Diary

Entering my 54th day of quarantine, I recall how much I was looking forward to this spring in England. There were so many exciting events and celebrations planned. Several friends were throwing big birthday bashes; I was picking up a couple of awards, performing my one-woman show, going to Cannes, and most exciting of all, participating in a plethora of events surrounding the VE Day celebrations. All of the above have gone with the proverbial wind, except for, in a small way, the latter. The Queen’s Pageant Master, Bruno Peek, asked me if I could lead the nation’s toast to our heroes and heroines of the second world war. VE Day dawned sunny and hot. Percy and I festooned the balcony with Union Flags and bunting, and at 3 p.m.

Never have I stared at my own face so much. Not because I want to, it’s just always there now, ever present in one part of the screen I’m compelled to look at as I talk to the person who requested a Zoom, or a Teams, or a FaceTime. It feels apt, in an existential crisis, to keep opening new ‘windows’ to see out into the world, only to discover they are only mirrors, reflecting oneself. A dark morality tale for the isolation age. ‘You won’t find it on Zoom, James, the answer to your problems lies within.’ Or something. Is that really what I look like when I talk, though? Why do I always look so tired? It’s not as though I was out last night.

When the post office and stores closed in our village on Exmoor, my youngest stared out of the car window as we drove past and saw its dreaded ‘Closed’ sign and ‘For sale’ placard outside for the first time. ‘That’s my whole childhood,’ he wailed, ‘GONE.’ As an over-50 who’s had peak everything, I can’t complain — out loud anyway — but I find the losses for younger generations too painful to contemplate. No travel, no parties, no pubs, no clubs, no sport, no sex, no education, a life unlived online for the foreseeable. Given how badly Oliver took that one tiny but vital enterprise shutting up shop, I’ve been shocked and impressed by how well millions have adapted to the closure of the country.

The vocabulary of Brexit has passed into oblivion. Now there’s fresh work to be done. We all know about ‘flattening the curve’, but are you comfortable yet with ‘fomite’, a word my older son, a virologist, taught the family early on? It’s an object or surface on which an infectious agent like a coronavirus might be lying in wait — just for you. A cheque in the post, next door’s cat, the tennis balls you are about to double-fault with — all good candidates. You knew that already. Then how about ‘lipid envelope’, the outer shell of certain viruses. We learn with relief that the envelope of our coronavirus of concern is easily destroyed by soap and water.

When two members of my family went down with what appears to be Covid-19, I felt concerned. What I hadn’t bargained on was the sense of wounded pride. As the patients, pale as veal, collapse into their beds for 16 hours of fretful, jagged sleep, I ask myself how the wretched virus could have penetrated my defences. Have I not for three weeks of lockdown carried out normal household tasks with the heightened vigilance of a Porton Down lab technician moving radioactive material across an infant-school playground? If an Amazon parcel came to the door, I commenced the Corona Protocol. First, don safe-cracker gloves (the indoor pair not the supermarket pair) to take package. Immediately, march packaging out of back door to recycling bin.

Week five… which is to say I’ve been self-isolating in the country since 6 March. Meanwhile, engagements which threatened a return to town have been falling over like a row of dominos. If it were not for the terrors surrounding us, this is the life I’ve always wanted — social distancing without social disapproval. My wife Sabrina, who to my amazement is a techno whizz, has expanded her social life digitally, sometimes with pals by the roomful. I am learning not to blow my cover story (‘Tom’s working’) by passing behind her while she’s on FaceTime. Meanwhile, the days are not long enough for me to not work and keep up with my magazines.

‘How are you bearing up?’ ‘Is everyone terrified?’ ‘What’s the mood?’ These are the questions concerned family and friends are kindly asking about New York City which, according to my armchair epidemiology, is about ten days behind Italy and ten days ahead of Britain. It would be reckless to describe things as calm, not with a New Yorker dying every seven (?!) minutes, and refrigerated trucks parked ominously outside hospitals. But I sense no mass panic. Life, of a sort, still goes on. People run, dogs are walked, post is delivered, Amazon arrives, and the shelves are stocked with food. The absence of cars without the presence of snow is a novelty, as are the nods of camaraderie.

Writers like me are used to long hours alone. I’ve never enjoyed that side of it. I don’t like the bleakness of silence. As I try to settle and gather thoughts on my bed, pillows piled up behind me — Robert Louis Stevenson did the same, and it worked for him — I must have birdsong, music, the murmur of voices, and I must be able to see the living world from my window. I need the reassurance that I am not alone. I get up from the breakfast table always reluctantly, knowing the hours of solitary work that lie ahead, often dreading to have to go to it. I make myself do it, because I do have a story in my head I want to tell, because I need to prove to myself every day that I can still do it, and because it’s how I earn my living.

