Obviously, if I’d known at Christmas what I know now, my “things to be happy about” series of advent posts would have included things like “the pubs are open” and “supermarkets sell toilet roll” and they would have been much easier to write. But we’re not called Glad All Over for nothing (yes OK, it’s because of Crystal Palace, but if the official CPFC song was, I don’t know, Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter then I wouldn’t have named my blog after it) and so in these exceptionally trying times I am going to do my best to start bringing you doses of good news, fun links and just cheering things, however small.

And also, things to do when you can’t leave the house! A couple of weeks before This All Started I found myself randomly watching an old episode of Death In Paradise and then somehow helplessly watching episode after episode, completely entranced. Death In Paradise has been going for almost ten years, a fact I only know because the original writer, Robert Thorogood, was the brother of my then-boss who told me his brother had only set it in the Caribbean so that he could go to the Caribbean. This seems entirely sensible to me and it obviously worked, because the next best thing to going to the Caribbean is looking at the Caribbean from afar, and since looking at things we like from a long way away is the new normal I think you should follow my example and watch it all on iPlayer. (But don’t follow my example of starting with S4, because I don’t know why I did it and now I don’t know what series to watch next. Just watch them from the beginning like a normal person.)

I should warn you that it is racially problematic (the comedy characters are all black; murder victims and murderers all white) and every episode follows exactly the same formula (though this in itself is also sort of comforting, especially when you find yourself saying the lines along with the characters), but it is so sun-filled and light-hearted that I can just about forgive it its many flaws, because watching an episode and seeing all of that outside is very much a tonic for being stuck on the sofa in a cold and grey Greenwich.

(Although the best thing that’s happened so far this week was going to the park yesterday and staying socially distant from my sister, but being allowed to say hello to the dog. Outside is outside, after all, and there is, as you know, literally nothing better than a dog.)