Anywhere But Here

As the walls closed in over the month of July — despite more midweek beach trips than we’d made in the previous three years combined, despite masked playdates in the park, despite glorious afternoons in friends’ pools, despite everything we’d done to keep our horizons broad and our children entertained — we yearned for freedom and something different. We are gypsies at heart, and so are our children. In recent months, they have begged us to move back to England, to North Carolina, to San Diego, to a city, to a farm. They initiated their own home searches on Zillow, finding new homes that would be better, more interesting, more fun, just…. different. Anywhere but here.

Of course when I say “anywhere but here”, I realise that there are very many places one would not want to be at all, from an ICE detention camp on the US-Mexican border to a certain hospital bed in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Of course I realise that a tongue-in-cheek post about travel is a luxury many can only dream of, especially now. Of course I realise that my privilege affords me the opportunity for a white whine that is perhaps completely out of step with the chaos and sadness of these troubled times. But as I spent a week in bed recovering from the adventure I am about to relay, I wrestled with ways to approach the paradox of my privilege. I have certainly said many times since our current president (I cannot even bear to type his name) came crashing into the Oval Office that I would like to live anywhere but here. If he is not defeated in November, I will mean that more than ever and may even act on it by upping stumps again. But as I have said before, I am not a political journalist; I am just a person who has things to say and who wants to share her reality, however unlike that of the rest of the world it may be. So, with all that in mind, I would like to share some musings on travel, which has been a central, defining part of my life. If you are lucky enough to be able to undertake some of your own, there are definite lessons to be learned; if you are stuck at home in full COVID-avoidance lockdown, you might end up feeling very thankful for your own here and now. I certainly know I am after our summer trip.

During the course of our UK careers, with five weeks’ paid vacation per year plus public holidays (which is a laughably small amount of holiday time compared with the rest of Europe, who alternately mock and pity the workaholic Brits while they enjoy their own seven weeks’ rest; Americans’ two weeks of leisure are so pathetically mere that they don’t even merit comment, as they are but one more symptom of all that the rest of the world quite rightly perceives to be wrong with the US of A), we traveled all over the world. Once they came along, our daughters discovered the world in our arms, averaging roughly ten plane flights per year, so that our ten-year-old has logged 96 flights in her life thus far and our seven-year-old is close behind with 74. Indeed, before the age of three, our older daughter had been on a plane almost as much as she’d ridden in a car, since we didn’t own one in London and our car trips mainly consisted of cab rides… to the airport.

But their frequent flyer accounts have languished lately, miles unused, with only two flights logged since arriving on these shores three years ago. Instead we did that quintessentially American thing, and took to the road, (re)discovering the delights of California. We lived in a tourist destination, so we starting touring it. How lucky we are, we thought this spring, to live here during the pandemic that has Americans trapped within our own COVID-infested borders for the foreseeable future. We have everything on our doorstep: beaches, mountains, deserts, rivers, forests, national parks, state parks, glorious weather. We could skip the cities and focus our attention on exploring nature.

With that in mind, we made the profoundly dubious decision to spend our summer vacation camping. Anyone who knows me well might have questioned the wisdom of this choice. Certainly I should have questioned it, given that on our last camping trip — which was our girls’ first, to a beautifully wild field near the Grand Canyon — I netted around two hours of broken sleep the first night and only marginally more the second night. But I remembered the children’s giddy joy at being free, at running around in wide-open spaces that were new and different, the luminous light at dusk as we set up our tent in a windstorm, the satisfaction of a meal cooked and shared in the open air, the velvety night sky spangled with a million stars. Sleep is overrated anyway, I thought.

So I suppose I should blame my terribly patchy memory and the resulting rose-coloured glasses for agreeing to a second foray into the wilderness. With all the gusto with which I used to choose beautiful boutique hotels, I selected a campsite on a county beach in Santa Barbara which I managed to snag serendipitously in the three minutes before they were all snapped up by more experienced campers, followed by a quirky hipster spot in an apple orchard in the lush, green coastal hills to the west of San Luis Obispo.

