IT'S TIME NOW TO CULTIVATE

LIKE folk across the country, my partner and I spent last Saturday night having a virtual social with some friends.

- Chris DUNLAVY

We’d initially planned a quiz, but let’s not pretend this will all be over soon. Best keep a few ideas back for when Netflix is exhausted and we’re dispiritedly eyeing a Last of the Summer Wine box set. Or every episode of Coronation Street since 1960.

The drinks were good. The company was... jumpy. One couple in particular had spawned three children since we last laid eyes on them, a measure of life’s ability to barrel you onwards like heedless balls of tumbleweed.

You work. You sleep. You make dinner and sort the kids. You go for a pint with your mate up the road because he’s here, not there. Plough, plough, plough.

But for the imprisonment enforced by the outbreak of Coronavirus most of us would still be ploughing along, impelled by habit and weariness onto the path of least resistance.

I’d probably have spent Saturday night watching a rerun of Predator on ITV4, or Match of the Day, or some subtitled Scandi misery.

I certainly wouldn’t have caught up with Rachel and Nick, and I probably wouldn’t have thought to message my oldest friend, who suffers from cystic fibrosis and is desperately at risk from the virus. I haven’t seen him for two years.

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