Last night, the family came together to share each other’s company. We have all our girls back home and, although two of them are now adults, we are still the closely-knit family of the photos in our album. And how time does race past.

Our perception of time alters depending on our circumstances. It either races, during intense activity or feelings of anxiety, or it slows as it is doing now for many people across the world. There are huge spaces where before there was only a block of tasks that demanded our attention. Indeed, we have grown accustomed to sectioning off time into bites that we can digest with a certain amount of ease. Minutes, hours, days and weeks exist in order to make the whole business of living more manageable and, perhaps, more productive. The old idiom, ‘The devil makes work for idle hands,’ suggests that in order…

My mornings begin in roughly the same way. I wake. I climb from bed. I descend the stairs and I boil a kettle. God forbid if this virus interfered with that. Earlier this week, one news article grabbed my attention by the horns. It was a video-report from a hospital in Lombardy and it needed little hype.

There were rows of hospital beds with patients laid flat on their stomachs. They had ventilators attached but were showing no real signs of life. Here, it definitely wasn’t business as usual. For these people, not really patients because they could not really be cared for, the end was definitely nigh. A doctor explained through a facemask that nobody was expected to survive. This was a ward that had become a morgue and these bodies were waiting to be officially pronounced DEAD. The doctor suffered from sleep deprivation; she could not really…