Forgetting what it was really like to lie on a “comfort” air mattress with searing flashes of pain racing down my sciatic nerve, forgetting what it was really like to hear my husband snore so loudly he rattled the windows of the car to which I banished him on the second night, forgetting what it was really like to freeze in a summer sleeping bag in 45F/ 7C weather, I rashly agreed to this new adventure in nature.

Nature delivered. The beach was breathtaking and remote, so far down an extremely winding road that you had to drive 35 minutes back towards civilisation to pick up one fluctuating bar of cell phone signal. The summer-browned hills curved around a startlingly blue bay, creating an expanse of beach that is among the most beautiful I have seen. The apple orchard smelled divine with ripe fruit, the air so clean that lichens grew on the branches of the 115-year-old trees, as we looked up an almost sheer hillside covered in a thousand shades of green.

And it wasn’t just the nature: we explored beautiful towns and missions by day. Ojai, Solvang, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara had all mastered the art of socially distanced dining, turning their sidewalks into restaurants and showing the rest of California how to take advantage of our glorious weather. Why would we ever eat indoors again? With everyone in masks — the value of which Orange County has not yet grasped — there was a social contract of caring, compassionate connectedness which made us feel instantly welcome and part of something bigger and better. We dined on delicious food, we shopped in quirky independent establishments, we fed ostriches (of course), we splashed in icy surf, we built sandcastles, we watched meteor showers. In short, it was a perfect vacation.

By day, it was glorious. But by night — oh, by night! — it was sheer hell. Apart from the endless, brilliant stars and the magic of the meteor showers, which were the sole and truly glorious redeeming feature of the hours between sundown and sunup, I wished almost constantly I were anywhere but in that tent.

Most people we know have either chosen to stay put or to rent a house with all its comforts. With 24 hours between guests and rigorous cleaning protocols in place, with fridges and bathrooms that can be easily wiped down on arrival to ward off any remaining viruses lurking on surfaces, these establishments afford sensible travellers all the same daytime pleasures…. and then they go to sleep. In a bed. Without strange neighbours (by which I mean by strangers and weirdos) a mere few feet away.

I, on the other hand, eschewed all of these amenities and comforts, like a deranged person in the desert choosing to use her canteen to water a cactus instead of drinking it herself: somehow, in some roundabout way, I told myself I was helping nature by being part of it (a rather dubious, self-defeating and deeply flawed logic, on closer inspection, because nature most assuredly did not want me in it), despite the enormous personal cost. After braving shared toilets — even armed with our own hand soap, toilet paper, gloves and of course masks, it was an experience that would have challenged the heartiest adventurer, pandemic or no — I had to hope that when my children brushed their teeth, they didn’t spit the paste out the tent flap and into my shoes. I had to try to coax my children to fall asleep surrounded by RVs, illegal campfires and the sounds of millennial surfers blithely ignoring the 10pm quiet time. I had to quell the girls’ fears in this strange place: no, a tsunami couldn’t reach us up here on this hillside (actually, could it? Perhaps she had a point); no, there are no kidnapper aliens on that satellite circling above us (and yes, they do look rather ominous when you think about it). I had to wrestle the fly sheet onto the tent, and then near midnight, the flapping of said fly sheet in the rising winds so deafening none of us could sleep (except my hubby, who was happily snoring away), I had to wrestle it off again. Then, just as I’d sunk into a fitful sleep, my hips hurting like an octogeniaran, I heard those fateful words that every parent dreads: “Mommy, I think I’m going to throw up”.

I quickly shepherd the small, nauseous person into the car, thinking that sitting upright in relative comfort on the back seat I could contain what was coming in a barf bag, whereas in the dark of the tent anything could happen. Of course the other child woke up and was frightened without me, and my erstwhile happily snoring husband, now awake and deeply unhappy about it, was not exactly comforting. At least our neighbours in their steel-walled vehicles (and their beds!) might not have heard their plaintive voices or seen our bobbling flashlights or noticed the car doors opening and closing multiple times, I thought — because fear of bothering or offending your fellow travellers becomes a major wet blanket on everything you do, although it seemed on this trip I was perhaps the only traveller so encumbered by such thoughts.

