Strangely, this pandemic has turned my thoughts away from the global picture, and I find myself concentrating more on the minutiae of life, stripping away the obvious, and examining tiny details. In the garden this has led to a new obsession with shoots. My hostas have produced fat purple globes, slender points, or dark green twirls of tightly packed leaves, arguably more beautiful, and certainly more mysterious than the mature plants.

In a similar way, this forced isolation has changed my way of reading. Once again, I have opened Jean Rhys’s ‘Wild Sargasso Sea’, but I no longer speedily chase the narrative. Now, I am savouring and re-reading passages, thinking beyond, and taking a new delight in the words and the ideas.

I am not wasting time, I am appreciating time.