Lettuce pray

+There will soon be a new sub-genre of the plague diary hitting the columns in the press. Is this a good time to start a diary? With so many people told to self-isolate, what better time to pour your thoughts into a record for posterity. What were the daily challenges, the ups and downs, the fights in the supermarket, the issues around discovering close confinement, etc., etc? Diarists with good agents or something spectacularly interesting to say will either end up with newspaper deals or perhaps more remuneratively become ‘influencer’ types on social media. Sharing life experiences in times of stress can of course be a good thing, and since so many people might be thinking that they’re on their own, it can be reassuring to hear others’ voices. But there may well be those whose experiences will be brought to us with added bathos, to bring what is probably a dull and wholly boring routine to some form of literary life.
 
+One of the questions that must be on all our minds at the moment is how are the super-rich coping? For those who treat the world as their plaything, these times could be a little unnerving. Not least since for many of them their excessive wealth will have taken a knock on the stock exchanges.  But mostly they’ll have enough dosh to escape the virus. They should eschew their bunkers (whose ventilator shafts might deliberately become clogged up with all sorts of detritus) and take to their super-yachts for circular trips around the South Atlantic, where self-isolation is more or less guaranteed. For the very few ultra-rich perhaps a trip to the International Space Station could be in order, where through a porthole they could watch the rest of us cough ourselves to death. I read last week that lettuce has been successfully grown on the ISS. Let them eat lettuce!