My isolation reading list

A psychiatrist once told me that it takes one’s subconscious about three weeks to catch up with a significant life event, and that is certainly holding good now. We have gone through shock and disbelief while simultaneously accepting the situation. Mostly we have also accepted the rules and restrictions, and I wonder if many who flocked to holiday places on the first sunny days of school closures and went dozens abreast in parks and on beaches were not deliberately sticking up two fingers to the virus or the law, but simply in denial. It took more deaths, especially among the young and otherwise fit — plus the Prime Minister’s television address giving not advice but orders — for it to hit home.

My own catch-up moment came early one morning. It is always quiet in this tiny village, but now the quietness had a different quality; it seemed to have thickened in spite of the birdsong, and in the quietness my subconscious awareness zoomed to the surface. This is real. We are in lockdown.

Yet no man is an island. The huge and immediate response to the government’s call for volunteers and the proliferation of organised help groups prove it, as did that extraordinary clapping for NHS workers which rippled out across the country. Someone asked a nurse if the applause made any difference. ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘because it couldn’t. But it was bloody good to get it.’ Paramedic friends drove their ambulance through a city street to claps, cheers, waves, saucepan lids banging, car hooters sounding. They said their hearts lifted.

But Covid-19 is still there and it isn’t going away any time soon. It is calm and peaceful here in my Norfolk fastness, and yet the consciousness of this thing insinuates itself, gets under the door and through the cracks, mingles with the dust motes in the air we breathe, unnerving, unsettling.