Samuel Pepys was always better at social than distancing. At the end of 1665, after bubonic plague had taken off a quarter of London’s population, he wrote in his diary: “I have never lived so merrily . . . as I have done this plague time.”
By December the great tide of death had abated but even as it had swept in months earlier, Pepys wrote of “the greatest glut of content that ever I had”, adding, almost as an afterthought, “only under some difficulty because of the plague”.
