Welcome to a special edition of a Spectator podcast, except this isn't really a podcast.

Every week during lockdown, we are asking three of our writers to read out what they've written for the magazine.

The idea is that normally a magazine is passed between

readers and their friends, so each article can be read two, three, four, even five times,

but this won't be happening so much now that we're not allowed to see each other. So first,

we have Rachel Johnson reading her diary, then we have Paul Wood about the morality of COVID testing and a new

back street testings which have crept up. And then finally we have Simon Barnes about the beauty

and the art and the point of boxing. First, Rachel Johnson. When the post office and stores closed

in our village on Exmoor, my youngest stared out

of the car window as we drove past and saw its dreaded closed sign and for sale placard outside for the

first time. That's my whole childhood, he wailed. Gone. As an over 50 who's had peak everything, I can't complain, out loud anyway,

but I find the losses for younger generations too painful to contemplate. No travel, no parties,

no pubs, no clubs, no sport, no sex, no education, a life unlived online for the foreseeable.

Given how badly Oliver took that one tiny but vital enterprise shutting up shop,

I've been surprised and impressed by how well millions have adapted to the closure of the country.

Lockdown has worked because, against all expectation, there turned out to be many more acceptors and sufferers than resistors,

the three pandemic personalities identified by King's College.

I'm keeping a note of some of the less seismic adaptations.

Everything is a family now.

Priti Patel speaks of the Blue Light family of emergency workers.

Rishi Sunak of the health and social care family.

Journalists of the superior ability of female leaders from from Iceland to Taiwan, to care for the human family.

...