Sometimes I feel so low-down and disgusted. Can’t help but wonder what’s happenin’ to my companions. Are they lost or are they found? Have they counted the cost it’ll take to bring down, all their earthly principles they’re going to have to abandon? There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend.

“Slow Train Coming” Bob Dylan

At time of writing the world has been caught in the grip of the strangest, most frightening events in recent history. Events that seem so far-fetched as to be the stuff of celluloid. Stranger, in fact, than in fiction. As far as the UK goes it would be no exaggeration to suggest that this is the most disruptive – in the truest, life-changing definition of that word – event to have happened for several generations. Its effects are wide-ranging, reaching every element of society and its scale and repercussions are on a par with World War. Except, of course, that every nation is fighting the same enemy. An insidious, indiscriminate and invisible microscopic parasite searching for as many hosts as possible in order to guarantee its own survival. A novel contagion with no known cure which has simultaneously filled our hospitals and emptied our streets within a matter of weeks.

And here the nation finds itself hanging in the balance. One half leaving the house each day in very fear of their life and that of their family. Dealing with circumstances beyond imagining. Emptying our bins, ensuring our food supply, treating our dying. The other half staring at four walls on the longest half-term holiday in history and wondering which boxset to watch next. 

It’s madness. Nonsense. Incredible. Beyond belief. But it’s happening. Right now. In real time. Before our disbelieving eyes. 

On the 12 March 2020, Boris Johnson, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, stood up before the nation, flanked by the chief medical officer Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, and said, “I must level with you and level with the British public: many more families will lose loved ones before their time.” 

Those words chilled my spine. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. I could not think of any circumstances, outside those of war, when a sitting Prime Minister would openly and knowingly suggest that a threat to society was so great that it was certain to cause widespread loss of life. I knew then that the threat was real. A tsunami was coming. 

Precisely four weeks later and his words have proved to be hauntingly accurate: the death toll is now in the thousands and he, himself, is in intensive care fighting for his own life. Both Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden were seriously ill while in office but neither of them victim of a pandemic flu that they had been forced to inform the nation about a mere 4 weeks before. It is all beyond belief. Quite literally. The situation has progressed to a point at which the brain cannot fully compute it.

In the space of one short month every single element of our way of life has been turned on its head. There is no escape. Citizens are under house arrest. And not voluntarily. Laws have been passed that ensure the curtailment of our freedom within our own communities. Let’s pause for a moment to think about the enormity of that statement. The nation whose constitution began with the Magna Carta (as Lord Denning put it, “The foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”) finds itself in the position where the freedoms of the ordinary citizen have been curtailed to an extent never before seen in peacetime. And our elected representatives waved these laws through, perhaps with a heavy heart, but with hardly any protest. 

Why? In short, they were given no real choice. Car parks and trails leading to Snowdonia National Park in Wales had to be closed because a scant nine days after hearing Boris’s announcement, by which point there had already been 3983 recorded cases of CoVid19 in the UK,  Mount Snowdon had it’s busiest day since records began. It was sunny and it was Mother’s Day weekend and the nation seemed to decided that given such a grave situation, it might be best to have a nice day out before the apocalypse occurred. 

But things are very different now. Reality has sunk in. Phrases which had no meaning four weeks ago are bandied about on a daily basis: “shielding”, “self-isolation”, “social distancing”, “flattening the curve.” Rarely does any conversation, news broadcast, tweet or even a breath of wind, fail to carry the phrase “Wash your hands.” Non-essential workers are being paid by the government to stay at home “on furlough.” The schools are closed with no reopening date on the horizon. Groceries are bought as irregularly as possible, whilst wearing a mask, maintaining a distance of 2m from all other human beings and (both shopper and shopping) are subject to a full decontamination process when they re-enter the home. Items that were banal to the point of completely escaping our notice 4 weeks ago have reach mythic proportions – “Sainsbury’s actually had pasta today!” “So-and-so’s neighbour found a shop selling yeast!” “My aunt gave me a great DIY hand sanitiser recipe!” Don’t get me started on the loo rolls…

We cannot visit one another. We are only allowed one outdoor form of (socially distanced) exercise per day. Indeed the elderly and vulnerable must not leave their house at all for a period 12 weeks. The number of recorded cases has now risen to 60,733 with 7097 deaths. It is a nightmare from which we cannot wake. 

