Not going out

So, here we all are. Day 3 of a lockdown (well, partial lockdown). The sun is streaming in through the window to make the living room midwinter toasty. The occasional neighbour scurries past outside, on their way to the supermarket as if popping out for a pint of milk before it pours with rain. Except the forecast is for more spring sunshine. So they'll be making lightning raids on Waitrose, distanced at the front door from fellow desperate shoppers by the two-metre rule, still not knowing whether once inside there will be toilet roll, or anything. Viewed from one angle, there's a post-apocalyptic mood taking over. From another, it's business as usual. Weird times.

Face facts, world, we're in a new reality, something unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. Whereas, once, we may have scoffed at dystopian depictions of contagious invasions, like Danny Boyle's scarily prescient 28 Days Later, Outbreak or even the preposterously watchable Independence Day (conceptually not a million miles from HG Wells' The War Of The Worlds), now we are in it for real. In some respects, this doesn't even compare to the world war my 90-year-old mum lived through, though her humour remains undimmed by the virtual house arrest she now finds herself under. "I keep my stick by the door," she joked when I warned her of a couple of conmen prowling the area claiming to offer doorstep coronavirus tests. It's humour like that that got Britain through the Blitz, albeit with rationing, gas masks, Andersen shelters in the back garden and front gates being melted down to build Spitfires. COVID-19 is testing any national cultural stoicism. And so it should. Barrage balloons and Vera Lynn won't work this time around. Not even a Churchillian prime minister.

To the paranoid and even mildly hypochondriac - me, for example - every contact with the outside world is a potential encounter with the coronavirus, that nasty, spherical bug with the protruding antennae we've seen magnified in the media. Mingling with others in the outside world is one thing, but I'm now looking at objects indoors with suspicion. I'm just counting down the days before Hazmat suits can be bought from Amazon (for vastly inflated prices, obviously). Trust me, fashion followers, the American term "leisurewear" is about to get a radical redefinition. Yesterday I started assembling a home exercise bike with the intention of maintaining my existing health, and came to an abrupt, spine-chilling halt when I'd already removed all the components for assembly, handling the packaging without gloves, and then seeing the sign 'Made In China'. It's a paranoid, borderline racist thought, I know, but I started fretting about where the bike had been packaged, its parts manufactured, and how recently? Irrational, I know, but that's where I am, increasingly.

It's why I now baulk at newspaper pictures of gym bunnies still exercising next to each other at public recreation grounds, or cyclists congregating in Richmond Park to swap stories about rogue gear changes and how motorists are the Devil's work, or whatever it is these Lycra lovers do when they get together. What little micro-biological knowledge I possess (i.e. nothing), I do know that COVID-19 is a tricky little bugger, capable of hiding away in places you wouldn't necessarily find other viruses. We know it can last up to 72 hours on hard surfaces, such as handrails and the poles you find on buses and Tube trains, but precious little understanding on how it lives on fabrics and cardboard boxes. The packaging for that exercise bike is so going up in an almighty pyre, once rules on garden bonfires are relaxed. And they will, as local waste disposal facilities run out of capacity.

You see, COVID-19 is already impacting rational behaviour and thinking. But, then, it is also making normality irrelevant. Crises - and existential crises at that - force everything into the background, but now more than ever. Taken to an extreme, nothing - in the words of Metallica - else matters. The other day Chelsea announced a new player for its women's team and I just thought, 'who cares?'. Why do they even think this is worth tugging our chain for? Good news to otherwise cheer us up? In the space of a month since the coronavirus became so globally prevalent I've become totally disengaged with almost everything, football included, that doesn't involve the health and wellbeing of my family and myself. I really couldn't care less about either the lack of football, when it will start again, who might be playing it and for whom. Indeed, whenever I see tra-la-la tweets from companies puffing what they're still up to, as if the chronically sick elephant in the room doesn't even exist and 'normal' commercial life hasn't changed, I wonder whether reality has actually set in.

