May, 2021. In about 10 days it will be 51 years since I came, at the age of 15, to study in this city, London. But it’s a very different place we live in now. After weeks of meeting outdoors in parks and private gardens, or sipping coffee in open air cafes, we are allowed, from today, to dine in restaurants and socialise in each other’s homes. Yet, the solitary habits we formed during our 13 months of almost constant lockdown are here to stay people rush home at a given hour to ‘attend’ Zoom events or simply to watch television.
Last weekend’s television highlight was the new adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s once very popular comic novel, The Pursuit of Love, which I read in my early 20s like a minor rite of passage. When I watched it on a dreary Sunday night, the silly antics of silly aristocrats in the years between the two world wars worked better than any pill to put me to sleep.