Monday 13th April 2020

Funny how mood can change. Always by the day, I find. Today I’m much better than yesterday although nothing has changed in the outside world, as far as I know. Yesterday I took my temperature in the morning. It said 35.2 which is .2 degrees from hypothermia. I did feel a bit funny. Later it rose to 35.6. What can it mean? I must ask Joshua Baring who is a fully qualified doctor in all but fact. While up at Oxford he attended all the medical lectures in addition to the ones in his chosen subject. Why not?  2 degrees for the price of one or may be 3 or 4, if you throw in nuclear physics and marine biology. So you could emerge as a George Eliot specialist with a sideline in building nuclear power stations and saving coral reefs.

I haven’t been out since Friday. Robert Nevil and Sebastian Archer are completely secluded, with the Nizim fetching and carrying for them. It seems that in the garden he dons a boiler suit and does heavy work in the pond while Robert Nevil prances about taking picturesque shots for Insta. So useful.

It’s best not to go out because if you do you might lose your temper. The happiest seem to be those completely in purdah. Supermarkets are hopeless. No social distancing. I got furious with a young man who walked right up beside me by the raisons, whereupon he tried to blow in my face. Not very successfully, I hope. But still another week to wait to see if symptoms develop. I think he might have been unhinged.

The episode brought to mind Dame Lettie – that’s Muriel Spark’s Dame Lettie, from Memento Mori, which is a novel by Dame Muriel Spark. Dame Lettie is an important committee-woman and chairman. When she receives anonymous phone calls saying, ‘Remember you must die,’ she so barricades her Hampstead home with grilles and alarms that burglars are provoked to action and she ends up murdered in her bed.

How would it be with this Covid if the more we brace and spray and wear ourselves out with hygiene, the more it is spurred on to attack?

What I’m really trying to say is that there’s something desperate and strained and unnatural about this ‘fight’ against the virus. Where does it end? As I was saying to the Gay Mother last night, how do you get a letter out of its envelope without the letter possibly touching the outside of the envelope? How do you know the letter isn’t contaminated?

Merle Barr came round with some crumpets she’d made, except she decided they were pikelets. Angus Willis furious. Said they weren’t pikelets, pikelets common, how dare Merle. Recipe quite wrong. All his memes went red. I said, ‘We know about food too!’ Wouldn’t normally dare to speak thus except in a time like this.

I managed to get pikelets out of Merle’s packaging onto a sheet of greaseproof of my own. Then they were toasted for final viral obliteration although Merle least likely to be viral.

Merle’s Pikelets Arrive. That’s Ant Powder by the Way

Merle’s Pikelets: Superb. So Light and Pikelet-like