Go away, it’s mine Like many people, I’m still enraged by the exploits of the prime minister’s adviser, Dominic Cummings, and those who seek to protect him. But alas, my ire is additionally tinged with my strongly proprietorial feelings about Barnard Castle, where he travelled to in order to test his eyesight. Naturally, I’m well aware that several thousand people live in Barnard Castle; I’ve seen, too, the crowd that gathers at the Bowes Museum to watch the glorious Silver Swan – an automaton much admired by Mark Twain when he saw it at the 1867 Paris exhibition – dive for fish. Nevertheless, I’ve always clung to the illusion that the town is my secret. Reading in the Northern Echo that inquiries about short stays in the area were up by 160%, my heart sank faster than Boris Johnson’s ratings. When I say proprietorial, I mean slightly crazed. In our hall hangs an old railway poster advertising the virtues of Teesdale – to where Barnard Castle is a gateway – by LNER. I bought this at auction at Sotheby’s via telephone, a call I made in a corridor at University College Hospital, to which my husband had been taken by ambulance for an emergency brain scan following a football accident. Yes, I agree (and so does he) that this was ruthless of me: positively cold, in fact. But I had to have it! And isn’t it a good thing to be able to remain calm in a crisis? To keep one’s focus? More weirdly, I own – and wear – a lovely piece of Victorian tourist tat in the form of a rose gold locket that is enamelled with the words: “A souvenir from Barnard Castle.” Open it, and inside you will find four tiny, sepia scenes, among them one of the very same market place that flashed up on the television news virtually every night last week. Lockdown longings From tomorrow, we can see our families and friends again, even if we won’t be able to touch them – and so, for the time being, our collective longing for others will be at an end. What does it mean to miss someone? For generations before our own, to do so was an ordinary thing, if still a painful one. But for many of us, this has been a new experience. Reading Love in the Blitz, a collection of wartime letters by a young woman called Eileen Alexander to the man she would later marry, Gershon Ellenbogen, I felt new gratitude for the fact that I’ve only rarely been separated from those I love for very long – but also, a piercing sense of recognition. Yearning is difficult to bottle: the only words that get close tend to sound, on the page, cloying and needy. “Darling!” Alexander writes, again and again (Ellenbogen was in the RAF). “Think of me.” As she comes to realise, perhaps it’s best not even to attempt to capture the ache, but rather to fill the emptiness with something else: news from where you are; the sense that although everything has changed, some things – you – will always be the same. Peony paradise Peonies are governed by two basic laws. The first is that they’re moody: move one, and it will sulk, probably for years. The second is that no sooner have they begun to blossom, than it will howl a gale, and every long-awaited bloom will be instantly destroyed. But not this year. I’ve never seen such magnificent flowers. Depending on my mood – ie how much rosé I’ve drunk – mine resemble ethereal feather dusters, or the late Barbara Cartland’s skirts. •Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist