Physical survival, in these virus-threatened days, continues to involve the trek-and-lug of food shopping. This is still the area of life where I feel most exposed and vulnerable. (Last night I dreamt I was passing someone in a narrowish supermarket aisle, and she sneezed. I woke up, anxious.)

But it also continues to involve fresh air and exercise, freely obtainable in this lovely bit of Norfolk that has sheltered us for three weeks now.





We still feel hugely privileged to be here. So many are really suffering in this global attempt to contain the pandemic:

"For some, sheltering in place and social distancing mean home workouts in front of large-screen smart televisions, cooking up a storm with groceries ordered online and more time in their backyards.

"Elsewhere, it means confining a family of four in a 110-square-foot space while children struggle with e-learning on a poor Internet connection. It means a devastating loss of income for families who now forage through trash, and crippling loneliness for those already on society’s fringes."

Those of us with functioning internet can access so many contributions to our physical and spiritual wellbeing: psychological guidance; breathing exercises; home workout suggestions; even virtual museum/gallery visits (I spent some of this afternoon looking at impressionist paintings in the Musee d'Orsay, and more work by Goya in the Museo del Prado).

Favourite survival bonuses over the last few days:

-- This wonderful message from Richard Rohr: "All you have loved in your life and been loved by are eternal and true."

-- Maria Popova's "antidote to helplessness and disorientation", which draws on the work of Erich Fromm: "To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness -- a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope."


-- Lambs. Nothing says hope like a spring lamb.


-- Fish and chips. The fact that the take-away down the road has stayed open is a particular plus, given that everything else we eat has to be donkeyed home from one of the supermarkets.

Pet hates:

Pictures of empty spaces around the world. Gives me the creeps...