Like many people, I am assuming, I have started keeping a plague diary. The problem is that like almost everything I do – especially at the moment – it is not well done.

So, I am left with a series of one line notes, written with no date and now seeming to be part of a list of memories from a far-gone era such is the time-warping experience of day-to-day life at the moment.

One aspect of our changed lives however is all too visibly present.

Jess was due a hair cut just as lock-down was called – in fact that day. With hindsight, I should have sucked her into the car, driven the five miles to her groomer – after all I wasn’t going to Snowdonia or Cornwall – and got her done.

But I didn’t, and now she is faced with the best-beloved using an array of more or less blunt scissors most days to just trim a bit here and there….

(There will come a day when I have to use those same scissors on the best-beloved’s hair and he will enjoy plucking my chin hairs – such are the admissions I am willing to make in these strange times.)

She is a sociable dog and has been very happy to have us both at home all day and a lot more people than usual coming walking past our garden.

She usually runs from one vantage point to another to bark at them – annoyingly I’ve no doubt though locals all call out ‘hello Jess’ – but now even she has largely given up on that, so many new people are coming past us.

Yesterday, we went for the full hour’s walk round a circuit we sometimes do. Usually the gardens I pass are empty but yesterday the circuit took twice as long as usual.

I met a lovely couple who gave me half a dozen eggs – they have chickens, ducks and geese so a interesting egg box – a lawyer working from home and helping asylum seekers, a volunteer for our local emergency group who I hadn’t ever met in person. ( She has a perfectly groomed dog and Jess was somewhat embarrassed as she might well have been.)

I met a family who are pretty sure they have had the virus but as we have no mass testing, they are not sure.

An asthmatic woman walking and living off the shopping from neighbours, a neighbour bringing me empty milk bottles.

So, this is the lovely neighbour who answered the call for the village to have some volunteers to deliver information including green, amber and red posters for people to put in their windows to indicate whether they were fine, in self-isolation, needing help.

The BB and I were having to get the packs together, work out who would deliver to each of the (only) 70 households and put them all together and in plastic bags hung on our back fence for those volunteers to collect.

It’s happening across the land I am assuming.

I am an expert at waving my hands in the air, saying I have a task to do and please could anyone come round and help. ( See also my wedding planning – done by a marvellous committee of women.)

This time, of course, that wasn’t going to happen.

‘Have a glass of wine whilst you do it,’ said my smart, thoughtful and oh so right neighbour.

‘Should have got a supply of white wine sorted,’ I texted back.

Ten minutes later a chilled bottle was on my doorstep. Lovely.

But they had no milk so I have upped my order from the milkman to supply them too. Thank you Matthew the milkman.