One of us has developed symptoms. Tuesday 31 March - Australia - 4557 cases - 179 per million population

It's definitely not the virus we are sheltering from that has her in its clutches, but a no less dangerous longer term addiction that has caused her to work feverishly all day and into the night.   

After sewing a gazillion quilts (and sails, which are after all just a quilt with bigger blocks) over the years, and even our boat covers one of us announced not so long ago that she was going to direct her creative energy in other directions.   She explained that she'd done enough, that there were other roads less trod on which she would like to travel.

Yet the symptoms of her disease remained, mostly invisible but lurking somewhere within.  It is a matter of record that what seemed like much of the writer's last day out before being confined in voluntary isolation was spent standing outside a fabric shop, waiting, while within she did whatever it is one does for hours in a fabric shop only to emerge empty handed.  Shortly after that she began shuffling through her boxes of what is the fabric hoarder's equivalent of timber offcuts, laying out bits, standing back, looking with that familiar tilt of the head, eyes squinted to better gauge the position of colour tones in the pattern, and it was clear that some sort of relapse was well underway.  

"I think I'll make a quilt as a farewell gift" she announced.  "But they are leaving the day after tomorrow" the other replied, his words falling on entirely deaf ears, she was already a woman on a mission, barely looking up, stopping only to feed us both once or twice, not even to make the bed, for crying out loud!

By the time we waved our choking farewells to Chris and Phil this afternoon (from a safe distance), they had a new throw rug for their van to remind them of our decade in close proximity, and we had a house that was doing a fair imitation of a bomb site.  They'll only be a few hundred kilometres away so it's not as if we are losing them for ever.  No doubt the urge to visit one another will arise from time to time just like the urge to make just one more quilt.