Coronavirus Log: Self isolation: Finding the unbearable supervising bearable

For all of its ills - and there are many - there is one curious upside to the ongoing 2020 coronavirus pandemic, and that’s how it continues to relentlessly and mercilessly starve me of everything I hold dear.

If you’d told me in February that next month I could be arrested for leaving my house twice in the same day, coronavirus needn’t have worried as the anxiety itself would have killed me.

A month on, and I live on a diet of sirloin steak and value chicken fillets (it appears stockpilers only enjoy strictly middle-market meat). Bar going to the toilet, cooking, and the occasional visit to the shop, the last two weeks of my life have been spent within the same ten square feet. I have absolutely no recollection of the last time I shook somebody’s hand, but I’m confident it was more than two weeks ago.

And most remarkable about it all is how completely unremarkable it feels. I’m not enjoying it, as some might claim to be, but neither am I massively bothered by it. Nice for some, you might say, I haven’t lost my job, or my grandparents.

I’ll emphasise I am talking about the restrictive measures to combat the virus, and not the devastating impact of the virus itself. But therein lies an important distinction, and an important lesson in stoicism that we can carry with us long after this whole coronavirus thing has blown over: provided nobody dies, or loses their job, it’s probably not going to feel like that much of a deal in the end anyway.