Today is Sunday—the second of the quarantine—and, as I mentioned last week, on Sundays we have lunch. I love cooking and am passably competent. A significant part of my Instagram account is now food: sadly the blossom is blooming amid the glorious ruins of a millennium of triumph and anguish unobserved; the shadowy churches are keeping the motes of incense dancing in their shafts of spring sunlight to themselves.

The best ready meal ever.

Despite my fondness for cooking, it’s always nice to have something different, and one thing our neighbourhood is missing is a really good fishmonger. So we took advantage of an ingenious idea spotted on the Facebook page of Michelin-starred Pascucci al Porticciolo at Fiumicino. As restaurants are closed by law they provide a kit with pasta (kamut grain tagliatelle from Felicetti, the optimal pasta folk); a vacuum packed bag of sauce made with chunks of slow-cooked Mediterranean bluefin tuna, bottled tomatoes from the organic Paglione farm in Puglia; a chunk of (extremely good) pecorino Romano; and even a few leaves of basil. A DIY takeaway delivered (at distance, sadly we now live in the age of the dead drop) to the front door of our building by Gianfranco Pascucci himself. I did my very best to do it justice in the preparation and it was totally delicious. A proper taste of the sea, and of summer. A wonderful treat for Sunday lunch, and so abundant we still have half of the pasta and sauce to cook for tomorrow. Four plates of top notch delicious fishy pasta delivered by the chef himself for €40. Not bad.

Afterwards, because it’s Mothering Sunday in the UK, we had a quarantine conference call with my siblings, their families, and my parents to wish my mother, Elizabeth (here, for all your suffrage needs), a happy Mothers’ Day. All of us chirping in our little boxes. Some nearer some farther, and more and more all in a similar boat and waiting anxiously for this to pass. We were all able to quiz my older niece about the new remote-schooling regime, and my little niece blithely showed off her new trick. Proper walking. I hope we can all watch her do it together before too long.