Okay, so for a travel column – when absolutely nobody is travelling – it has to be a good excuse to write about something other than going places (aka travel). Although, that said, there is still the odd travel tale to relate.

For instance, when a mean SOB of a pandemic virus brings the world to a grinding halt, how ironic is it that some people still can’t stop complaining about airlines? Like a neighbor of mine who this weekend, for family reasons, flew from JFK to South Carolina. He’s always enjoyed feeding me stories about his frequent air trips (he’s a private equity type) usually on the basis of, “Here’s something you’re really going to want to write about!” – and it’s inevitably some bad experience he claims to have had on an airline. I strongly suspect that more often than not HE is the cause of problem rather the airline.

Anyway, on arrival in Charleston he called me from his rental car specifically to say “Can you believe it? I flew this afternoon and was one of just nine passengers – I counted them – on an A320. And you won’t believe it, but I still got lousy service!”

Resisting the temptation to simply say, “Yes, I believe it” I asked about the airport experience, “Breezed through, it was like a ghost town – absolutely empty” he replied. But then, perhaps fearing that could have smacked of positivity, he had to throw in, “But it was actually quite awful, absolutely nothing was open. There was nowhere to get a drink, not even a cup of coffee.”

He failed to mention that the round-trip had cost him under $200, something that I learned later from his wife, who told me it was the only reason he’d decided to make the trip.

For those not daring to escape house arrest and take flight, the whole sorry situation clearly hasn’t stopped anyone from meeting and chatting with friends and family.

Over the last few weeks I have found myself being swept into an ever-widening vortex of Zoom parties, FaceTime chats, Skype and WhatsApp calls with all sorts of people. I’ve even indulged in the occasional plain, old-fashioned phone call. You really ought to use it sometime – it still works just fine.

The nice part is that the people on the other end of these things consist of not just family and current friends but all kinds of old school chums and former work colleagues (even an ex-girlfriend from my youth) many of whom I haven’t communicated with in years.

Conducted from our living rooms and kitchens, one Zoom call included my brother and wife in the UK, his three married sons plus assorted wives and kids – two in the UK one in North Carolina – my daughter and her kids on Bowen Island BC, and my four sons all of whom are in Connecticut as their schools all closed for the duration. It was great fun and at its conclusion we all said the same thing, “We really must do this again.”

What we should probably have been asking though was, “Why on earth does in take a pandemic to get us to do this for the first time ever?” The technology has been there for a while but I guess the answer is that when our lives are ‘normal’ we’re just too busy to think of such things: Kind of sad really.

I’ve even become a very willing participant is several weekly Zoom “happy hours.” One of the more imaginative ones is at 5:30 on Friday evenings between four pals in London and half-a-dozen of us in New York and Boston. We branded it the, ‘Time Gentlemen Please Hour” because, as the name suggests, with the five-hour time difference, it’s close to the traditional closing time call in the UK and it’s time here for us to open the first cold one of the evening.

My other virtual, ‘Zoom Me Another One’ hour on Wednesday evenings includes about seven of us spread around in New York, Miami, Toronto, Montreal and Calgary. One upside here – it’s certainly a lot cheaper than doing the same thing in bars in any of those cities!

So, while all these newly stimulated modes of communication are the result of our virus-driven incarceration and ‘social distancing’ – at the same time it has, somewhat paradoxically, managed to stimulate a new genre of what can only be called ‘long distance social closeness.’

For those of you paying attention, you will have noted that I am still available for online Cinq à Septs on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday – I like to take the weekends off. Let me know.

Stay safe, stay sane.