March 2020. These are reflections from a diary I kept through lockdown. Looking back now, what strikes me most is how ordinary the beginning felt.
There have been a handful of times in my life when I’ve felt the ground shift under everyone’s feet at once. The Berlin Wall coming down. September 11th. The July bombings in London.
Every time, I was watching from somewhere safe. A screen. A distance. A spectator to something enormous happening to other people.
This one was different.
Isaac came home from school on a Thursday in March 2020. He didn’t go back for months. And I stopped being an observer.
The first thing I noticed was the quiet. During the day there were still cars, still people out for walks. But at night… it was something else entirely. No one driving to social events or running errands. Just the odd siren, far off, and the particular silence that follows it.
I found myself praying for whoever was in that ambulance. Which probably tells you something about the headspace lockdown put me in, fairly quickly.
We built a routine almost immediately. Not because we were especially organised. More because routine was the only thing that made it feel like life was still happening in the right order.
Get up. Tea. Log on. Work. Calls. More work. More calls. Make tea. Lunch. Walk. Maths. Reading. Science. Log back on. Dinner. TV. Bed. Rinse, repeat.
Isaac wanted to build a cardboard castle. My mum dropped off boxes and flapjacks on the doorstep, contactless. He had his heart set on Castle Coch… because red is his favourite colour. The flapjacks lasted about a day.
What I remember most from those first days is losing track of what day it was. Without the usual cues, Monday felt like Wednesday felt like Saturday. We weren’t even through week one and I wrote in my diary that life was getting more and more surreal.
I was right about that.
Peace
G