There’s a friend of mine who likes to torture me occasionally. ‘I really don’t like to tell you this,’ she trills, ‘but I’m looking out on to a field of daffodils. In the hedge just outside the kitchen window there’s a blue tit nesting.’ If she wants to go for a walk, she heads into the woodland behind the house. She’s in her oather home in Wales (normal residence: Fulham) and rather fancies staying there, having got the hang of the whole working-from-home thing.
Another friend, who’s getting on a bit, is in her other home (this isn’t just a holiday cottage, but a proper estate that they’ve had for years) in Cornwall (normal residence: Chelsea). She called the other day when it was hot. ‘Isn’t it dreadful?’ she says. ‘We’re not really seeing the family but we do manage to get out into the fields, and then there’s the garden. I do feel so very sorry for those poor people in London stuck in awful tower blocks.’ ‘Quite so,’ I said bitterly. ‘It’s a bit like that at the top of a mansion block.’ ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘You poor things!’
This is the kind of conversation I’ve been having with an awful lot of my friends since the start of the lockdown. My husband works for the NHS (normal patients, not Covid) and so we’re stuck in London in our rented flat, without so much as a window box, let alone anything fancy like a balcony. It could be worse: I am 15 minutes’ walk from my allotment, which is the size of your dinner table, and if I break the rules about limiting exercise to an hour, I can make it down to the river for a walk.
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