Social distancing - I have been doing it most of my life!

Much is being made of "social distancing" at the moment due to the Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic - maintaining a safe distance between people to try and avoid the transmission of the disease. This is, in some cases, also combined with "self-isolation" where a suspected infected person, but showing no symptoms requiring hospitalisation, or someone suspected of being infected (returning form abroad, or from contact with an infected person) keeps themselves isolated even from their own families within the same building.
The government regulations vary a lot from country to country, from trusting the public to do the right thing (yeah, that is working in the UK!), to more draconian measures such as I am under in Peru - we have a daily curfew between 16.00 and 04.00, as well as Sunday, and the rest of the week, unless working in "essential" services (particular the food chain) you are only allowed out, and only one member of the household at a time, for food shopping, and medical needs, and we have to wear face masks in public. So no long walks, no drives in the countryside (you need a permit to use a vehicle, provided to "essential" drivers by the local authority), and not even outings for exercise. They even, for a short time, had "gender" days, where men were allowed out (for the essential things above) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and women on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday - so effectively limiting our "available" out-of-the-house hours to 33 a week (the curfew then ended at 05.00)! Most people are accepting these as absolutely necessary to curtail the spread of the virus, though the police and army are still arresting around 300 a day in our Province for breaking the curfew, and so far in 5 weeks have arrested about 16,000!
All over the world we are reading stories about how people are coping, or not, under lockdown, and what you should do to cope - and many of these are coming from the countries with the least strict rules. In my case it has been pretty much life as usual! OK, I cannot go for my usual long daily walk along the seafront here, primarily for exercise, but I manage a slightly shortened version en route to the market or the shops 5-6 days a week. My usual routine - pre-lockdown - would have included rides on my motorbike, Oli, once or twice a week along the coast to deserted fishing spots, or longer rides, solo, to nearby towns in the Andes, or even journeys lasting a few days to further locations, again solo, and staying in single accommodation (as opposed to sharing a dorm room as many travellers do, for company as much as cost) - as well as trips to the supermarkets in Trujillo, 10 km away. But most of the time I spent alone, but not lonely - never lonely!
While in Brazil (for the other 6 months of the year) my routine was very similar, though I do have a garden surrounding my house, and live in a much more beautiful area, being in a National Park, so my bike trips tended to be shorter, and my walks less frequent (steep hill from my house into town!).
You see the pattern here? Solo/alone - both through choice - I have kept my social distance almost all my life, and so now when it is enforced it is not an issue. I was a very shy child, so much so that my parents worried about it - only telling me about this when I was in my late teens - and though I did have friends, I always (and this was repeated throughout my life, even as an adult) had a limited circle of close friends, rather than loads of acquaintances around me. In social situations I sat to one side, aloof and silent, though in later life I over-compensated by become garrulous, talking too much to fill the embarrassing gaps in conversations. Dating was a non-starter as such a shy person, and living in a small town in Mozambique during my "formative" years, where social conventions were very restrictive as well, meant I never really had a proper girlfriend during my teenage years.
We moved a lot when I was young - to Angola, and later Mozambique, and boarding school in what was Rhodesia - then as an adult I started working in Beira, Mozambique, after one year moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, then a year later to Durban, where I stayed for 3 years. This meant that I never had "life-long" friends, always moving on and leaving people behind, years before social media meant we could keep in touch, so maybe I developed a mechanism where being on my own was the norm, and the safest place to be. After I returned to the UK at 25 I then spent the next 30 years in Norfolk, within a 10 mile radius, but initially working with my family, and then married, I did not socialise that much - certainly not alone. In 19 years of marriage not once did I go out on my own for a night out, partly due to the fact that much of the time I worked night shifts, but also because family life was what was most important to me.
Since my divorce, apart from a few years when my daughter lived with me, I have lived alone - so that is for the past 15 years - and it has never bothered me. I am very independent, and, I think, very capable of managing alone, and do not feel any need to have other people around me. I would like to see my daughter more often (she is in t he UK and I am currently in Peru!), but thanks to social media we can easily keep in touch, and can chat using Skype if we feel the need. On the whole, though, I do not feel any driving need for social interaction, and, in fact, will actively try and avoid social contact on occasion. If I was not under lockdown conditions right now I would probably not do things very differently - I would go for rides on my bike, and longer walks along the seafront, but I would still be practising social distancing, and keeping myself to myself!