London lockdown; another coronavirus chronicle

I’m standing in the street outside the grocery store on a cold London spring morning. I have to line up, keeping a two-metre distance from every other person in the line-up, before I can go in and select from a small stock of food, pay quickly and leave in haste. The small shopping basket costs me £30 — which is usually what I pay for a great deal more — but I don’t have the luxury of being able to shop around. I have to pick what’s available and pay the price. Moreover, I am buying a birthday cake. March is the birthday month for a whole lot of people and certainly, it’s the worst birthday March in our lifetimes.

I walk home, studiously avoiding the other masked figures on the street, who are equally assiduous in avoiding coming anywhere within a meter and a half of me. We look at each other with fear, our bodies folded in on themselves as we pass each other and scuttle home. From time to time a lycra-clad jogger thunders past, face set, breathing heavily, looking as though they’re trying to outrun the virus, but of course, they can’t. Everybody copes with it in their own way. Even I thought about going for a run; me, who never has been for a run in my life and am never going to. The fact that ‘a run’ even crossed my mind is an indication of the new weird.

And yet. And yet it’s only been two weeks, and that’s the laughable part. Exactly 2…