The Pride of Pimlico has closed, its door and windows sealed up with perforated steel. Not long ago the Surprise at Pimlico closed. I never foresaw this closing down of pubs, which a generation ago were money-printing machines.

It is not exactly that pubs are Catholic organisms, for they throve as well in parts of the country undisturbed by much challenge to the Established Church. The old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings might not have stopped off for a pint of warm mild and bitter on the way home, but the men who cut their hedges and delivered their milk did.

The loss of pubs encourages atomisation. Coffee shops function in quite a different manner, their customers isolated and uncommunicating. The laptops and phones to which they are tethered could have someone at the other end, but their chief function is to encase each person in a transparent bubble, like Dan Dare in his space helmet. By chance a traveller might have a wife or husband in tow, but this no more counts as company than a large suitcase on wheels.