcements, and the police overstepping their powers, my heart remains heavy for Merrie England. People will survive, communities will go on, but Merrie England may reel and stagger from dizziness and nausea, before recovering and carrying on.”

On St George’s Day last year, 23 April, I wrote: “It IS the end of the world as we know it, and I DON’T feel fine. It is easy to have bad days in the lockdown, even in this lovely spring weather. Don’t get mad – get ready. Is it slow-motion apocalypse happening around us? It is pointless to mourn for old England for she is gone: to 2019 there is no returning. I don’t believe we shall soon see a soft return to the kind of normality we had. The kind of normality where angst-ridden middle-class environmentalists can assuage their guilt with ethical purchases whilst still taking the car to Waitrose three times a week. I’m talking about shortages of everyday necessities – we’re seeing it with flour just now. It may get worse.”

On 31/5/20 I remarked – as the first lockdown eased – that we could sit on our patio and enjoy socially distanced drinks and nibbles with two friends of ours. Real pleasant. A week later on 6/6/20, someone remarks during prayers for church that “we go in directions we have never been in before.” Arguably that were always true – or ought to be of healthy individuals – but it is doubly and certainly true of us at the moment in the time of Coronavirus. How will I manage to get my priorities right and do what is important before God, when in these times I am full of self-righteous anger and annoyance at what is happening around us? How will we cope with the institutionalisation of social distancing when it is all over? How do we restore ourselves to community in the actual rather than the virtual? Will there be a “roaring Twenties” like last time? One may hope!

On 25/7/20 I wrote: “We sense COVID-19 making a resurgence, and I believe we shall see further lockdowns once Autumn gets underway. This is the time when the government has abruptly required quarantine for travellers from Spain. This has thrown the Spanish Mediterranean holiday market into frenzied disarray , and more importantly to us, rendered impossible a visit from our oldest daughter, who lives in Madrid.”

On 12/8/20 I noted that the very hot weather was continuing. 27 degrees C in our north-facing bedroom at 7a.m. The other day I took both my daughters to two different airports; one to go on holiday, the other, to return to her home after visiting with us. Our son visited at the same time, and there was a day when we went from five adults in the house, to just us two, in a single 24-hour period. I personally don’t find this weather oppressive, though others have. I spent enough time in my last job working outdoors in really hot countries (Ghana, Gabon, Burma, Thailand etc), to not have to be seriously bothered by any hot weather that can occur in England. In fact I’m the other way round – these days I struggle with the cold til mid-April!! A few days later the weather broke – and what rain. Every weak place in our rain-water goods became apparent in less than five minutes downpour.

24/9/20 “When I woke up this morning, I heard a disturbing sound…” (James Brown, in The Blues Brothers). Actually what I heard was the sound of rain lashing down. It had stopped by the time I went for my walk. And that led me to realise that for all English people moan about rain and bad summers and all that kind of stuff, when I look back over the last six months, for there to be falling rain at 7a.m, is actually quite rare. At the moment I’m doing some research into a possible hiking trip to the Lakes. See Wild camping in the Lake District – October 2020 | Plateroom 28.

16/10/20 Today I received from a supplier, a Christmas present for my son, which we have still not managed to deliver to him, as another lockdown prevented a meeting and exchange of gifts before Christmas. It will be Lagavulin 17 or even 18 rather than Lagavulin 16, by the time he gets it!! Yesterday to a private medical sorted through my insurance company. It was instructive in that there was no doctor, just a perfectly polite and helpful medical practitioner of considerably less learning that a doctor. I confess I was unimpressed, although he did have a funky machine which enabled all kinds of measurements of my person without me taking my clothes off.

27/10/20 A visit to the Dower House Hotel at Lyme Regis. We have been lucky with travel in 2020. We visited Bergen, and then Lee Abbey in North Devon, before the first lockdown. And now we are visiting this delightful place in the all too brief window during the autumn when actual travel is permitted. A lovely interlude. It is the autumn though: this was the first time I had attacks of Reynauds Syndrome, that condition of frozen fingers. I found myself sitting indoors in a fancy restaurant in the middle of the afternoon, wearing gloves. I have worn gloves outdoors from that day until now. A few days later, there was a remarkable Sunday when we had a pub dinner!! (Now that IS remarkable in 2020) and then went onto church so I could play guitar at the last cafe service before another lockdown.