The worst thing about being single, living on your own and living through a pandemic is not the thing that you’ve just thought of. Although that’s quite bad as well.

No. It’s when you have a thought… or something happens… and you don’t have anyone you can pass comment with.

I’m generally not one for filling the silences anyway but sometimes, as on Friday when I changed my Virgin Media package (one needs to save cash, just in case), you get a minor win and find you have no-one to share the news with. Or you hear a good joke, or come up with a good joke, or have a funny story to share. Or you just want to vent

Big ticket stuff – a new job, another death – you can announce that to the world, sit back and wait for the likes or loves to come in. But the small stuff? Send out a tweet which no-one will notice.

It’s not an isolation thing. I could always send a text to a friend. That might explain why she’s moving to Keswick in a few months… But my point is that you can’t manufacture the relationships where you talk about minutiae. That requires people who know you well, who know you well, who know just how much attention to give and how important this small, random piece of news is – or more usually isn’t.

Some of those people I might have met down the pub. Can’t do that at the moment. It did occur to me anyway that pretty much everyone I socialised with in the 1990s who lived and/or worked in Leeds has moved away (or died). Scary.