The vomiting episode I dreaded (and yet secretly longed for, because then we could give up and go home) never transpired and it turned out to be a false alarm; so false indeed, that in the morning the previously queasy child confessed to making it all up so that she could sit in the car with me instead of lying miserably in the tent. Anywhere but here.

We returned to the tent, I calmed everyone back down, then realised I desperately needed to pee, but refused to travel a few hundred yards down the steep hill to the cess pit that was the shared bathroom, and so stubbornly went back to sleep in extreme discomfort (both hip and bladder). Just as I drifted off again, there it came: the unmistakable roll of thunder. As the lightning flashed out at sea, I tried to count the seconds between the flash and the clap, but realised in my exhaustion that I’d forgotten which came first. Indeed, I’d forgotten how to count.

I was awakened around half an hour later by the patter of raindrops on my face. I roused my husband again (at least this time he had a job he knew he could master, wrestling a fly sheet onto a tent in the dark and the rain being infinitely easier than comforting a child who only wants the other, absent parent), and we covered that tent. The rain, of course, abruptly stopped.

Back in the sleeping bag, I realised dawn was coming, and gave up, choosing instead to focus my remaining energies on not wetting my pants, until such a time as the zip (the horrible, whining searing scrape of the zip!) would not awaken my children and turn them into exhausted, hollow-eyed beasts the following day. One of us was enough, and I knew I could manage my own exhaustion with the best pair crutches at any tired parent’s disposal: coffee and wine.

Permanent damage to my plumbing system notwithstanding, I survived that first night. The following three (three!) were marked by various other adventures, including noisy neighbours (one of whom had the temerity to snore even louder than my husband, who’d kindly absented himself to a far corner of the orchard), bug bites, more lightning and rain, nightmares, and a child suffering a panic attack (at least — I thought to myself as I held her shaking body and wondered how to help her start breathing again — we’d been to the ER in San Luis Obispo on a vacation two years previously, so she was probably already in their system; sometimes these small comforts get us through the strangest times).

Shattered, sore, profoundly exhausted in mind and body, I nevertheless managed to remain remarkably cheerful during our daytime adventures. So pleased was I to be sitting in restaurants with people bringing me delicious things to eat and then whisking away the dirty dishes, I uttered hardly a single complaint. My condition on this trip, having spent our first one in a campsite with no running water washing dishes in a tiny scummy cooking pot, was that I would not cook a single thing, not even a s’more. Not only did my children not protest, they actually questioned why people thought they had to eat s’mores on camping trips anyway, as they gaily ordered refills of lemonade, guacamole and ice cream.

My poor husband quietly watched his dreams of camping all over the American West with his wife and children go up in the smoke (for there was actual smoke: although open fires were banned, he liked making his coffee over a Bunsen burner, and managed to burn the pot; the smell still lingers in my nostrils). As he plaintively tried to defend our choices by extolling the beautiful sights we’d seen, our daughters fixed him with withering looks, and told him in no uncertain terms that they looked just as good when you slept in a hotel.

As they whined their way through the four-hour car trip back south, wishing they were anywhere but in the car again, we talked of our next trip. With the possibility of borrowing a friend’s RV and the reopening of schools fraught with an uncertainty that might afford us the opportunity of an autumn escape, we wondered whether actual beds and our own toilet would make our next adventure more successful. Everything — the RV, the schools, the travel — remains to be seen. And that uncertainty, that promise of adventure, is precisely what makes travel so alluring in the first place.

One thing is certain, though. When my husband asked me the other day where I thought he should store our tent, many possible replies came to mind (“up your bottom” was one), but there was really only one answer.

In the bin.

Indeed, anywhere but here.

Spoonful of Sugar

Mary Poppins had so much right. When life has you feeling trapped and miserable and wholly out of touch with your inner child, go fly a kite. When you’re feeling low and unsure of what to do, laugh so much you float up to the ceiling. When the world is grey and raining down on you (again), step through a chalk painting into another world.

