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Since we are told that the worst will be upon us in the next twelve weeks, that this may well last six and even as much as twelve months, I have decided I need a project to settle down to every morning. Since, alas, the longer fiction I so much crave to be at work on is still very nebulous, I have decided to use the alphabet to trigger memories and thoughts and try and write a memory or thought every day; and I have decided to preface each session with a brief ‘coronavirus diary’, of which this is the first and necessarily the longest instalment. Longest just because it is the first and I need to bring myself up to date, so to speak. Who would have guessed, as the parliamentary Brexit saga dragged to its painful and horrible conclusion in the last quarter of 2019, ending with the nightmare of an eighty-seat Conservative majority and the certainty that we would leave the EU and that we would have five years at least of a bragging and reckless government slowly turning the country into an English version of Hungary and Poland (gradual erosion of any opposition, be it in the media, the judiciary or the universities) – who would have guessed that in the last week we have become a kind of Leninist country, with the state in effect employing the workers to keep things running? Johnson and the Tories, who crushed the opposition and cowed and uplifted the country, depending on your point of view, with a vision of heroic Britain at war with Europe and going it alone, now find themselves in effect presiding over a country at war – but not with Europe or with any visible enemy, but with a virus that is rapidly spreading world-wide and promises to decimate the planet in a way not seen in peace-time since the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–26. It is likely to be with us for a long time to come, though in eighteen months or so there is a chance that a vaccine will have been developed and put into general circulation. But how effective will it be? We have seen with the common flu vaccines that they often don’t 14

work, and we are told that this is very different from the flu. What will the country, Europe, the world, be like then? There are some positives. Already, only weeks after countries shut down travel, China, where the Covid-19 virus started to infect humans, is showing a marked decrease in its emissions of greenhouse gases, with the great cities visibly less polluted, and Venice, since the vaporetti no longer run and the vast cruise ships have stopped coming, is swiftly and miraculously returning to what it must once have been, with swans and herons on the canals and the water clear enough for one to spot seaweed waving in its depths. And countries, cowed for so long by populists bent on destroying the fabric of the state and of communities, are beginning to see that there is some virtue in efficient governments which can organise their countries to deal with a world-wide emergency, where inter-country co-operation in the field of science and the production of medicines and hospital equipment is a vital necessity, and where – in Britain at any rate – the innate kindness of people and their spirit of caring for each other, long thought dead, is suddenly blossoming. Whether any of this will survive the pandemic is of course a moot point. It may be that, as after the financial crisis of 2008, things will soon get back to ‘normal’ – but I wonder if modern capitalism and its mantra of ever more progress will have taken such a beating that some things at least will change – fuelled by the desperation of the young for far swifter action on global warming. For me, at this moment, the key thing about it is that, unlike the last fifty-plus years of my life, spent in relative comfort in England, where what made me uneasy was that there was nothing to push against, that the march of consumerism and Americanism, which I was deeply troubled by, seemed inevitable and unstoppable, rather like one’s nightmares of being slowly suffocated by an octopus, now there is something 15

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Since we are told that the worst will be upon us in the next twelve weeks, that this may well last six and even as much as twelve months, I have decided I need a project to settle down to every morning. Since, alas, the longer fiction I so much crave to be at work on is still very nebulous, I have decided to use the alphabet to trigger memories and thoughts and try and write a memory or thought every day; and I have decided to preface each session with a brief ‘coronavirus diary’, of which this is the first and necessarily the longest instalment. Longest just because it is the first and I need to bring myself up to date, so to speak.

Who would have guessed, as the parliamentary Brexit saga dragged to its painful and horrible conclusion in the last quarter of 2019, ending with the nightmare of an eighty-seat Conservative majority and the certainty that we would leave the EU and that we would have five years at least of a bragging and reckless government slowly turning the country into an English version of Hungary and Poland (gradual erosion of any opposition, be it in the media, the judiciary or the universities) – who would have guessed that in the last week we have become a kind of Leninist country, with the state in effect employing the workers to keep things running? Johnson and the Tories, who crushed the opposition and cowed and uplifted the country, depending on your point of view, with a vision of heroic Britain at war with Europe and going it alone, now find themselves in effect presiding over a country at war – but not with Europe or with any visible enemy, but with a virus that is rapidly spreading world-wide and promises to decimate the planet in a way not seen in peace-time since the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–26. It is likely to be with us for a long time to come, though in eighteen months or so there is a chance that a vaccine will have been developed and put into general circulation. But how effective will it be? We have seen with the common flu vaccines that they often don’t

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