If you've got just two full days in London - what were you thinking? – and you want to tick off the big-ticket attractions, plan carefully and follow the sage advice of a London Blue Badge Tourist Guide. Better yet, hire one and have them show you what you would never see on your own on a tour of Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London or even the not-so-simple-as-it-looks Changing of the Guard.

Landing the accommodation just right for you is integral to your London experience, and there’s no shortage of choice. But just because London is a city that never sleeps doesn’t mean it doesn’t go to bed: rooms in sought-after hotels can be booked solid. There are some fantastic hotels around - whatever the price tag - but and always book plan ahead.

It’s time. Slowly and with resolve, I close my bedroom window upstairs and walk down the steps into the hallway. It’s been a while. I open the front door. The world is at my feet. But like so many around me and around the world, I look to the left and to the right and I wonder: Is this what I want? In almost four months I’ve seen acts of human kindness positively overflowing, enough to fill that half-empty glass many times over.

I’m looking out the window to the street below. One of those annoying yappy dogs is dragging its owner on an exceptionally long leash. Everything about it bugs me, including its colouring (which, by the way, matches the oblivious owner’s hair). `That dog has a brown head and a black body,’ I hear a voice say. I jump and turn but see no one. But I know who is speaking.

I would very much like to continue gazing out my window – front or back – but the views are, well, fairly restricted at the moment. Scaffolding has edged up to the top floor to the north and the south. Someone had the bright idea of using this time to have the window frames and the masonry painted, the rain-ravaged cills repaired. Oh, that was me? Ooops, never mind. With Carole King belting out at the mic, I go Up on the Roof.

I believe in ghosts. Not the chain-rattling, shroud-clad nebulae that float in and out of Shakespeare’s plays and Dickens’ stories. I’m referring to people who have `moved on’ but still come back for a visit, who can talk and walk with you. Souls... Spirits… Whatever we want to call them, it’s impossible to have lived in a place like Hong Kong like we did for a dozen years and not believe in them. Just impossible.

I’m helping my husband, Michael Rothschild, re-arrange the window boxes in our bedroom upstairs. I do the lifting, not the nurturing; my thumbs are black. Two doors to the east scaffolders are erecting staging across our neighbour’s roof. Yet another loft conversion is in progress. The workmen are Polish.

I’ve taken my cue from an erstwhile neighbour – Alfred Hitchcock was born just up the road in Leytonstone – and I’ve moved to the rear window. I’m in search of the colour purple. But instead of the lilac that coyly shows its first blush this time of year through the satin-white of the magnolia tree and the billowing chartreuse of the willow, I’m getting a Phoenician purple that would have turned Queen Elizabeth I, who banned the royal colour from her court, apoplectic.

My husband, Mike Rothschild, thinks I’ve been staring out the window for too long now and suggests a bit of exercise. But our lovely lady, Vicky Park, is off-limits, I pout. `Let’s go to the Olympic Park,’ he suggests. So off on our bikes to the big green space just east of us we go, with Mike, my own personal optimist trying to keep my head above water as I struggle to submerge, wallowing in the black ink of despondency. I’ve been cooped up way too long watching the world sink from my window.

Time is weighing heavily as I sit at my window, sewing. Yes, buttons. Has it really come to this? Every once and awhile I’ll lean forward to wave or nod to a friend or a passing acquaintance. The window washer, the Baptist preacher, the local councilwoman, the `kids’ next door (who are now adults) … We know everybody. But truth be told, it didn’t get off to a good start. My husband Mike Rothschild and I moved into this house in Bow in East London at the end of the first year of the new millennium. Almost immediately we flew to the USA to visit family before returning to begin a massive renovation of our new home.

I’m standing in the bathroom on the upper floor – you really don’t have to know what I’m doing –looking wistfully through the chartreuse-coloured cascade that is the weeping willow at the bottom of our garden and across the canal to Victoria Park. It is `just spring when the world is puddle-wonderful’ as American poet E.E. Cummings once put it, and we can no longer enter it. Like pints after work and an evening at the theatre, our beloved park is just a memory. It’s encaged by tall iron gates.

Like all of us, I’m housebound. In a bid to allay cabin fever and death by boredom, I’ve taken a front-row seat by the window. With a tip of the chapeau to Colette, who wrote Paris de Ma Fenêtre (Paris from My Window) from her apartment on the Place du Palais Royal during the German occupation of WWII, I’ll begin my random musings on the city from one small corner of London during the `occupation’ by the coronavirus COVID-19.

London is the link that unites all of us who were rocked in the soft cradle of the English language or first slept on its comfortable cushions at a later age. Our shared language is the tie that binds everyone reading this, and the capital is our tongue's birthplace. At its heart is the British Library, which automatically receives a copy of everything published in the United Kingdom and Ireland.