Social Distancing - Not

Tod has been on the phone to an old school friend for nearly an hour.  This, mind you, is a man who tells me he hates the phone.

I call the HomeAway helpline to renew the advert for our cottage. (Normally a somewhat irritable conversation with a stressed agent in a call centre.)  I can hear domestic sounds in the background - a child's chatter, the clatter of kitchen routines, scraping of a chair - and I ask the man who answers if he is working from home.  He tells me about his bulldog who prefers his bed to a walk in the morning and we chat and laugh.  Never has HomeAway taken my money so easily and pleasantly.

I send my "Just checking" email to a friend in the UK and we gossip about gardening.  Photos are swapped, of the small shed she has made, the dogs, my roses.  And she describes the challenges of self-isolating from her granddaughter who lives next door.

Funny or nostalgic videos, snippets on Twitter, cartoons by Matt (from the Daily Telegraph, who is mining a rich vein of coronavirus humour) are shared round the world.

The British government has chosen the wrong phrase. We may be distant physically, socially we have never been so close.