St Ives...

As a child of the television age, I automatically think of illnesses, and their remedies, in terms of anthropomorphic cartoons. So I picture a headache as a man inside my head with a hammer. Whenever I get heartburn, and take a dose of Gaviscon, I conjure up a pair of uniformed firemen dousing the flames in my stomach with their fire-hoses. There are no images associated with the invisible menace of the coronavirus, and a cure, too, remains aspirational… yet to escape from the confines of wishful thinking.

Licensed today, the Sloop Inn on the quayside in St Ives...