It’s now July, nearly four months since the start of lockdown. Alice still gets her education mediated by us, for better or worse. It can’t be easy for her not to get our full attention when she needs it. All things considered she’s coping pretty well, showing she has her parent’s fundamentally introverted nature. I’ve heard that some of her classmates are less happy with the situation. I keep on wondering how they’ll remember this strange time.

Yesterday was officially Return To Nearly Normal day: pubs and restaurants were allowed to reopen. Of the people I know and work with, most were pretty determined to stay away - we can drink from home, thank you.

Still no idea how well the UK is doing on infections, because we still don’t have many tests. The government refused to implement systematic testing of the NHS staff, which would at least be a proxy to calculate the overall population’s infection rate from. Two weeks ago the beaches in Dorset were heaving, people sitting shoulder to shoulder on the hot sand and flapping around in the shallow waters. The virus aside, the sight was enough to make me claustrophobic. Virus wise, it may have been safe enough? It’s outdoors after all, my understanding is that the risk is much greater indoors. Some of those people probably work in enclosed spaces, a day on the beach is not measurably more dangerous.

In the absence of information, the imagination struggles. So, from the people in my area, how many are actually infected? Those things aren’t evenly distributed. It might be perfectly ok to mingle, because maybe the infection is concentrated in, say, a pub, a church, a neighbourhood, and the rest of the city might be fine.

People react to this absence of information in different ways. Some shrug their shoulders, and decide that there’s no point interrupting their life any further, might as well live life and happen what may. The risk is probably low enough. I’ve heard elderly saying that they don’t have much time left anyway, so there is no point spending it cooped up.

… I do understand. It’s tempting, the risk is invisible, abstract numbers going up and down, happening somewhere, no doubt, but not near us. Lockdown is boring.

Then there’s us, who are stuck in a slightly neurotic rut. We quarantine deliveries as much as possible. We tend to swerve to avoid people on the sidewalks. We wash our hands systematically for more than 20 seconds when we come back, and I give a disinfectant wipe to the more risky areas on a regular basis. I track the numbers obsessively, trying to understand what’s happening locally. We haven’t seen friends and family live for a long time. My Belgian relatives are living on a different planet, life is back to normal there, and they are including us in holiday plans which seem mad to us (and would get us stuck in quarantine).

There will be a point where we need to move on and go out again. Alice will in all likelihood return to school in September. When that happens, is there much point in us isolating? At what point does it become futile to be careful? At what point is the risk acceptable?

Are we being sane? I look at the people going to pubs, having garden parties, having sleep overs. I start to wonder if we’re like the man from I am Legend, keeping to strict routines and extermination, when the world has basically moved on and civilization has resumed around him. I’m not even sure time will tell who was right.