HERE’S THE WRITE WAY TO HAPPILY SPEND YOUR TIME IN SPLENDID SELF-ISOLATION

THIS may sound unforgivably smug but when it comes to self-isolation, writers are solitary swine to start with.

All right, Jeffrey Archer is untiringly convivial except when he is tapping away in his stone bothy in Grantchester, but most whom I know, like me, regard solitude and silence as indispensable. If out on the town, we are like moles in a disco – blinking at the light. My whole household (I mean both of them) is well schooled in understanding that I need my P and Q – short for peace and quiet. The CO is allowed to interrupt as and when she wishes – which she would anyway. For someone who is pretty bone idle to start with, there are further advantages.

If ever caught staring vacantly out of the window, I can claim to be thinking, i.e. working. I can even have a nap and claim to be hard at it. So coping with self-isolation? Not a problem.

I have a two-foot stack of must-read books I can at last get around to. I have long been a nutter for general knowledge quizzes so there is another pile of quiz books. I enjoy the challenge of seeing if I can finish one without referring to Mister Google, and when I am flummoxed learn something new.

That said, this desert-island lark has no deadline, no foreseen termination. So by midsummer even I may be moving from bored to homicidal. So far as this column is concerned I can keep going (if you wish it) from my snug office with patio door open to the garden and three Jack Russells for exercise in an empty field beyond the garden

IF, in spite of stockpiling, you run out of loo paper, just use your share certificates. Very soon they will have the same value.

gate. Plus all the papers, radio, TV and the phone to check up on things. Plus quite a list of private sources, even though the CO remarks that the Telegraph obituaries page is starting to look like my contacts list.

Oh dear, it’s time for another cuppa. It’s all go.