What a time of captivity, what a time of plague. The Disney musical Frozen, long delayed by the mammoth Melbourne lockdown, opened and then immediately had to stop. Sydney has the prospect of a lockdown that could stretch beyond human reckoning. No wonder a friend said last year you were better off reading the account of plague by the great Greek historian Thucydides than a newspaper: it was starker, it showed other societies had suffered worse, it was better written.