Endogamy is the practice of marrying or associating with members of your own clan or social group. Exogamy is that of marrying or associating with those of exterior clans, groups, races etc. We are more exogamous than we used to be, but perhaps not as much as we think. When I try and situate myself within this spectrum it is difficult to know whether the partners or close friends I have associated with in the past have attracted you to them by some elements that recall myself and my own clan, even though they may have elements that are clearly alien (race, colour, social class). Equally, life pulls you away from your home clan. You may go away to study and never return. Over the years the notion of home gradually disolves. Moreover, your home clan may in itself be a complex uncentred atom, more electron than neucleus. It might also be that you find extraneous elements in the other that refer you to yourself but may be peripheral to other viewers, elements to do with those modern things like common tastes and outlooks. Or, and this may well be the case for me, it may be that it was never you making the choice in the first place, but the other.

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I heard the term Spy Wednesday for the first time this week. It is today, the Wednesday of Holy week, and refers to the underhand apostleship of Judas, spying on Christ before his eventual betrayal on Good Friday. First usage, as far as I can make out, 15th Century.

Judas is a peculiarly modern figure. Dante has him in hell. The New Testament has him punished in this life and the next for his act. And yet, as Thomas de Quincey amongst many others pointed out, Judas’ betrayal is part of God’s plan. Without it, the great process of our so-called salvation would not unfold. He is, then, pivotal to the necessary crucifixion of Jesus, which opens up the gates of the kingdom of heaven to us all. The so-called lost gospel of Judas, written perhaps in the first century AD, makes this connection explicit. Judas is an active participant in god’s plan. With or without his own agency. So should Judas not be saved? Indeed sanctified or beatified? His understanding was greater than Peter’s, who blunders through the New Testament constantly goofing and getting hold of the wrong end of the stick: sinking on the Lake of Galilee; misunderstanding the Transfiguration; denying Jesus three times in the Garden of Gethsemane. Actually, Judas is a perfect protagonist for peoplearerubbish. Maybe not so rubbish after all.

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It can’t be easy being Nicholas Witchell. His colleagues at the BBC have now taken to calling him ‘Nick’ in solidarity. You know Nick. He is the BBC’s Royal correspondant. He has the worst job on the network. He has to say things like speaking from Windsor, Her Majesty the Queen clearly expressed her solidarity with the nurses and doctors working in this crisis and with all key workers throughout the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. She further expressed her confidence in the British people pulling together at this difficult time as they have so many times in its long and glorious history. All of this he has to utter without a hint of irony, without cracking a smile, without ever seeming to want to question a morsel of the statement. A few years ago Prince Charles was caught on microphone saying to his children don’t look, there’s that awful man. He was refering to Nicholas Witchell. Since then, we can all empathise with Nick. He is living and working under the shadow of the axe. At the BBC colleagues must pat him extensively on the back in deepest sympathy. Who knows? Maybe he’s coming up for retirement and thinks I’ll just get through till then, nobody’s going to make me War correspondant now; I won’t get to wear the hi-viz press jacket. Or maybe  – who knows? – just maybe he likes it, being Royal correspondant. In which case, good luck to you, Nicholas Witchell. Containing all that stuff. In these difficult times, well done, Nick.

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My neighbour Tom, a congenial, intelligent and civilized man, took to talking very loudly in his kitchen from 8 in the evening to 2 in the morning. He also produced this schoolboy giggle. We go to bed early. It was infuriating. Tom’s kitchen shares a wall with our corridor and bedroom, so it was particularly irksome. Tom has recently started dating a new woman. I had never noticed that ridiculous teenage giggle in him, but, I thought, maybe it had been there all along. Love, we said and shook our heads distastefully. Well, it may be love, but that’s no excuse to inflict it on others. And his girlfriend must have Bob Monkhouses’s joke book to hand to elicit the medley of schoolboy snickerings that flow through into our bedroom a-nights. I raised the issue with Tom. He seemed bemused. He was an early sleeper himself mostly, he said. Don’t think so, I thought. The next night it started again. By eleven o’clock I was knocking on the party-wall. He still didn’t heed. I knocked again, louder this time. Stil nothing. Well, this is willfull insolence. I got up, pulled my pants on, went outside. This is one in the morning. In his kitchen all is dark. He is talking at the top of his voice in the dark! I hammer on the door. Tom arrives  from behind the front door stage right. The kitchen is stage left. It isn’t Tom. The yapping is still going on. It’s my upstairs neighbour. I go up and knock on his door. The second I do it the giggles and the chat stop, though he doesn’t open the door. This story will run all coronavirus season, as will many other stories of neighbourly dialogue. Sorry Tom. Here is some mixed fruit to make amends.

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This quarantine suits my general propensity towards modularity. Pre-crisis and not liking coagulous sauce,s I espoused modulariry in cooking: a raw carrot followed by a piece of fish followed by cheese and crackers followed by a pudding. Now modularity is universal. We separate our shopping from our run in the park; we have a segment on the computer before we have to hand it over to the next person and we have an hour of reading. I have even broken my books down into units. I have a night book and a day book. The night book I read in bed. It is Thomas Bernhard’s autobiography in five small volumes, much of the action aptly taking place in quarantine hospitals. My day book is ‘Les Meteores’by Michel Tournier. My plan is to move onto ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ as the next night book in (I estimate) ten days time. Not sure about my next day book. When you break your marathon down into periods of time, or laps, it becomes manageable. If you want to write a novel start by breaking it up into twenty chapters. Yesterday we acquired a new set of four toilet rolls, which we will move onto in about five days time. Each new toilet roll will last two weeks. So will we count the quarantine away. When our final toilet roll dribbles out we hope the hard days will be past. We are all measuring our life out in toilet roll sheets now.