I have been trying to write about a great unpleasantness for some time: the trans debate that we don’t really have. Men go to Woman’s Place meetings. So do trans women, it’s not a separatist organisation. But for some godforsaken reason the Labour leadership hopefuls thought they might endear themselves to their lost ‘red wall’ voters by signing pledges calling Woman’s Place and LGB Alliance ‘trans-exclusionist hate groups’. I was appalled to see that the signatories included Lisa Nandy, who is bright, and Rebecca Long-Bailey, who isn’t. Anyway, having been asked not to write about this subject for months (I still have the police reports from the threats I received last time), I insisted.

‘Aren’t you meant to be in quarantine?’ the man in the cloakroom queue asks. I sense that his enquiry is motivated more by concern about his wellbeing than mine. ‘Don’t worry! I’ve not got the coronavirus,’ I try to reassure him cheerily. That’ll teach me to talk about my health on the Today programme. I mentioned on air that I’d taken a precautionary test after returning from holiday in south-east Asia with a cough. Soon afterwards my guide in Phnom Penh sent a message to ask how the rest of my trip had gone. Pleased and somewhat puzzled by her solicitousness, I quickly realised that she had heard about my test and wondered whether I — or rather, she — was all right.

I made the mistake of saying I thought insects might help feed the world. They are high-protein, cheap to farm (they breed like rabbits and grow like Topsy), require little water and energy and probably wouldn’t mind being factory-farmed. Now my post is full of mealworm powder and cricket flour and invitations to champion bug farms. Being an adviser to the hospital food review has been surprisingly uplifting. The panel members are mostly NHS professionals who are champing at the bit to improve matters and have already led changes in their own hospitals, so know it can be done. In one hospital, lunch was as good as the best home cooking. Yes, some hospital food is dire, and reform will be a huge task and take years.

A doctor will tell you heart attacks may appear to come out of the blue, but if you look carefully, you can spot the telltale signs. The same is true of my prospects at last week’s cabinet reshuffle. Things seemed positive enough on Monday. I attended an event in London to celebrate the first same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland. Westminster Hall was packed with many of those who had pushed social changes through last year, such as Lord Hayward and Conor McGinn, together with new MPs such as Colum Eastwood, the charismatic, debonair SDLP leader.

Exactly 50 years ago I drove, for the first visit of many, across country to Aldeburgh in Suffolk, following the Pied Piper, Benjamin Britten. I had been obsessed by his music, and indeed by him, since first hearing the ‘Sea Interludes’ from his opera Peter Grimes in a music appreciation lesson. His sound worlds, his persona, the place he both lived in and recreated in his work, spoke to me in a way nothing else ever has. As I drove in, past the church to see the sea, the Moot Hall, the fishing boats, the shop where he had bought china mugs to string in a line and tap with spoons for the sound of raindrops in Noye’s Fludde, I felt the real, everyday world and his imaginative one interlock. That first visit is etched in my memory.

After I took the editor’s job at Today on Radio 4 nearly three years ago I had to answer to John Humphrys, in his kitchen, over monastic soup and cheese. He asked me if my hidden intention was to try for one of the top jobs at the BBC. I told him that editing the Today programme was the top job so far as I was concerned. To have no interest in any higher rung on the corporate ladder confers freedom, but federal powers tend inexorably to exercise control over member states. Over time I came to realise how much sovereignty means to me, and handed in my notice last week. I shall leave in September cherishing the programme even more than when I joined.

I still live in the same house, in London, in which I lived as a baby. I walk my five-year-old son every morning to the same school, on the same route that I took 43 years ago, holding my father’s hand. We sing Gilbert and Sullivan in the same bedroom. I am whacked with a sword in the same garden square in which I once whacked my father. And the picture of me in red velvet knickerbockers can be superimposed over the picture of my son in his Batman costume — each of us seated at the same corner of the same dining room, peering gloomily at the two candles on our birthday cake. What will London look like when my son is the age I am now?

I start the week by going through my iPhone to delete the numbers of former friends. It sounds depressing, but it’s actually quite cathartic. I suppose it all started with Brexit. I’m not a confrontational person, so it was surprising to find so many friends turning against me over their newfound devotion to a neoliberal trading bloc. Since then, I’ve watched the ongoing curdling of rational minds with a growing sense of incomprehension. So many on the left appear to have surrendered to a collective fantasy in which the slightest point of political disagreement is interpreted as evidence of fascism.

Washington, D.C. On 8 January, I tweeted about the Sussex-Markles: ‘Obviously the plan is to return to Canada, lead a revolt against British rule, and establish an independent Canadian monarchy.’ Two days later, the New York Times opened a story about the Canada-bound Duke and Duchess of Sussex: ‘Some have suggested they could become king and queen of Canada.’ IT WAS A JOKE! Otherwise, I’m going to have Canadian security surveilling my cottage in Ontario as a node of Sussexite sedition. Yet maybe I had glimpsed something. A poll has suggested that 60 per cent of Canadians would support the appointment of Prince Harry as governor general.