It is also true that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And with that in mind, and frankly bored with the lazy old misery guts I was fast becoming, I promised myself last week that I would do something fun with my children every day that this awful pandemic lasts, knowing full well that those days could be interminable. Their lovely little lives have been upended, derailed, and otherwise pinioned and curtailed in almost every possible way. They look up at me, their sweet faces full of hope and fear and ask me if it will be like this for the rest of their lives. And I don’t know what to tell them.

Because of course we all desperately wish it to go away, but we also know that it may not, because that’s how coronaviruses operate. And so because no one knows when or where this will end, and because it matters now more than ever to live each day to its fullest, I took a silent pledge to make every day better, even if only for a few moments. I had been doing this unofficially all spring, but then we had our summer lull, the biggest one yet of those dizzying dips on the coronacoaster which we can’t always see past, when it feels like the only way to go is down.

July was truly tough. Perhaps it was the heady freedom of our spine-tingling trip to the edge of one of the wonders of the world, which then made our four walls seem even more confining when we returned. Perhaps it was the sheer number of days that we have now spent suspended, stuck, saddened and serious. Perhaps it was the empty echoes of a celebration of independence none of us now truly have.

Perhaps it was the fact that we celebrated my beloved great aunt’s 104th birthday without her, having lost her this spring to the cruel ravages of COVID-19, and then the very next day we celebrated my daughter’s tenth birthday in masks and gloves, waving at her friends from our driveway, trying not to think about that strange, gaping hole at the center of her day where there should have been a party.

Perhaps it was the fact that we had dragged ourselves through the miserably lonely months of spring looking forward to the vague promise that summer would be better, when it could only ever pale — nay, blanch to an utterly colorless nothing — in comparison to summers past, and that fact made itself painfully obvious as the month that should have been the heart of summer became such an empty void. Whatever the reason, July was long and lonely and sad, despite time with loved ones and best efforts to make it better. And it’s hard to know where to look because the road behind us is strewn with chaos and loss — and the road ahead could be worse.

Today is the 150th day since California first locked down. So in honor of that rather grim milestone, I share with you a list of the things we have done in the last 150 days to make them lighter and more lovely. I am in no way comparing myself to Mary Poppins; perhaps when my children were smaller and I was younger and sweeter and less exhausted, I achieved those lofty heights on occasion. But these days — these days!— I can often manage simply the one spoonful (and frankly even that can be a struggle). But that is often all it takes to transform a day, to lift my children’s spirits… and mine — because, to quote another favorite, sometimes you just have to whistle a happy tune and you fool yourself as well.

In no particular order (because order no longer seems to matter, and because I can’t remember, which probably also no longer matters), here are some of our favorite things that we’ve done to brighten our darkish days. It is important to know that I have participated in every single thing listed here. Which is possibly why it works so well and why I know the best thing I could do for all of us is to keep my promise to leave no day unbrightened by silliness and magic, as we march forward into the unknown.

We have:

Poured half a bottle of bubbles into the jacuzzi tub — then turned on the jets (the towers of bubbles were so huge they were over my head and took two days to disappear entirely)

Gone boogie boarding

Made sandcastles

Watched dolphins playing in the ocean

Shot foam rockets into the sky

Learned how to ride a bike without training wheels (okay, I already had that one down, but I taught them and my heart soared when they took off, feeling like I was flying along with them)

Played tennis in the park

Played volleyball in the park

Played soccer in the park

Practiced cartwheels and backbends (in the park, of course; it is large and grassy and lovely and usually empty and we are so lucky to have it)

Practiced ballet at the barre

Practiced yoga, with the children taking it in turns to lead us

Designed our dream homes

Made tipis out of twigs and brown paper bags

Made Aboriginal-inspired art out of brown paper bags

Made hats out of brown paper bags

Staged fashion shows

Given each other makeovers

Painted our toenails

Dyed our hair purple and blue

Had dance parties, complete with flashing colored lights and a disco ball

Had mother-daughter sleepovers (just the three of us) in my younger daughter’s bedroom