While of this happens just beyond the end of our street, like many people, Beloved, Small One and myself are holed up at Magpie Hill. We had several weeks of schooling Small One from home and now we are having the Easter Holidays – whatever that means. In reality, the only change in our daily routine has been leaving out the part of the day where we argue about how many spellings and how much writing is required to be produced by lunchtime. 

Over the period of this last 4 weeks I have swung wildly from one emotion to the next. In week one I felt numbed and frozen by dread. Overwhelmed with the enormity of it. Unable to sleep at night. Instead staring at the ceiling in the wee small hours imagining what would happen if one or all of us died. Imagining what it must be like to have to work in a hospital at the moment. Imagining what it must be like to sit around the table with other officials at Cobra and hear these things being calmly discussed. Imagining how on earth any or us to hope to survive any of this physically or emotionally at all. 

Then came the days of action in week two, smartly organising our hand-washing regime. Ritually cleansing everything. Coming up with detailed schedules of how we could productively use our time. The sense that everything was actually alright – if only we could come up with a nice plan of how to deal with it all.

Then just as swiftly came days of not being able to get anything done at all. We began to hear of local people being ill. The death toll began to climb. Week three was spent forgetting to feed everyone in the house at normal times. Lying in the bath and feeling myself crying and not knowing why. 

Then I fell ill myself. A mysterious mild flu accompanied by very sore irritated eyes, a sore chest and shortness of breath, a sore head and extreme fatigue. Week four was spent having to isolate from even the others in the house, for their own safety. Lying in bed, with half-closed, red, itchy eyes, feeling my breath fluttering in my chest, watching white fluffy clouds scudding by in a cast cornflower blue sky, just outside my bedroom window. Trying not to think the worst. Wondering if I would ever get to hug my parents again. Trying and failing to make sense of any of it at all. 

And now here we are about to begin week five. Despite everything, the statistics, the news, the deaths, the masks, the sorrow, the dread, the craziness, flying in the face of every single bit of it, we are fine. It feels wrong. I feel guilty even writing it down. But it’s true. I pray daily and often for key workers, for the government, for Boris, for my family, my neighbours, for those stacking shelves and filling prescriptions. I thank God every single morning for another day that I have been given. I ask for His will to be done. I praise Him that His plan is still in place. That despite all evidence to the contrary, that His message of Love and Hope, which we will celebrate this coming weekend in earnest, is as real and as relevant as anything I might I hear in the headlines.

Every single night somewhere between 4 and 5 am I wake in something like terror. As my eyes become accustomed to the gloom, I see a dark smudge of fog hovering in our bedroom on the wall beside our window. It is a living, malevolent thing. I can hardly bear to look at it but I can’t tear my eyes away. Its darkness seems to suck all life and air from the room. In my fear I can’t remember to be calm but I try to cling to everything I know. That God is in charge. That he has won. But it is no good. I am too weak to be brave. I curl up tight and, shaking, cry out in my heart, “Dear God, save us from this evil!” 

I lie without breathing until I at last feel I can open my eyes and when I do, it has gone. I sleep almost immediately. Because it seems that the Angel of Death hovers over us in the early hours of every single morning. The strain of daily meeting him face to face is exhausting.

And yet. And yet. And yet. I am fine. In fact, I am not just fine, I am happy. How can this be? I wake up every morning and I pray and stretch and get up and realise I am happy. The empty calendar makes me happy. The lack of any external agenda for our days makes me happy. I ignore my phone and the incessant deluge of breaking news interspersed with people from every element of my life giving me tips on how to spend my day, ideas for how Small One should spend her day, ways to keep fit during lockdown, celebrities singing during lockdown, video conferencing during lockdown, memes about lockdown, ways to deliver the curriculum during lockdown. 

Instead I sit on my garden bench and listen to the birds. I take little videos of them and listen to them again later. I bake and plan meals around exactly what I would like to eat with absolutely no regard for how long it will take to prepare nor the calorific content therein. I eat no junk food. There is simply no need for it when what I have is limitless time. So we eat all our favourite feasts. All the dishes we only usually cook at Christmas or for someone’s birthday. All the recipes we’ve always wanted to try. 

