Is it the same world it was when I wrote last week? In the space of seven days the place has continued on its trajectory of rapid change. We’ve gone from resenting the hoarders emptying shelves, being vituperative about the youngsters who congregated instead of distancing to finally obeying instructions.

One could concentrate on what one can no longer do; personally, I’ve not left my home (I include the garden) for almost two weeks. The enforced containment has given time for reading news and an endless stream of social media. It’s made me more aware of the disparate ways in which we live; I have my garden but what does a single mother or someone with a worrying health condition do in a flat? As someone of pensionable age, my income doesn’t depend on my employment but what is it like to fear that there won’t be enough?

I have discovered that it matters not a jot who you are or how you live, if you make a need known someone will come forward to meet it - you may never have met them but their generosity is unbounded. And to think that a little while ago it seemed that so much voluntary work was done by the old and the young were either too busy or didn’t care to follow on from us. I publicly apologise for ever thinking that the younger generation was too selfish to help.

People are seeing analogies to wartime so I’ll share a story from 1940 which shows that extraordinary kindness is not a new thing. My parents married in 1938 and lived in Coventry. My sister was born a few days before Hitler tried to obliterate the city. Their house was destroyed and while my father stayed, doing his job and as an auxiliary fireman (and never really talked about the horrors), my mother and sister were taken in for eighteen months by a friend from Leicester whom she’d met while on holiday in 1929. My mother once commented that when your house disappeared down a bomb hole but the people you cared about were all right, you never again lost your sense of proportion. Does it really matter that I cannot go out to obtain my favoured brand of some comestible?

Diana Manville, Gazette Community Correspondent for Kempshott