The End of the World News

Today is the end of our first full week on lock down: it was sunny this morning when went out on our doggy walk but then grey clouds filled the sky, the wind got up and now it is freezing outside. Sometimes when the sun is shining is difficult to believe we are only at the end of  March, but in fact on this weekend two years ago we had thick snow. Meanwhile our locked in life continues and we have not starved: we've ventured out each day to buy essentials, like the newspaper, bread and milk and so far have not had to miss out on anything. However on the animal front the situation is quite different, although we are manging to keep everyone well fed. Our dog lives on Lily's Kitchen Fishy Pie as just about any other flavour seems to give him digestive issues (polite euphemism for you know what). Generally we buy it in bulk from the supermarket but supplies there were limited and there was a long queue to get in so we've been buying in bulk online: as long as Amazon can d...

I very much enjoyed the version of Dracula that the BBC screened over the Christmas holiday and I also watched a documentary that Mark Gatiss made on this history of the Dracula story. As a slight digression it was also a surprise to find that one of the supposedly Transylvanian locations was actually pretty close to where we live, i.e. at Mottisfont Abbey: Dracula filmed at Mottisfont Abbey I’d grown up watching the Hammer versions and I’d seen the Bela Lugosi version in a late night double bill but I’d never seen the FW Murnau silent version (which he called Nosferatu but which was essentially the Dracula story and I understand that m’learned friends had a few exchange about copyright infringement). As a result of this I subsequently watched both Nosferatu and the 1979 remake with Klaus Kinski as Dracula. However it was only after seeing recent news reports about the number of deaths from the Coronavirus that I began to seethe parallels with Murnau's film (which on thi...

The beginning of our second week of isolation: this morning there was a thick frost and Sascha's early morning walk was distinctly bracing, but I've just come in after serving lunch to the ponies and I'd left my fleece indoors. One of the joys of country living is that Hungerford is only 20 minutes away and among its other attractions it has an award-winning independent bookshop. The owners run an innovative series of events, author appearances and signing sessions and last Autumn we went to one of the best: Robert Harris (who lives in the next village in a house that boasts a superlative Duck House) was going to be interviewed about his new novel by Jon Snow (of C4 News fame rather than the one in Game of Thrones ) who also lives locally and we pass his house on one of our regular weekend dog walking routes. Older readers will recall the political turmoil of last Autumn (the attempted prorogation of Parliament, numerous knife edge votes and a general election); as a...

Day five: a bright and sunny day with a biting wind. I've seen numerous comments about Coronavirus which described its effects as being "just like flu" and as such wondering what all the fuss is about. This is not some kind of homage to Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch, but the flu virus that appeared in the summer of 1918 was unlike any virus that had ever appeared before. There had been serious epidemics of flu in 1900, 1908 and 1915, so the outbreak that began in 1918 was initially ignored, but then things became significantly worse... Juliet Nicolson's The Great Silence (the title refers to the aftermath of the Great War) includes a number of detailed contemporaneous accounts of individuals afflicted with the flu as well as a detailed description of the effects of the illness after the initial familiar symptoms of sweats, headaches and muscular pain: "When the virus entered the body it was transformed into something almost invariably fata...

Day three of our new world. Tonight we had been due to hold the next screening at our Film Club, but earlier this week a quick discussion among us committee members agreed that although we had initially decided to go ahead with plenty of space between the seats to allow appropriate social separation, in the light of subsequent government advice we needed to cancel the rest of our season. As the average age of our members is probably pushing close to the age beyond which the government advised self-isolation then it was our only choice. We had been due to screen The Good Liar starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren: the film received excellent reviews and I'd wanted to see it but it disappeared from general release pretty quickly. I have the DVD on my desk and will watch it over the next few days as I think I will have plenty of time on my hands. Once I've seen it I will pass it on to other committee members and we can continue as a virtual film club. Here is what we'...

Although the advice from the government is new we have in fact been practicing social isolation for more than twenty years: we live on the outskirts of a small settlement in North West Hampshire (although our postal address is Berkshire) and we have no neighbours for several hundred yards in any direction (in fact the woods we can see from our bedroom window have been there since the Domesday Book and thus have been categorised as Ancient Woodland). The whole area has been designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and it is an amazing place to live. Over the past few weeks we've been following the news closely and are keen to do everything we can to help mitigate the spread of the Coronavirus. It's good that "celebrities" with large numbers of followers on social media are using the media to spread sound advice and I was interested to see this clip from Arnold Schwarzenneger: We do not have a donkey, but do have four Shetland ponies, although we do no...