Drinking in isolation is far less appealing

Spring sense, caressing sunshine: last week, London enjoyed village cricket weather. Even in normal circumstances, the season would not have begun; the anticipation would. Soon, one would be watching the run-stealers flicker to and fro, a pint of beer at hand. ‘A pint of beer’, four simple words, but in these times my tastebuds were flooded with memory. Où sont les boissons d’antan?

Friends of different strategems were fighting off that lowering virus, cabin-fever. I am re-reading Macaulay — there is no more joyous prose in English — and alternating him with Gibbon, whom I am ashamed to have never read all the way through, at a ratio of four Macaulay to one Gibbon. That is like switching from a gulping great draught of Housmanic ale to sitting and savouring the subtle power of a hundred-year-old cognac.

Apropos reading, may I recommend two recent discoveries. The first, which everyone except me has long since come across, is Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Beautifully written, its account of poverty-stricken life in mid-1930s Spain helps to explain the Spanish civil war and draws on the failure of Spanish polity after the golden age — if indeed there was one. A good three-hour exam question: ‘How golden was the Spanish golden age?’

The second is Red Rag to a Bull, by Jamie Blackett. Also beautifully written, there is no better one-volume guide to rural matters. Every politician should read it, as should anyone who cares about the countryside. It is a pleasure from first page to last.

At the moment, there is also trying to think about what happens after the plague subsides. Although there will be much more continuity than change, the government must not make Churchill’s mistake from 1943 onwards: concentrating exclusively on the crisis, with nothing to say about what comes next.