Scrooge Loved Lockdown... By Dr Hodgson-Jones

As well as teaching English at Queenswood, Dr Hodgson-Jones is a prolific and published writer of short stories. He penned this charming vignette, imagining how Dickens’ infamous miser would have responded to the pandemic... 

Scrooge loved lockdown; he loved the mean-spiritedness of it; the sanctimony; the wilful, deliberate isolation. Nothing warmed his temper – if warmed it could be – more than the thought of his nephew and his vile wife staring at each other from opposite ends of the dining table over congealed Turkey and a single pulled cracker.

That his clerk, with wife and various rat like children might be cooped up for days in the dingy hole that is Camden Town brought Scrooge’s flint-like heart the closest thing to joy it had experienced since the cholera outbreak of ’32.

And as for the poulterer; all that jollity and bulk and over-priced pigeons, Pah! A good dose of being closed down was far too good for him!

All Scrooge wondered was why the authorities had been so generous: why let people see so many as six friends? Wasn't one’s own image in the mirror good enough?