22.3.2020 Just past the Spring Equinox. Tomorrow, 23 March, twentyfourth anniversary of Sacha’s death. And a week in to the moment the coronavirus pandemic really hit the UK. That was on Monday 16 March, when the Government began to announce measures which have, by today, more or less brought the country to a standstill, as all places of mass gatherings, pubs, restaurants, theatres, sports venues, etc. have been ordered to close as from tomorrow and all those ‘at risk’, those with chronic conditions, pregnant mothers, and over seventies, have been advised to ‘self-isolate’. Strange to feel so fit and well and yet know one is well into the ‘at risk’ category, and this is no mild flu but at best, if one catches a severe version of it, an excruciating week or two, and at worst, an excruciating death, as doctors struggle to keep one breathing. And I am haunted by the thought that my grandmother died exactly a hundred years ago of typhoid during the typhoid epidemic that swept across Egypt in 1920. I imagine this is what the Phony War of 1939–40 felt like: you wait for the enemy to strike and both can’t quite believe he will and are filled with nameless dread in case he does. But of course even when ‘he’ does there will be none of the horror of bombs and bullets, but none of the solidarity either, since each of us has been told to retreat into our houses and only go out for essentials or for exercise. So T has come down here to Lewes, though she is concerned about her mother, a not so frail ninety-two. But John, her brother-in-law, as a doctor, has (wisely in my view) told her there would nothing she could do for her mother in London, that her sister and brother are there, and there are two doctors in the family – and that anyway there will be no policing of London’s borders, so in a real crisis she could get into her car and drive up. 13