Had mother-daughter sleepovers in my older daughter’s bedroom

Piled into our bed with a stack of books, every day this spring

Piled into our bed to watch movies

Piled into our bed to play board games

Had tea parties with lovies

Had tea parties with each other

Had hot cocoa on a hot day while reading stacks of books

Had ice cream on a chilly day while reading stacks of books

Made our own sushi

Made a giant rainbow unicorn birthday cake

Made food from eleven different countries (and counting)

Camped in our backyard

Camped in the great outdoors

Dyed our hair purple and blue

Looked at three different planets (and a few moons) through a telescope

Learned how to identify constellations

Searched for comets

Counted the stars

I started this list to remind myself that I am not perhaps the terrible parent I so often feel that I am these days, to remind myself that I have some agency and some small degree of control over the direction in which our lives are headed, to remind myself that I have the power to change things for the better and to pass that power on to my children. I started this list because in a time when we are all exhausted by uncertainty and by interminably bad news, setting out to accomplish even one small thing (sending a text, opening the mail, feeding one’s children) feels like a Sisyphean task. I started this list to try to regain some of the perspective which is so easy to lose when nearly all our external forms of validation have vanished, as we have lost the usual rhythms of our lives which bind us to a sense of ourselves and tether us to what is familiar and known and good.

And all the while we wonder what irreparable harm this time is doing to our children, to us all. Am I locking down too hard and cutting my children off from any semblance of normalcy? Am I letting them out too much and taking too many risks? Am I too strict? Am I too lax? Am I forgetting to teach them about what really matters? Can their brains actually shrink from watching too much tv? Will they ever love reading and school as much as they once did? Will they remember all the times I have yelled at them during lockdown, or will they remember the times I have lifted them up and made them feel loved? Am I crushing their spirits or teaching them to function like regular humans? Will they thank me for all the careful attention I give them or will they remember only the times I have failed them during these dark days?

Assailed by doubts, I do what I can to assuage them before they pull me under (the doubts, not the children — though there are days I feel that in my attempts to rescue them from drowning I start to sink like a stone).

So I turn once more to the wisdom of Mary Poppins. If you’ve never read the books, please do: they are full of many more examples of that delightful juxtaposition of her prim, proper exterior and her magical ability to make absolutely everything far more fun than it could ever have been without her. They are also weirder and more wonderful, and more than a little darker, than the unsurprisingly sugary Disney version. But really, I am democratic in my tastes: I don’t truly differentiate between Julie Andrews’ slightly saccharine but satisfyingly sassy version, or Emily Blunt’s perhaps more faithful interpretation, or PL Travers’ far firmer and fantastically formidable original. I’ll take whatever sugar or hard-won wisdom I can glean; it’s all to the good, however far from practically perfect we may find ourselves these days.

And so we have had our tea parties and we have laughed (though we have yet to float up to the ceiling).

We have made sidewalk chalk drawings (though we have yet to work out how to jump through them into another world).

And of course — of course — we have flown a kite.

And that has made all the difference.

Smeared Mascara and Video Games

“Oh,” said my incredibly talented and mind-bogglingly busy cousin (who achieved tenure at a top university by age 40, whilst simultaneously juggling the demands of two busy, bright children, solving the hunger crisis in America, and teaching ballet workouts in her spare time), “you’re one of those people who’ve been productive in quarantine.”

Given her numerous and staggeringly enormous accomplishments, I took this as a rather wonderful compliment.

However I am sorry to say that I have not lived up to that early promise. From setting up websites and starting a blog (hi!), to teaching my children ancient history through the medium of crafts and clever games, I was seriously productive during the first six weeks of lockdown. Absent the grinding and exhausting routine of our pre-COVID lives, all that pent up creativity and longing to spend more time doing meaningful things with my children found its outlet, and we were on fire.