Evidence does, however, suggest that the new reality has. We live very close to a major commuter railway station. Street parking spaces start filling up from 6am as people from more expensive rail zones leave their cars here for free before returning to collect them later in the day. Last week, there were one or two spaces left vacant. This week could be the middle of August, and a particularly good August for the travel industry at that. And, yet, still we see images of crowded Tube trains. I'm a tad claustrophobic at the best of times, but the sight of human sardines on the Central Line travelling to construction jobs out of sheer economic necessity fills me with dread, especially when you see the infection models various epidemiological institutes have published, depicting both the virulence of COVID-19 and how even the simplest removals of human moments of content can impair its progress. The sight of those poor workers on the Tube reminds me of one of the grimmest stories of 'normal' life in Britain during World War Two: even as Goering's Luftwaffe was bombing Britain's towns and cities people went to work. The buses and trains ran on time and milkmen delivered the daily pint. Amidst the bombsite rubble, life carried on. Indeed, one of the more horrible illustrations of normality occurred barely a four-minute walk from the sofa where I write these words. On 16 August, 1940, a German aircraft that had been bombing the London-Portsmouth railway that runs through this town, returned to strafe commuters as they disgorged from a train from Waterloo. That didn't stop people going back to work the next day, or for the following five years.

Brits are reputed to thrive on an unflappable stoicism, and humour. The "Keep calm and..." meme you see on this page is based on a motivational poster produced in 1939 Britain as the storm clouds of war gathered over Europe. COVID-19 is no less deadly than the war that was brought to these very streets, but is proving even more indiscriminate. Whereas at first we feared for those over 70 or with the ambiguous "underlying health conditions", now it is taking the young, even those with no known existing health issues. Tin hats and even gas masks won't protect us this time (though a bomb shelter in the garden might). The message is clear: stay at home. Just stay at home. When I read in The Times on Monday of three middle-aged men who met up in Richmond Park on Sunday for "a lunchtime sprint" on their bikes, I actually flinched. "In many ways it's the best time to be out," said one who asked to remain anonymous. "I'm very aware that we're all supposed to be social distancing," he added, "but we're on our bikes, wearing Lycra and pollution masks. I think we'd have to be incredibly unlucky to catch it." That's not carrying on as normal. That's carrying on as one of the most lethal contagions in human history is on the loose, and infecting people with alarming rigour and equally alarming spread before anyone's even realised they've got it.

I've spent the last few months on virtual lockdown, myself, having left my last place of employment in September. Staying in and not going out has been pretty much the norm for me, so perhaps I'm better prepared, psychologically, for the conditions we're all now being forced to adopt. Not that I've lived hermit-like, of course. In those months I've managed to move in with my other half and work on a few projects to keep me busy and my noggin active. That will be the challenge facing everyone now. When my girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter was sent home from school last week due to a teacher shortage, she inevitably treated it as what Americans call a 'snow day'. Others must be treating their first week - possibly ever - of 'working from home' as a bit of a holiday. Some will be bunkered in, worrying about how their mortgage will be paid, or even their grocery bills. If that doesn't highlight the existential nature of this crisis, then hopefully the starker warnings from almost every authority figure that public compliance with the lockdown is only about one thing: saving lives.

"Life," Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, said the other day, "should not be going on as normal". Normality was so last month. Normal, now, is staying indoors, venturing out only when there is a supermarket to visit, briefly, or perhaps for a brisk walk on your own. Normal is remaining within our familial caves. Strange as it may seem, as winter finally gives way to spring, there's a nuclear winter going on out there. The stuff of my childhood nightmares, when I was told that Heathrow Airport would be a target for Soviet nuclear missiles in the event of World War Three, and with a westward-facing bedroom window, I'd struggle to get sleep at night for fear of seeing a mushroom cloud. Now, I'm looking out of our living room window, wondering - no, worrying - what lies beyond it. And when it's going to get me. For now, lockdown means wading through that mountain of music biographies and those DVD box sets put into storage almost immediately after getting unwrapped at Christmas. My compulsive record buying disorder will continue to be served as I crack through the crates of still-in-their-packaging LPs while engaging the good people of my local music shop who've now fully converted to a home delivery service (by bike). Even if I use that exercise bike wearing surgical scrubs, I'll need it to work off the demons of social distancing. Who knows how long this will go on for, or how bad it will get. We're only even now at the start. See you on the other side.