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Teenagers and others are confused. What you must not do is anything. What you must do is nothing. They have suddenly been let out of existential prison. As for the grown-ups? All the rushing around on public transport or in cars; the saving of one earth minute by pushing into a crowded tube train; the nipping out to Pret-a-Manger for that tasteless sandwich; the stops-off for coffee in plastic cups; that way of walking in the street with a goblet out in front of you like some beast of burden, a boastful participation in the consumerist edifice; the endless whirr of office machinery; . It is all starting to look like mauvaise foi, self-deception, the key notion of the existentialist, just so much stuff to tell yourself you’re alive, though you aren’t really. Now, the new dynasty. Personal projects that were meant to never happen can now take place. Reading. Dominoes. It only takes a week for our world to look like a distant and random memory. Dominoes have more reality than an Excel spread sheet. I suppose we will continue to refer to the world of complex human relations in our reading and conversation, though that world has now been squared-off from us. We have retreated into a cloister to consider what once was. When we come out of our cloister will we look again at that world of ours and not believe it so much anymore?

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When you are in lock-down food comes to the fore. Yesterday we had pie. Chicken and leek pie was the one we put our virus faith into. In recent  weeks I have seen much super market action concerning  leeks. A man with a basket full of leeks seeing the queue at the checkout furiously throwing the basket down and storming out. I saw whole bucketsfull of leeks in our local little shop but when I went to buy them they had vanished, snapped up. Soup is important in these hard times. Whole cloves of garlic melted into the liquid to sustain the struggling human mechanism. Suddenly no-one is interested in the weather. From it being my favourite programme, it is now irelevant. Weather was always the most relevant of shows. My betrayal is total. I turn off  the weather. For me, this is a first. Normally  I dash from channel to channel, looking for the various forms of non-committal pronouncement. Now I can’t be bothered. What was this love affair I had with weather forecasts and will it ever return.

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At the start of the First World War in 1914 the French government gave a reading and writing test to all conscripts. 70% were deemed to be unable to read more than a few words. In 2020 we can all read, more or less, though poor literacy is more common than you might think. I suppose that screen culture has in many ways helped. Kids are attracted to social media, texting and games, which all include a degree of reading, but the ability of many children to read a page of writing is poor. When I am teaching I find the only way for many of the kids to follow a text is if I read it out loud. I tell them to follow in the text but when I look up their eyes are looking round the room. Concentration dips. Malebranche, the 17th Century French thinker, noted tha la concentation est la piete de l’ame (Concentration is the piety of the soul). Concentration, then, was viewed as an almost religious quality. It may be that our period of genuine literacy is no more than a brief moment of sunlight in an otherwise cloudy day. The ability to be alone is a skill that we all need to acquire in these days.

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I think I have the coronavirus but I’m not sure. It would make sense.My significant other has it. We spent the week together. She is not here at the moment, so I am alone, self-isolating. I am lucky. I am strong with no underlying medical issues. I have not stocked up on food, so I will have to either pop out or get someone to drop stuff outside my door. I fancy some fish and, fortunately, I managed to pick up a last tin of mushy peas from a supermarket on Sunday. As you see, not easy to think ahead when you are used to thinking in small steps. A number of people I have spoken to are not sure whether they have had the coronavirus or not. As basic healthy people, was it just a bit of under-the-weatherness? And, by the way, how is the common cold dealing with sudden coronavirus celebrity? And the basic common-or-garden flu? I imagine the two of them furious with recent developments.

If working from home beckons (could be on the cards) a number of issues emerge. The main one is how I present my domestic context. What will be the backdrop to my happy talking face? The classic one is a wallfull of shelves filled with learned tomes, leather bound, oeuvres completes, an index to the seriousness of the skyper, but maybe a little pompous. How then do I present myself? Playfully, I think. I have a little wooden horse ornament on the mantlepiece. Perhaps I could shift the angle of my computer to catch fleeting and enigmatic clues to my normally occluded personality: the horse; the corner of a wine rack; the edge of a chess board; the artfully angled Persian rug. What I will not be exposing is the Game of Thrones box set, my empty packet of chocolate biscuits, my various dirty underwares, the sink of unwashed dishes.

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I remember as a thirteen year old the first time I read Macbeth. This was as a revelation to me. The language and the syntax were so thick and involved. They were like bracken soaked in tar. Trying to decode the complications was like cutting open a large insect and examining its insides, seeing how the various parts fitted together, some of them exuding black liquid matter. The rhythms were like witch chant. You could see why this was a dangerous set of words, a text that was damned.

You do not often get texts like that. Or maybe it is only at rare times that you are receptive to that kind of experience.

Then I made it into a play with little puppets and my little sisters helping me out. I think we did almost the entire play, unexpurgated, longer than most staged verions, for my mum and dad. My mum and dad had to sit through it. After a bit my mum started reading the paper and my dad fell asleep. We just kept going for a couple of hours. The three witches; Lady Macbeth; Banquo’s ghost; Birnam Wood; the lot. We read all the parts from behind the stage and moved the little puppets around.  My sisters, aged ten and eight, were exhausted  but I was a hard taskmaster. I was like the Cecil B demille of  number 1 Woodbank Ave. I suppose I was possessed. Decades later I still have Macbeth in my head more than any other block of writing. It is the backbeat to all my things.

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