stay home save lives

We looked up from the balcony at lunchtime, and there was writing in the sky.  STAY HOME SAVE LIVES seems a clear enough injunction.  It's one we'd taken to heart already, having decided that for the next couple of weeks at least, going out for walks is just too risky: the arrogant young hipsters walking designer dogs who don't wait for one to get out of the way; the families with three children; the man up the street - this was the worst - sitting in front of his house, coughing.  So now exercise is going to consist of Stairs - up and down them, inside and out, and walking along the narrow top of the back garden and trying not to fall down the hill onto the increasingly splendid poppies.

Of course it's impossible to look at skywriting, ever, and not be reminded of Mrs Dalloway.  If that was a fictional device - everyone looking up at once; trying to decipher the letters that might or might not be advertising toffee - designed to show that disparate people in London were, indeed, at some level connected, I guess that this might well be said to be happening for all of us self-isolating in Los Angeles ...