I haven’t written anything for so long that I am feeling rusty, and didn’t really want my return to be a plague diary – but hey ho.

Oxfam is closed, so all those lovely books ( and indeed the not so lovely ones – Jeremy Clarkson included) will be sitting there waiting for new homes for some time to come (perhaps not Jeremy Clarkson…)

Meanwhile, we usually are fans of hunkering down.

And usually that comes with winter and log fires and telly and the dog asleep on some piece of furniture, a stew in the Aga and friends for a long Sunday lunch.

Now it comes with all the above except it is Spring, and we can’t have anyone in the house.

We are the really privileged and I am seriously aware of that – we can afford to be where we are with no financial worries, we have a decent sized garden and are surrounded by fields.

But these are jittery times, strange times, no point of reference times, the calm before the storm times.

The times when you watch what is happening in Italy and marvel at the efforts being made to save lives and at the same time hope you never need to ask that for yourself or people you know.

I’d like to think this was bringing out the best in me but just like my inner cleaner, I am finding it quite hard to locate by better inner self at the moment.

But here are two things that made my day:

My lovely next door neighbour managed by a slip of the cursor to get 4 kilos of carrots in her Ocado order.

In a few weeks time she’d probably be able to sell those on some black market for shares in Zoom, but right now she has given me some.

My BB, never knowingly cooking a thing in his life, and who has a sweet tooth which he has been nurturing for all his years, did not seem to run through the options of soup, purees, carrot curry ( but then who would?) and came up instantly with carrot cake. (Recipes that don’t involve cream cheese all welcome.)

We are also about to spend some happy hours filling envelopes with advice and support stuff from our Parish Council for the locals, and another lovely neighbour offered to help.

Now normally, I would have flapped my hands and asked half the village in to help but had to say that we would manage.

She said, it would all go better with a glass of wine and I said, we should have stocked up with more of the white stuff – ten minutes later, a lovely bottle was delivered to our doorstep.

That will make today fine. Hope yours is too.