6 April 2020
I'm more than ever aware that moments of thankfulness for Titch - when he’s being particularly cool or loving and I take a second to marvel that all the years of wondering if we’d ever be parents brought us to him - are tinged with a flash of fear that it will all be taken away. Neither of us truly allowed ourselves to believe that pregnancy would end in a healthy baby and we’ve been acutely aware of our fortune ever since. But just at the moment, as more and more people face the horrors of this virus, those flashes of horrified fear feel sharper than ever.
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Someone shouted ‘IDIOT!’ at me as they drove past when I was walking the dog with the boy in town this morning. They may have been having a very bad time, they may just have been a prat. Either way, it rattled me and left me wondering if I should be out, and if I should have brought the boy out (he was dropping pokemon card swaps to old friends, arranged on a video chat at the weekend and dropped through morning letterboxes without seeing his buddies); we were so carefully within the advice, exercise and fresh air are so important, and yet…
The people suffering this week were probably infected the week of 16th of March. We cancelled the conference on the 3rd of March, which was the last time I was in London. By the week of the 9th we were lightly self-isolating, only going out to school and very limited trips to the shops. Matt went to a lecture at the RI at the end of that week, I was supposed to go to London for work but cancelled. That all feels like A Good Thing now - in hindsight it seems insane that events like the Cheltenham cup went ahead - but it also feels that we’ve mentally been on lockdown for a month already.
Strange times.
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