Hardly a day goes by without someone remarking how much worse lockdown would have been in pre-ICT times. As a cartoonist interpreted it, we’d have had to sit around on milking stools waiting for Shakespeare to finish writing King Lear so we’d have something to binge-read.

Worrying about finding something to read or watch is now as moot (to those of us privileged enough to have wifi or data) as worrying about how to get hold of people. Every kind of contact except the actual physical kind is right there at our fingertips. When we are fatigued by Zoom meetings we can take a break and watch Welsh sheep playing on a merry-go-round on EweTube.

You might have noticed that I sneaked the word “moot” in there. Moot is one of those egregious English words that grew up to mean the opposite of what it meant when it was born...