My love affair with Hannah Arendt

The three of us — me, Catriona and her daughter Skye — were having a wash and brush-up before going out for a meal ata restaurant in the village, when we learnt that President Macron’s smooth dishonest face had just addressed the nation on TV and told it that he had ordered bars, cafés and restaurants and all places of entertainment to be closed until further notice. The news both exhilarated and disappointed: real life had begun in earnest but the bars were shut. Skye assembled a round of gin and tonics and we three settled down in a row with our feet on the coffee table to make our own evening’s entertainment, the first perhaps of many. Starting as I meant to go on in fast-setting new reality, I confessed to them that I had fallen in love with an elderly Jewish woman called Hannah.

Unfortunately, she died in 1975.