Lockdown Notes.

The lockdown is getting to me already and we’re only two days into it. I didn’t mind when self-isolation was voluntary, but now that the government has decreed that it shall be so and resistance is useless, it’s getting to me. I hate being told what to do, and now I have some idea how a caged bird feels. I suppose it’s all a matter of psychology.

My daughter is looking on the bright side. She feels that the crisis is doing some good because there’s far less pollution in the air and the Grand National has been cancelled, thereby saving an indeterminate number of innocent horses from injury and death. Can’t disagree with that.

I spent much of today sitting in my mild and sunlit garden with Douglas Adams’s novel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul for company. I like funny stories about severed heads rotating on the turntables of record decks, and sassy young women called Kate from New York bossing the great god Thor about. (I’ve just reached the point at which Kate is about to accompany Thor into Asgard, although we don’t know why yet.) And the golden eagle scaring Dirk Gently witless is a real star. I would recommend it to anybody with a taste for Douglas Adams (whose sensitivities, sensibilities and general thought projections seem oddly in tune with mine.) I just wish I didn’t feel that I was reading it in prison.

But today’s mystery is the fact that my blog has started receiving visits from China again after a break of several years. I was under the impression that people from China weren’t allowed to read my blog. Has the firewall been dismantled? Is there some ulterior motive at work? Is Mr Xi taking a personal interest in me? I would quite like to know. Meanwhile, welcome back Chinese people. Let me know in the comments section…