With classic plague literature now fairly thoroughly mined for instructive similarities with our current predicament – official cover-ups, forced isolation, mad clerics, makeshift burials, heavy-handed policing etc – perhaps it is time to turn to some of the differences. One of the major ones being, of course, the earlier absence of influencers.
As terrifying as it would have been for anyone stuck in the London described by Defoe or inside Camus’s Oran, these imprisoned citizens were, at least, spared survival tips dreamed up in the remote homes and gardens of fund managers, celebrity chefs, professional tidier-uppers, titled brand ambassadors, “tablescaping” experts. You might be banged up, scared and brooding on things left undone and unsaid, in 1665, but at least nobody thought this was the perfect time to inform you that “this period of self-isolation is a good chance to experiment with more decadent table settings”. Yes, even if you are alone, mid-virus. “At a moment like this,” the same connoisseur continues, “quirky tableware is particularly uplifting.”
We can’t be sure, admittedly, that daily bulletins on the lockdown habits of more successful 17th-century people, on matters such as skincare (“there’s been no better time than now to look after number one”) and a new, working from home wardrobe (“yes, you’re confined. Your style needn’t be”) wouldn’t have made pestilence and economic catastrophe more endurable, even for those unable to sit it out in Oxford or Salisbury. “Has there ever,” suggests Samuel Pepys, “been a better time to organise your old wigs?”
Today, there are presumably people confined to garden-less flats with hostile fellow-occupants who find that articles such as “Why we decided not to self-isolate in our Cornwall holiday home”, along with joyous diaries from isolated mansions (“I’m also planting a vegetable garden”) are just the thing – like the government’s separate bathroom advice – to get them through another day of confinement. Maybe people don’t need, personally, to feel blessed in the face of illness and redundancy, to benefit from the example of busy professionals for whom, it emerges, the ideal isolated day might begin with entries in a gratitude notebook. Has there ever been a better time to start one?
As for material, the FT’s Marie Kondo-inspired hints on gratitude practice (as a means to finding “joy at work in the age of coronavirus”) include “be thankful for being healthy”.
No disrespect to Kondo, whose tidying is unrivalled, but, as with fellow influencers, some of her hints could challenge civilians now dependent for survival on universal credit or facing other threats – from abuse to overcrowding – to their gratitude or online shopping practice. Maybe it’s because this contagion’s projected remedy - self-isolation - is situated, literally, in the world of interiors, that the restrictions have been so widely understood as an athleisure-buying/self-care/crafting/decluttering opportunity, as opposed to an impending economic catastrophe. But maybe I’ve forgotten similarly abundant guidance on fermenting turnips, dumping cleaners and gratitude practice after the 2008 banking collapse, generally from the very people it was least likely to touch.
While some of our more fatuous celebrities seem to have piped down a bit, since contributions including Madonna’s from her bath and David Geffen’s from his yacht helped propel the hashtag #guillotine2020, the stream of virus-inspired lifestyle advice on things it has never been a better time to do has gone ever more Marie Antoinette. “It suddenly makes sense,” city dwellers without the space for a flock of sheep are told, “to own hens.”
Both UK lives and the UK economy were already imperilled on 17 March, the day after shutdown, when the revered fund manager Dame Helena Morrissey drew on her long experience of getting dressed and sometimes working from home to reach out. “Take time to do your hair and makeup as usual,” she advised on her Instagram account. Avoid black - “too draining for most of us on video” – and white - “too stark”. With this additional explanation for the gender pay gulf: “I’ve learned,” she wrote, “that a jewel-coloured poloneck with a necklace looks both polished and appropriate for remote meetings.” Definitely something to try when this is over.
Among those professionally supplying emergency lockdown hints is Kirstie Allsopp, whose early retreat to a spare home in Devon, with an infected partner – “Heather, our nanny, is still in Lanzarote” – was widely covered. Channel 4 recruited Jamie Oliver, 1,000 of whose staff lost their jobs last year, to provide recipes “specifically tailored for the unique times we’re living in”. Oliver, now fully regenerated as a country squire, approaches this solemn task from a gigantic house that mercifully survived the collapse of his restaurant group with £71.5m debts. The Sun took the chance to show readers “inside Jamie Oliver’s incredible £6 million Essex country pad where he’s isolating with Jules and his kids”.
“Who better than Jamie to help us all navigate the day-to-day challenge of eating well and feeding our families?” asked a Channel 4 person, who must have known that the obvious answer was (before the BBC sensibly hired her) the brilliant @BootstrapCook. Jack Monroe once struggled to feed her child and has been characteristically generous in lockdown, tweeting uses for ancient/doomed-looking ingredients.
And whose navigation could be worse? A tie, I’d say, between Richard Branson and David Cameron, reaching out from island and hut respectively. Although special Marie Antoinette points for the members of the royal family photographed empathising in the country, while their London homes stand empty.
It isn’t that self-isolation wisdom and encouragement can’t be comforting. I’ve enjoyed, in particular, the Guardian’s streaming gems, the Getty museum challenge and a terrific New Statesman compilation featuring Hilary Mantel’s recourse to Ivy Compton-Burnettt, Anthony Powell and her old bottles of scent. Finally: something for my new gratitude notebook.
• This article was amended on 6 April 2020 because an earlier version incorrectly referred to Kirstie Allsopp’s husband. In fact he is her partner.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
