I’ve long championed the art of the letter. I have boxes of stationery and stacks of postcards, being incapable of exiting a museum via anything except the gift shop, picking up a few on the way. I actually order stamps from Royal Mail, because that’s the only way to get the non-boring type – most recently, a large consignment of James Bond commemorative stamps. (And let’s face it, this is alas the closest I’m ever going to get to Daniel Craig.)
Poor, poor hands. Have they ever taken such a battering? Assaulted by the alcohol in most sanitisers, washed for a total of minutes a day while singing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice over, under our breaths. (Personally, we really wish someone would come up with an alternative to that which is the requisite 20 seconds long, or forever more when we wish someone Many Happy Returns as we head in their direction carrying a large cake, we’re going to be thinking of the corona-nightmare.)
The world seems big and scary and out of control right now. I remember feeling just like this as a child, hiding behind the sofa and peering out occasionally at The Daleks, who seemed so utterly terrifying. (I met a real Dalek many years later backstage at the BBC and it was honestly like something I might have made as an art project – but that was alas too late to console a seven-year who regularly suffered Dr. Who-related Saturday nightmares.)
When was the last time you concentrated on something – really, deeply, fully concentrated, without feeling the magnetic pull of your phone to check anything from your Instagram likes to the weather for your walk home? Hmmm. Thought so. We live in an age of scattered attention, when it sometimes feels like we’ve lost the ability to focus on anything for more than five minutes at a time.