I show Small One how to hang clothes on the line. None of us are sleeping at normal times and we have given up worrying about this. At midnight one evening we listened to an hour of classic hits from the 60s, 70s and 80s and I danced with abandon in my oldest jumper with my untrimmed hair flying. I spun the delighted Small One round the kitchen and taught her dance moves. She had tiny braids in her hair that took us an hour to do because she wanted it to look crimped. 

I chat to my neighbours over the hedge. I phone my parents. I knit. I read the books I panic-borrowed from the library the day before it shut. I stand in my greenhouse for hours in my pyjamas with the sun on my back and plant little self-seeded baby plants I have found all over the garden, each nested in their own tiny pot. I water them every day. I sit in Beloved’s study as he works or plays video games and chat to him about things we remember. Things we’re going to do when IT is all over. I stroke the cat. I cuddle the dog. 

Inside myself, as each day passes, and despite the guilt and the conflict and the feelings of uselessness and dread and fear, despite it all, I feel my heart open and stretch. My brain reaches first to the things I want to do that day, not the things I must. Every day feels endless and full of such promise. I cannot remember feeling this happy and content, this grateful and unencumbered, at any other time in my adult life.

The idea that all of this is in any way comparable to the sacrifices and stress our key workers are facing is ridiculous in the extreme. We are told we are doing an excellent service to our country, that we are “helping” by staying at home. This is the same kind of “helping” that you might give a bothersome child who is getting in the way of you getting on with the real job at hand. For the sad truth is, despite what my inflated ego might tell me, in the face of this crisis, I am useless. I have very little to give. The very best I can do is get out of the way of the people who are doing the real work. 

In this way I know perfectly well that I am living on grace. I am blessed with my family around me, a garden to spend time in, a roof over my head. Many don’t have any of these things. The weight of this knowledge causes me to pray even more – in thanks. And as a way to somehow lighten the load of my own uselessness and guilt. There but by the grace of God go I. My freedom is literally being bought on a daily basis by the sacrifice of others. How on earth could any sane person be happy while knowing that others are not? But I am. It is wrong. It makes no sense. How than these two conflicting ideas coexist?

I wrestle with this question every day and am no closer to an answer.

I started biting my nails when I went to school at age 4. It seems that I have been on a stress roller-coaster ever since, because usually I can only resist biting them if I carefully manicure and paint them on a weekly basis. Sometimes not even then. Now, of all times, they are mysteriously long and pink and healthy, with white half moons at the top. They keep catching my eye. I admire their reflection in the mirror. I cannot stop looking at them. Because I have never seen them before. This is the longest period in my adult life that I have not bitten them. I don’t even think of biting them. It’s not even an issue.

Today as I watered my tiny plants yet again, Small One used her new washing-hanging skills to hang some tea towels she had pretended to wash on a washing line made of string I rigged up outside her playhouse. 

And this time I didn’t feel the need to video any of the garden birds. Because although they were singing fit to burst, as they have been every other day this spring, her song rivalled any of them. I couldn’t catch the words but I certainly heard the joy. Loud and clear, as her piping voice floated across the lawn. 

And I wondered where did we all go wrong, that it had to come to this? That everything had to come to a point so terrible and so undeniable and so unyielding, and at such an enormous irrevocable cost for others, for us to have a chance to have this moment of peace in our own back yard? And how do we find it again, when our exhausted, traumatised nurses come home to us, and the memorial services take place and the graves stop being dug and the temporary hospitals pack up and the masks come off and traffic mounts and the calendar fills and the whole merry-go-round of life splutters back into being again? Is it possible? Should we try? 

And, though there is much from our former life worthy of being missed, I worry that I will never hear my daughter this happy again, that I will never be this happy again, that our family never spend this amount of time around the table together again, unless we make some changes. Changes based on decisions that we must make using our own wisdom and our own determination, not those enforced on us against our will nor, more importantly, bought for us by the pain of others.

And I find myself having to ask the inevitable question:

Which is worse? If things never go back to “normal” again or if they do?