April 19

I’m missing the city below us.

My husband and I are city-dwellers very much by choice . We love the buzz London has delivered over the past years. (Whether it will continue post- Brexit and post -Covid is impossible to imagine). We have led our social lives going to the pictures, sampling new restaurants and re-visiting old favourites, meeting friends for jolly Sunday breakfasts in a nearby hotel and attending galleries, museums and theatres far less often than our country friends, who don’t have them on their doorstep. We appreciate being able to walk home from The Royal Opera House while frantic out-of-towners queue for taxis in the rain. London’s beautiful parks are so precious to us, we get irritated when they’re appropriated for cycle races and art fairs. We don’t have a car, since most places we visit are within walking distance and, for those that are not, we have generous, motorised friends who give us lifts.

Being in the epicentre of Britain’s fight with this hideous disease – 3,522 deaths in London hospitals so far – we have chosen to take this Lockdown hyper-seriously. We are not going out at all, we are exercising solely on our terrace or indoors and relying completely on food deliveries. We haven’t seen another soul, other than on a screen, since March 12th.

Friends, walking and ethnic food are highest on my miss-list. Culture is available on TV and, though it’s not the same as experiencing plays, concerts or opera live, the Arts have offered us all a feast since Covid -19 hit.

There’s one thing, though, that is, by its very nature, unavailable at home and that’s the magic of Serendipity. Out walking the streets as we used to, we might come upon a mass ballroom-dancing session on the Plaza outside the South Bank, or a Klesmer band playing on the bandstand in Regents Park. Maybe we’d drop in to the annual food festival in the grounds of our local church or marvel at the apples growing on a tree in the middle of Soho.We’d spot the familiar posse of large, leather-clad, gay men sipping coffee on the street and coo-ing over their assortment of tiny ,white, fluffy dogs. And here comes the local tailor, always immaculately turned out in a suit, waistcoat and tie, or the man who must, surely, be a jazz musician, dressed in a grey pin-striped frock -coat with a matching Borsalino. We haven’t seen the elderly woman with grey and fuschia-pink plaits down to her knees, for some time. It’s Serendipity who or what turns up in the pageant of the city.

It’s that Serendipity I’m missing as we pre-plan our day’s meals, decide when we will exercise, when to clean the house and what to watch on TV. The spur-of-the-moment moment is no more and I envy those of our friends still experiencing them. Here’s Tod, for instance, still accidentally locked down in the Scottish Highlands, relishing a serendipitous experience:

When Lockdown is over and we are free to go where and do what we choose, constrained only by our implacable diaries filled with their unmissable appointments, I vow to savour the impromptu and remember how much I missed it.