Mary Dejevsky

Maybe it had to come: a note on my local (London) message-board said that the two Marks & Spencer food halls where I have taken to shopping since the first pandemic lockdown are now offering – toot the bugle, as the Prime Minister might say – a booking system. Of course, this is presented as a big improvement, 'part of our efforts to make shopping easier for our customers,' according to M&S. It’s called 'express access', the idea being that, following the introduction of Lockdown II, you will be able to 'book a slot' to avoid queuing. True, the system is voluntary.

'The expected recession will hit young adults hardest,' BBC presenter, Jonny Dymond, said on 'The World This Weekend’. Almost half the programme was then given over to the dire future that awaits the UK’s 18-24 year olds, with the prospect that a million of them could become unemployed. The latest ‘Weekend Woman’s Hour’ offered a package in the same vein, as did the BBC website, with a feature headlined: ''We feel so lost' - Young face job despair.' Nor is it just the BBC. The media has been full of Cassandras from a variety of London-based think-tanks and plush addresses forecasting, with the same categorical certainty, that the chief victims of the pandemic will be the young.

It had to be. We were barely into the first week of the coronavirus emergency than the Prime Minister and others started invoking the ‘Blitz spirit’. You know, that incomparable time soon after the start of world war two when Brits stood firm and united against the worst that Nazi Germany could hurl at our brave and plucky islands? People helped each other, class distinctions blurred, and the Queen Mother visited London’s bombed-out East End. We kept calm, we carried on, and we prevailed. It has taken a few days, but now, equally inevitably, we have the march of the Blitz-spirit sceptics – of whom, I admit, to being one. Let’s not be too mealy-mouthed. As the enemy pounded British cities, there were extraordinary acts of kindness and generosity.

Every November the London based foreign affairs think tank, Chatham House, awards a prize for 'the most significant contribution to the improvement of international relations in the previous year'. This year, the joint laureates were Sir David Attenborough and the BBC Studios Natural History Unit for the television series Blue Planet II. It is a choice which, as a long-standing member of Chatham House, I regret. Don’t get me wrong. My misgivings are not about the prize itself, which was designed to raise the think tank’s national and international profile and is now in its 15th year. My doubts stem entirely from this year’s choice of recipients. The contortions in the official pronouncement betrayed something of the problem.

The central proposal in Damian Green’s recent paper on social care is that care provision should be treated like pensions. In ‘Fixing the care crisis’, he argues that everyone should be entitled to 'a decent standard of care' funded by the state – in the same way as they are entitled to a state pension - but could then choose to 'top up' from their own resources to add what he calls 'bells and whistles'. The benefits from such a system, as he sees it – and I agree – could be manifold. It should eliminate the patent injustice, according to which cancer care is fully state-funded while dementia care is not, and many other chronic conditions, such as MS and Parkinson’s fall somewhere (often disputed) in between.

It is cold, dank and muddy and I’m contemplating a barely defined path from the paved road into an ever-darkening wood. I should have brought a torch, but I didn’t, and before the light fades completely I need to find the ‘idyllic’ woodland burial ground I have shortlisted as a possible resting place for my late husband’s ashes; and also, when the time comes, for my own. When I get there, the site is glorious: on a slope, on the edge of a real forest — the sort of place the woodland-obsessed Germans probably have a special word for. The colours are sombre in the evening light and flights of birds wheel overhead.

The plane landed a fraction early, at just after 9 p.m. Hope flickered that passport control would be as deserted as the echoing arrivals terminal. But no. By the time we reached sight of what is now labelled in enormous letters the ‘UK Border’, we had joined a mass of humanity in a single corridor to be decanted in batches into ‘the maze’. This is the point where, at most UK airports, the great segregation occurs, between UK/EU passports and the rest, and then between regular channels and ‘e-passports’. Often, they try to chivvy you into e-passports. Tonight, though, these lanes were taped off. After the long shuffle to the control desk, I had the nerve to ask why.

There is much to be faulted in Uber, which has branched out from delivering people into delivering meals, under the unappetising name UberEats. But even I, someone who can rarely bring herself to write the word ‘sharing’, as in economy, without inverted commas, am prepared to give credit where credit is due. Uber has made private door-to-door transport accessible to far more people than before. It has thus done a lot of people a favour and hugely expanded the market, harnessing new technology to do so. It has provided jobs for people who did not have them, or who prefer to work in the semi-autonomous Uber way.

What seemed this time last year to be a little local difficulty in Ukraine has metastasised to the point where a peace plan drafted in Paris and Berlin may be all that stands in the way of war between the West and Russia. Over the months, many of those watching, appalled, from the safety of the side-lines, have combed history for precedents and parallels that might aid understanding or offer clues as to what might be done. Last spring, after Russia snatched Crimea and appeared ready to grab a chunk of eastern Ukraine too, the favoured comparisons were with Nazi Germany’s 1938 annexation of Sudetenland. It was a parallel that seemed all too plausible, given the Kremlin’s statements about the need to protect Russian 'compatriots' wherever they might live.