“No man is an island entire of itself” as John Donne put it, since he was born too early to have read Robinson Crusoe or watched Matt Damon in The Martian. Still, the consensus is that Donne was on to something, which accounts for why the phrase is so well known.

In the weird new world of “self-isolation” (a redundant term, like “safe haven”), lots of us must have found ourselves thinking along similar lines. After all, isolate, like insulate, comes from a root that means island.

On one level, Donne was certainly right. A paradoxical effect of lockdown has been to emphasise how dependent we all are on other people for the most basic things. Even the folk who were congratulating themselves on their sourdough starters a few weeks ago have discovered that you may be able to make bread without buying yeast, but it gets much trickier when there’s no flour in the shops.

Naturally, that’s a trivial example compared with the real suffering of those who have lost loved ones, or who have seen their livelihoods destroyed. But while we’re all affected to some degree by the current restrictions, their effects are very far from being equal.

Some people – especially those whose who can work comfortably from home, or whose income is secure – are clearly finding the lockdown irksome rather than traumatic. There are lots of other factors involved; those who are in a household with others may be finding it easier than those separated from loved ones (or, in some cases, harder). Hence the predictions of a spike in both the divorce rate and the birth rate as a result of the pandemic.

How big your house is, whether it has a garden, the reliability of your broadband, or your proximity to the countryside, or to a shop carrying essentials, all have an impact on the ability to cope with the current curtailments on our freedom. The most significant consideration, however, is a matter of attitude.

The – to me, rather surprising – results of a poll conducted at the weekend indicate that only one in five of us thinks that it would be a good idea for schools to go back, while not more than about one in ten thinks that the time is right for pubs and restaurants to reopen. No doubt much of this caution is based on the fact that the authorities, political and scientific, stress the importance of maintaining restrictions until we are certain that we are well into the downward slope of the disease’s transmission. It’s probably, for the moment at least, the sensible view.

All the same, it indicates a remarkable degree of compliance with what are very substantial restrictions on normal life. In America, there has been a predictable degree of protest against such measures from extreme libertarians – though there is a certain irony in the fact that the gun-toting “live free or die” survivalists who usually spend their time banging on about how they are ready to ride out the apocalypse in a bunker somewhere in Idaho have swarmed on to the streets to whine about the temporary closure of International House of Pancakes.

But in the UK, complaints seem to be limited to crackpots from the anti-vaccine movement or conspiracy theorists convinced that 5G masts are part of a Tory plot to murder the population. Indeed, most of those who are complaining loudest about the policies designed to deal with the pandemic are cross about the measures that have not been brought in – demanding that the airports should be closed, or that it should be compulsory to wear masks and gloves.

It’s rather alarming to see the eagerness with which some have embraced the opportunity to boss everyone else about, shop their neighbours, or argue that coronavirus proves the case for something – communism, nationalisation of utilities, universal basic income, the sugar tax, halting immigration, a smoking ban – that they already believed in.

On the whole, however, the attitudes towards lockdown from those who are not seriously affected by personal or financial loss seem to be less a matter of political disposition than of temperament. What matters is how social you are, rather than how socialist.

The clearest examples are in those activities which depend for their appeal on the fact that they are communal: not so much having a meal in a restaurant or chatting to friends in the pub, which most of us will be missing to some degree, but gatherings which rely on mass shared responses for their emotional pull. Those of us – and I admit I’m one – who aren’t particularly susceptible to this sort of thing, or whose idea of hell is crowded gatherings, will no doubt shrug, but it shouldn’t blind us to the real loss which many people will be finding it.

For some it will be church or mosque, for others nightclubs or music festivals. But some of the effect even of those activities can be satisfied in isolation. You may not be able to go to the cinema, but you can still watch a film; live music may be preferable to recordings, but there’s no overall shortage of music; and people are not entirely deprived of the consolations of religion just because services are suspended.

The great exception to this, and the one that seems to be a trial for a lot of people, seems to be sport. I was annoyed by the interruption to the Six Nations, but I wouldn’t say that the near-disappearance of competitive sport has made much difference to me. But for those who follow a football team, or racing, who count the days until Wimbledon rolls round, or were keenly anticipating the Olympics, this must be a considerable deprivation – and at exactly a time when that sort of distraction, as well as a sense of tribal belonging, would have been most welcome.

Sport may be a trifling matter when compared with the NHS or the economy but the loss of it should seem – even to those of us not much bothered by it – one of the strangest aspects of the current lockdown. And, unfortunately for the fans, it also appears to be one of the things that will be hardest to get back to normal.

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