Sir, As an elder of this town, and one who has seen it all before, I look at my fellow townsfolk with despair.

Long glum faces. Walk along our narrow streets with hardly room to pass. Elaborate manouevres to avoid contact, but when you offer a nice paso-doble you are faced with a scowl so murderous you wish you hadn’t given ground in the first place. Forget courtesy. We are too miserable to be polite.

Shops are shut. Pubs are closed. But happily the parking police are unmoved, a bastion of what was...and you thank the officer for his attention in this low tourist season when most of us are harassed.

When Hitler was doing his worst there was a community spirit abroad. We all mucked in together often with a gleam in the eye. We sang ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ and of nightingales in Berkeley Square. But now in year 2020 we sit transfixed before televisions in a state of ponderous inertia.

Goodness. Put the clock back 78 years.?Children provided with clogs and gardening tools, dug for victory. And as they dug, they sang. Contrast that with children today all pampered againt this aerial invasion. Silent. Moody.

Yet which was worse? Hitler’s Luftwaffe or the deadly droplets from the Orient? The bombing would tear you apart painfully.

Boris has condemned us to isolation, shut away in house arrest. But this state can be invigorating. Imagine yourselves as Nelson Mandela returning to normal life in triumph after scores of years incarcerated.

So it is all an attitude of mind how you confront your house arrest.

Newspapers tell of stock-outs in supermarkets. Toilet rolls almost absent from the shelves. Affordable wine too. Well for us all, life is a mattrer of selection. Wine or toilet rolls? Don’t be greedy. A crate will be enough.

Isolation may bring culture changes. Live Assocaition?Football is off the menu, What are we all going to talk about? And that awful hysterical Come Dancing must be a candidate for the guillotine on television. You see, Boris knows what he is doing. This is not just a question of life and death. It is of culture too.

This correspondent recommends we all stay smiling. This is not the end of the world. Not in the least.

Readers may be sympathetic to this view, but still harbour one or two doubts. A raising of the cap to the vicar may not come amiss.

The country beat Hitler and his Nazi monsters and I personally think that should remain as the template for our attitude today. But do keep smiling.

Mr. Pen-Nib,

Tenby 2020.

(Name and address

supplied)