I have spent two solid days listening to an audiobook, “The Great Influenza” by James M. Barry. Fine popular history — by that, I mean the kind written to tell a fascinating story about something important that really happened — and uncomfortably prescient in its concluding chapter, the obligatory “So what?” part of the book. It was published about 15 years ago.

A point the author consistently makes is that troop movements and concentrations of military personnel and industrial workers vastly magnified the impact of the 1918 pandemic, which makes me feel a lot better about the lockdowns and travel bans we have had since March 2020.

On the home front, the chest freezer is now stripped down to rather a lot of soup stock in litre containers, one litre of mashed raspberries for which I have no plans although they date from July 2020, and one litre of Marcella Hazan’s delicious tomato sauce for pasta. I think the last time I bought meat was something like six or seven weeks ago, when I got a large chicken to feed the in-laws. Nowadays I eat mostly fish or vegetarian meals.

What would you do with a litre of mashed raspberries? Not jam — I have enough raspberry jam to last me the rest of my life.