Apple blossom

A sprinkling of rain tonight as the veiled high cloud presaged the arrival of colder air from a minor Arctic breakout. I had earlier watered the lettuce, parsley and basil plants I’d put in on Friday. I also took water to the 80 Tropea onion plants I’d bought. These are long red onions sold fresh and traditionally grown at Tropea on the coast of Calabria: a harbinger of spring and delicious sliced very thin with olive and salt on bread.

A tiny relaxation in the lockdown in Tuscany with book, stationery and children’s cloathes shops opening under strict conditions. Social distancing has been increased to 1.8m so if I go out I’ll take a measure with me.

I think there is a growing recognition that asymptomatic or slightly symptomatic transmission via respiratory droplet/aerosol is a key and underestimated contagion routeway.

Swabs taken by German doctors show that at day five of infection one swab can contain 700 million virions(published this week in Nature Medicine). If you think 5% of each breath we exhale is water vapour that gives an idea of how, particularly under stress or exertion breathing , speech, shouting, singing and laughter all provide projectile force to the dispersion of respiratory droplets and their deadly viral load. It seems the WHO is turning the ship round on mask wearing.

Masks can’t stop the virus itself - it is so tiny a thousand would fit in the width of a human hair (Tom Whipple in The Times) - but they can stop bigger respiratory droplets, maybe particularly from people who are completely unaware they are infected.

I stood under a field maple and listened to the buzz of bees on its tiny green flowers; the hobby hawks were calling persistently in the pine trees below us, the cuckoos cook and ooh and the green woodpeckers laugh there way across the terraces in search of new sprung ants.

As they say again and again on Italian TV, ‘Don’t let down your guard.’