My faith in humanity is restored. Having decided to make gowns for her local NHS, Bella Gonshorovitz persuaded James O’Brien of LBC to do a tweet about her fund-raising appeal, which the Guardian picked up and in the space of less than a day she had raised all that she needs and more to make and supply the gowns. Thank you to all those who have helped. It’s such a direct and straightforward way of getting the equipment that is so obviously needed to the front line.

It’s taken me much longer to read the volume of essays on The Lives of Houses, edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee, than it should have done. That’s because although in theory I have all day and every day in which to read in practice there is always something else to be done. Also, I have found the essays, nicely varied in style and subject, work best as bonne bouches – Alexandra Harris on moving house, Hermione Lee on Penelope Fitzgerald, a good essay by Margaret MacMillan on her family’s house in Toronto, the appalling mess in which W.H. Auden chose to live in New York. It’s a good subject, particularly, as it happens, when we’re all locked up in our domestic circumstances.

Our friend Bella Gonshorovitz, who did her MA dissertation on the way that clothes can enhance the morale of people with disabilities, is now organising making gowns for hospital staff, since, although we are assured by government ministers day after day that hospitals have all the equipment they need, it is increasingly clear that they live in cloud cuckoo land. She is trying to raise money for her work. This is how to help:-

https://www.gofundme.com/f/making-gowns-for-nhs-staff?

Since handing in the text of my book about art museums to Thames & Hudson, I have been trying to resist the temptation to add to or change the text: with one exception. I was persuaded to write something about what the effect of Coronavirus will be on museums, in which I now, only two weeks later, think I may have underestimated the consequences as I watch museums everywhere furlough staff, particularly, I notice, their education staff, and the value of their endowments sink.

What I wonder will be the effect of the current terrible recession on two of the great current building projects – the Zumthor building at LACMA, already underway, and Jamie Fobert’s renovation of the NPG, soon to begin ? Most especially, will much more activity go online or will people rediscover and relish the experience of seeing the original, once it becomes possible again ?

I’m breaking my self-imposed lockdown on my blog, only because I am getting increasingly frustrated by the government’s total unwillingness to accept any responsibility for the delay in implementing a lockdown, the number of deaths this has caused, the pretence that their belief in herd immunity did not happen (did we just imagine it ?), and the total failure of the opposition to hold the government to account. I have just checked on the date that I was first told all about the dangers of Coronavirus, how it was likely to cause a gigantic epidemic, which could only be solved by the development of a vaccine, which was likely to take at least a year, and how the Chinese had made the necessary information about the disease available to scientists globally. It was on Tuesday 28th. January. If I who am not a scientist, nor an epidemiologist, nor in any way involved with government, knew all about what was likely to happen, why did it take the next eight weeks for the government to act ?

It was too late, as is obvious if one compares what has happened in Great Britain as compared to Ireland. At least two weeks too late. Surely this is the question Keir Starmer should be asking ? It’s not unpatriotic.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/uk-government-coronavirus-science-who-advice?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

We are alive and well, but the blog has gone into lockdown. It will resume one day.

I walked into this field this evening to look at the may which is flowering in the hedges:-

I find the washing which I hang up each morning reassuring:-

As is the view out to the mountains:-

The gatepost:-

The irises will be out soon and the willow already is:-

Maybe we will recover:-

In the absence of much else to write about, I am posting more pictures of the horses which keep us company in the adjacent field – Welsh ponies, Welsh cobs, and, I gather, a highland cob, but I am not enough of a cognoscente to know which is which:-

I was tipped off that Tide, the local cafe at Halen Môn, where they make Anglesey Sea Salt, was doing food boxes if you order online. I tried it today: the freshest of fresh home-made bread; peppery salad leaves grown locally in Dwyran; chard; chocolate and sea salt cookies. It would have been good at the best of times. But, as self-isolation begins to take its toll, however beautiful the surroundings, the simplicity of the food, particularly fresh bread, collected from a beach hut on the Menai Straits, was nectar of the gods:-