Digested week: with Covid and winter days upon us, I'm trying to store up nice memories | John Crace

Six more months of pandemic in Boristime may mean at least one more year of dread in real time

There was a heartbreaking story in the Times on Saturday about how Boris Johnson was feeling overworked and underpaid. How the flat in No 10 was a bit small, how the rent from the home he shares with Carrie Symonds in Camberwell has to be offset against his income as prime minister and how he even has to pay for any food the No 10 kitchen sends upstairs. Now you might have thought that someone who appears to have spent his whole life believing that becoming prime minister was the fulfilment of his destiny would have spent rather more time investigating the financial implications of his decisions. After all if he had been looking for a cushy job to keep his still growing family in the style to which he aspired, Boris would have been better off remaining a backbench MP on 80,000, while raking in another 350,000 from the Daily Telegraph for the occasional column dashed off in an hour and who knows how much more for after-dinner speaking. But we all have our crosses to bear, so I suppose we should treat the prime minister falling on hard times on a salary of 150,000 as a personal tragedy. With that in mind, several members of a WhatsApp group of which I am a member began to wonder what we could do to help Boris at his time of crisis. Two ideas came to mind. The first was a telethon in which stars of stage and screen could do comedy turns in between sad black and white footage of Boris sleeping in a cardboard box in the No 10 attic. The second was to set up a JustGiving page for Boris. So far it has raised 5 of its hoped for 1m. That donation has come from a Matt Hancock" with the message, We send the EU 350m a week. Let's Give it to Boris instead." Feel free to contribute. Or not.