La peste

I work at the hospital thirty hours a week over five days, so there's nothing particularly leisured about my week; yet the virus has quietened the din of consumerism. The showy jobs which most of us do are now admitted to be useless.

On the ward, I went to pick a hair off my trousers the other day, and winced as I discovered that it was connected to my groin. It was a pube that had somehow managed to protrude through the fabric.

Emptying the bins reveals the popularity of cakes, biscuits and crisps amongst the administrative classes, and goes some way to explain why many hospital staff are huge.

On Thursday's mapless walk I wandered around a near-silent suburbia, detouring into the road when elderly people approached. I acquired a print, left outside someone's house. Stamped on the back in red ink "The French Picture Shop, Pimlico, SW1," it's an engraving by one Adolphe Martial Potémont (1827 - 1883). I laid it down on the cricket pitch of a private girls' school that I found myself in and contemplated it over a pint of cider.

I've also been spending time with a couple of seagulls and the ceaselessly wandering homeless in Castle Park. The radiant sun, the feeling of mental emptiness and vivid intensity at the same time. The silhouettes of the trees against the wide sky; the bullshit consultancies and accountancy firms on the riverbank all turned off.

I repeated a persistent beggar's spiel back to him before he could start it. "Yes, I know mate, your name's Charlie and you don't mean to disturb me but you need your train fare." Try varying the story a bit at least.

They're converting a university conference centre into a temporary hosital for plague victims and offering £14 an hour for cleaners, with enhancements for Sundays and Bank Holidays. The small disadvantage is spending eight hours a day surrounded by people coughing corona all day long, but I've applied anyway, because I'm hard.

I am displeased with our Rector. Contrary to information on the church's website, he was not in fact there at 10am on Saturday to open the church. Me and two elderly ladies talked briefly, at a distance, before I decided at least to make an inspection of the exterior with the notes from English Heritage. As I turned the corner, the couple broke out in loud exclamations. "Well I don't know Edith. You could die, I could die. I only wanted to come out for a walk!"

I found John Frost's grave though. Even now, it's tucked away in the most inaccessible, overgrown part of the graveyard. "The outward mark of respect paid to men merely because they are rich and powerful...hath no communication with the heart."