When his honorary knighthood was conferred in 1973, for his "outstanding contribution to Anglo-American mutual understanding", Cooke – who relinquished his British citizenship for the United States version in 1941 - was reportedly happy to accept because, in the words of American founding father Thomas Jefferson, it did not involve "the very great vanity of a title".

Be that as it may.

Cooke – who died aged 95 in March 2004 – was born in Salford, Lancashire, but emigrated to the US in 1937 having married an American.

On March 24, 1946 he broadcast the first of a series of radio talks – initially called American Letter but soon after becoming Letter from America – which continued for 58 years, with the last of them being broadcast in the same month he died.

I have just re-read the first collected edition of his Letters from America, published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1951, and the opening piece – Getting Away From It All – resonates strongly given the vexed and discomforting circumstances in which so many people currently find themselves.

The letter starts in classic Cooke fashion, sliding you into the narrative easy as a shoehorn. He lists the arrangements he and his wife make in leaving their summer vacation cottage on Long Island and returning to their New York apartment.

They disconnect the electricity and the phone. They defrost the fridge. They distribute camphor and mouse paste. They burn and bury their rubbish. They bid farewell to the local folk.

But this time the leave-taking has "an ominous note or two". They have heard that the local bank manager is attending a meeting of a new civil defence committee – "a committee, that is, to plan the evacuation of doomed New Yorkers to the potato-fields of Long Island".

Meanwhile Eddie, the young man who drives the grocer's delivery truck, says a special goodbye to them – he has been called up to the US armed forces.

As Mr and Mrs Cooke and family drive over the Triboro Bridge in their overladen station-wagon, they see "New York again, splendid as ever in the autumn light. Not quite the same, though".

The car passes a hoarding advertising a new deluxe apartment building which enumerates a host of winning features – thermostats in each flat, all-electric kitchens, garbage disposal units and, finally, "adequate sub-basement atomic bomb shelter".

Cooke notes: "One of the children reads it out loud and it makes a pompous sound, so that the baby claps her hands and chortles like a wise old man. And we all laugh."

He goes on to describe the growing fear within the US in the immediate post-war period of suffering a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Businesses are re-locating from the more vulnerable east coast to the west. Individuals are taking to the hills of Arkansas.

"This energy has the real excuse that never before in history have free men faced the threat of a tyranny so large, so merciless and so painstaking as that with which the Soviet Union confronts us," Cooke writes, adding: "Most men find the problems of political power insoluble and tend to despair before a world that has shrunk in scale and enlarged in complexity, so that the knowledge of how it behaves seems more and more to be open only to the specialist.

"There never was a time, except perhaps in the fearful pestilence of the Middle Ages, when men hungered more for a decent private life, and when they are tempted to match in their joys the intensity of the sorrows all around them.

"I believe that this impulse, far from being an escape, is the only right way of asserting that human dignity which gives sense to the phrase 'an appetite for life'. What reasonable hope can an ordinary man have for himself and his family? Must we oscillate like crocodiles between panic and apathy?"

For many right now, Twitter and other social media platforms offer a greater range of experience than ever before, as the heart-breaking detail of coronavirus loss and the beyond-frustrating experiences of front line medical staff working without adequate protective equipment intersperse themselves with small celebrations of everyday, albeit shutdown, domestic life. And sport, while largely frozen in public terms, is playing big.

A young lad scoring goals in his back garden with remarkable similarity to great efforts from the greats – Messi, Maradona et al – and then mimicking their celebrations with equal exactitude.

Another youngster bringing off an amazing behind-his-back basketball goal before careering off in glee. 

As for in-house work-out programmes – social media is thronged. Former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, Britain's leading judoka Sally Conway, multiple Olympic gymnastics champion Simone Biles and world indoor pole vault champion Sandi Morris are just a tiny sample of those who have put helpful footage out there.

And there are, joyously, an increasing number of celebratory clips of great – or even relatively mundane but nevertheless much-loved – sporting moments.

Personally I've been hooked into a sequence of highlights from mid-1970s English football, with Arsenal's 2-0 win at Anfield in 1972, on a pitch muddied in the middle and scattered with clods of earth, getting several replays. Alan Ball's glee after scoring the opener from the penalty spot. John Radford's powerful and unstoppable break down the middle to add the second…

And then there's the clip of David Seaman's wonder save against Sheffield United in the 2003 FA Cup semi-final...

Let's revel in what we love. Let's celebrate. Why not?

Were Cooke still around, you can be sure his letters would be as on-point as ever as he attempted to articulate differences – and similarities – between the US and Britain as they struggled to come to terms with the current pandemic.

But you can be sure he would also be writing of joys as well as sorrows.

In his case, the odds are he would be turning his attention to the sport that consumed his interest from the point at which he took it up at the age of 55 – golf.

The sport formed the topic of many of his letters. In one he described the thrill of learning "how much more awesome was the world of golf than the world of politics".

On May 2, 1997 he animadverted on the inspirational effect upon black teenagers of the awesome Masters victory achieved by Tiger Woods – while pointing out with customary journalistic care that, while his father was a black American, his mother was Thai and there was also Native American and white blood in the family.

He also noted the level of promotion in operation as Woods advanced towards victory.

"After all, when you pay out $40 million to a man to wear a shoe and another $20 million to hit a particular ball, you expect a lot," he said.

"Even before Tiger's triumphant last round, there was shown, on the telly, a one-hour glorification – commercial, it really was – which exploited the effect a win was going to have on the black community."

In 2007, three years after his death, Cooke's writings on golf were collected into a volume entitled The Marvellous Mania which carried a foreword by the man who won a record of 18 major championships, Jack Nicklaus, who described him as "most of all.. a friend".

A wise, wise man also…