‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. The examples he gave in his 1946 essay included the paradox that ‘for years before the war, nearly all enlightened people were in favour of standing up to Germany: the majority of them were also against having enough armaments to make such a stand effective’.

On a beautifully sunny Maundy Thursday last year, during the first lockdown, I removed my cassock, slung my satchel over my shoulder and rode my bicycle to Lambeth Palace and back. At the halfway point I paused briefly to slip a letter under the Archbishop of Canterbury’s front door, before heading for home and the sad prospect of a solitary evening mass. In my letter I asked the Archbishop to reconsider his request that we not pray in our churches.

Should the undoubted intelligence of octopuses change the way we treat them? This question has been asked a lot of late because of the documentary My Octopus Teacher. The film is about a year-long relationship between a man and an octopus, and it takes place in a kelp bed off South Africa. It celebrates the sensitivity, awareness and intelligence of the octopus. That’s a difficult concept. Octopuses — octopi is wrong because it’s not Latin and octopodes is insufferably pedantic — are molluscs.

Baby, it’s cold outside. It’s dark. It’s January. It’s Lockdown III. There’s only one thing for it: stay home, snuggle up, save lives. Cocoon yourself in cashmere, treat yourself to silk pyjamas, invest in a lambswool throw. Lay the fire, warm the cocoa, watch Love Actually for the 30th time. Practise self-care. Be sure to put you first. You’ve heard of safe spaces and The Coddling of the American Mind. Well, this is the safe space as interiors trend, coddling as lifestyle choice.