Do we really want to go back to normal?

On the day our A-level exams began some wit wrote on the blackboard: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.’ I thought of that again yesterday when a writer friend emailed: ‘Like you, I thought I would be much more productive but I do find it very hard to focus… and I still haven’t filed those boxes of books in the sitting room.’

The days fly by and the sunshine was a real bonus, for it is pleasant and surely good for the soul to sit in it, reading, dreaming, nodding off, and topping up our Vitamin D levels. I said here at the beginning of lockdown that I would finish the book I had already started, plus some short stories, this weekly column and the occasional book review. I would also dig out the information my horrid slave-driver of an accountant has politely, and then progressively less politely, been requesting.