Coronavirus has even kept the sex-strikers at home

When we left this Britain on Thursday last week, life was almost as usual. Shops and restaurants were open. The Battle Observer was reporting that environmentalists, angry that East Sussex County Council’s pension funds are invested in fossil fuels, were organising a one-day protest demanding a ‘sex strike’. No one, they insisted, must have sexual intercourse with any of the county’s 50 elected councillors ‘until they agree to stop funding climate change’. As a campaign, this latter-day reworking of Lysistrata had the merit that most people would probably agree to its conditions, whatever their views on climate change. We returned home on Monday, however, to read that the protest had collapsed. Faced with the onrush of Covid-19, even the zealous green sex-strikers were daunted, and did not turn up outside Lewes town hall. Those wishing to copulate with our county councillors were left in peace.

It was in those four days that the coronavirus took hold in Britain.