30 March

Today I did not do anything very much.

C, who lives up the road, read yesterday's missive and lent me a spare monitor.

Some fool changed the clocks on Sunday and it has only just caught up with me.

"But Father O'Leary: if I go out honestly intending to take my permitted exercise, and my permitted exercise takes me past a shop, then, provided I remain two meters from the other people in the shop, may I go inside and buy something which is not essential for my survival, like chocolate or a newspaper?"

The Easter Egg thing is interesting. It has always been the job of the police to keep things ticking over, to give directions and tell people the time and stop groups of kids being naughty, even if no-one is actually "breaking the law". So politely telling people to stand further apart or to move on gatherings of more than two people is very much what they ought to be doing, and really does not amount to a police state. (I myself was sitting on a park bench with one other person, several feet, if not quite two meters apart, and a policeman politely moved us on.) But the police can't enforce a law which doesn't exist: I have been working on the assumption that a 90 minute walk (10,000 steps), once a day, is reasonable. The only time I leave the house, and combined with any shopping I need to do.

We could reach a point where shopping is nationalized and rationed and Sansburys is not allowed to see chocolate or beer or magazines or small Frozen figurines. (I believe we have decided that off-licences  - liquor stores - can stay open, which implies a very sensible attitude to "essential.") Until that happens it is madness to say "You have no right to be out, since you have purchased chocolate, and chocolate is inessential." I suppose it would be consistent with Plan A which was that pubs could stay open, but no-one was allowed to go to them. Shops may sell chocolate eggs, but no-one is allowed to buy any.

Where did anyone find a shop selling Easter Eggs anyway, since we learned last year that Easter Eggs have been banned by the cultural Marxists? 

That's the line to take, isn't it? Easter Eggs and Easter Bunnies are an intrinsic part of the Christian festival of Easter, and if you stop us buying them you are preventing us from practicing our religion, and you wouldn't dare do that during Ramadan, would you. I am pitching an article to the Daily Mail as we speak.