…I’m social isolating and getting used to solitude

AT THE beginning of my first week of self-isolation I found myself staring at the bunch of daffodils on the kitchen table, slowly fading, with that deepening yellow smell they produce on the point of demise. I wondered if I would only see daffodils again through Wordsworth’s “inward eye which is the bliss of solitude”.

It seems a strange metaphor — this bliss of solitude. Many of us staying alone in our homes, banned from seeing our children or grandkids, won’t find anything blissful in it at all. We are facing Pesach — some synagogues offer online second night Seders – but many people will experience it alone, or not at all. The great festival of freedom seems more and more like a prison sentence as the weeks stretch into months ahead of us. If you want to keep amused, try ringing the kosher butcher. You will hear the chaotic screaming over the phone at fever pitch, as people interrupt your call demanding to add to their order and being told — “sorry, you can’t add anything, you’ve reached the limit!”

Like everyone else, I have seen supermarket-ordering collapse under the strain of demand, but while shop queues are seething, my local kosher deli was quick to deliver matzah boxes, fruit and vegetable the next day with hardly a murmur.

But I know several people in the danger category who still go out to parks or queue in crowded shops, demonstrating that

Blitz mentality — that little Englander attitude — of those who lived through the war or the Holocaust and feel invulnerable to the unseen threat. They may represent a microcosm of London life, but