With just under a quarter of households comprising a single person, loneliness and isolation threaten to permeate what is already shaping up to be a particularly trying winter for the single among us.
Robert Lacey is sitting beside a large parcel of draft chapters of his new book, Battle of Brothers, which have been returned unopened from Buckingham Palace.
With Covid case numbers as they are, it seems further restrictions are highly likely.
An outbreak at a GAA club in Limerick led to a dozen players testing positive for Covid-19 and the virus being spread to close contacts.
To lockdown or not to lockdown? That is the question that drifts into the minds of most of us at some point each week, if several times a day of late.
Controversial figures are supported until they aren't. A party will support a divisive figure if they feel they'll deliver votes and power. But once the public starts to desert them, their enablers soon follow.
When Anthony Scaramucci was, in the space of just 10 days, hired and fired as White House communications director, one commentator likened the brief fandango to "the life cycle of a fruit fly".
