Cottard

There's a character of that name in The Plague by Camus who is, simply put, a miserable anti-social sod on the verge of topping himself just as the first buboes appear, who yet finds himself wholly reinvigorated by the new situation, as if his standoffish worldview were suddenly validated by being shared — transformed into an unlikely collective imperative.  

Salinas NYC: Gibraltar Negroni, topical novel and souvenir sticker

During the course of the pandemic there have been times when I have more or less identified with Cottard as a kindred spirit, and yet still I warmed to these words from Lara Prendergast in The Spectator festive edition...

As we brace ourselves for another winter of hunkering down and hibernation, I find myself feeling like an apostate. I have started to resent and mistrust anyone who is evangelical about time spent indoors. I’m suspicious of home-comfort obsessives, all of them itching for another lockdown and that nice, nostalgic sense of selfless idleness that defined 2020.