For many visitors to London, one of the iconic sights of a trip to the capital is a traditional London red double-decker bus. Known as a Routemaster, these buses was designed in the late 1940s and manufactured until 1968 when production stopped, mainly because their open back doors – which were one of the attractions for many Londoners – made them unusable by those in a wheelchair. They were still used on many routes until the early twenty-first century and some can be seen occasionally on routes such as the Routemaster Heritage Route 15 which runs from Blackwell to Trafalgar Square.

Like all of us, I’ve found lockdown hard. As usual at the start of the year, I was preparing for the new season with info-gathering and reorientation walks, but this all came to a shuddering end in mid-March. I live in suburbia, so that’s not really much use to me as a London guide.