Then, slowly, almost invisibly, standards started to slip. As the tedium of being cooped up and lonely took its terrible toll, especially on my elementary-school-aged children who suffered visibly and dramatically without their busy, happy, highly social lives, we argued and clashed. We lashed out at each other, because there was no one else, and we understood at a deep and personal level why caged animals become aggressive: they are frightened and trapped and everything in their nature longs to be free, so they become angry. We argued because we were railing against the sadness and the unfairness and the wrongness of our new normal, and because we desperately longed for something better. We fought because we cared.

And then something far worse happened: slowly, but very visibly, we stopped caring. My daughters, who previously loved their dancing, began to resent it. Dance is a performing art, after all, so without their fellow dancers, without the costumes and the lights and the stage, it began to lose its lustre. As we watched, their little lights went out. They became sullen and surly and silent. We did not recognise them, or indeed ourselves.

My husband’s quarantined-themed jokes to his colleagues — which, with our open- plan office, we all had to hear, every day — became less chuckle-inducing and more stale. I had much to say, but no inspiration with which to say it. I had much to do, but no energy with which to do it. We did some impressive spring cleaning, moving furniture and clearing out three-year-old dust bunnies (actually ‘bunnies’ sounds too cute — these were the size of enormous wild hares), but then, after our brief flurry of sorting and organising, spurred on by the promise of a puppy which has yet to materialise, we lost our motivation. With the discipline of many decades of doing things we don’t particularly like, my husband and I still rally ourselves to tidy and clean, a bit — we are grownups, after all, and we still sometimes to manage to behave somewhat like them. But our children now hate us for making them do chores, because we used to motivate them with the excitement of friends coming over, and they would buzz about busily and happily helping. Without that reward, why bother?

After our grand adventure to see Granddad and the Grand Canyon, we returned to… nothing. Camps were cancelled, or else indoors and therefore A Very Bad Idea. The Fourth of July felt flat and friendless. Our trip to Target was initially exciting, but by the time we were done with our errand, we were all desperate to get out from under the fluorescent lighting, away from what felt like COVID-infested confinement, and back home. We downshifted toward depression and embraced boredom, for the first time ever in our collective lives. My children have watched more television in the last month than in the previous year. For the first time ever, I hear that famous refrain, “I’m bored!” It is a novel sensation for all of us, and it doesn’t sit well.

We are spiralling down the drain.

As I start to wonder how low we can go, I think of the guilty pleasures I have enjoyed of late, all of which are unprecedented and never even crossed my mind in my previously busy, engaged, rather loftier lifestyle.

I’ve secretly scoffed s’mores for breakfast — having also enjoyed them in bed the night before, watching Bonfire of Destiny, with large amounts of red wine (the wine was at night, not breakfast — we aren’t quite there.… yet. Although, with another year of online school looming, there is a distinct possibility that wine will indeed be on the breakfast menu at our house).

I didn’t wash my younger daughter’s hair for an impressive and rather shocking nine days. Granted, it’s a task that would daunt the bravest of parents; I have previously had to don a swimsuit and earplugs to survive this experience. I worry that our neighbours will report us to social services, because she shrieks blue murder when she gets (tear-free, ultra gentle) soap in her eyes, and her own solution of wearing swim goggles backfires because she shrieks even louder when the elastic strap tugs at her hair upon removal. Faced with this enticing experience, I just…. didn’t.

Just do it? No, just DON’T. That’s my new motto.

I hardly recognise myself. (Nor do I recognise my small, wild-haired progeny, who looks like a cave child, and likely has creatures living in her mad mop of hair along with the leaves and twigs are very definitely stuck in it; we’re not talking wombats here, but certainly something the size of a field mouse or a small hedgehog could take up residence without our knowing).

I most definitely don’t recognise the person indulging in my latest guilty pleasure, which is playing video games on my phone. I am deeply ashamed to admit this, but the idea of this blog was to share my life, so here goes nothing: from the more edifying crossword puzzles and Sudoku, to downright mortifying home decorating games, I am totally hooked. While my husband works around the clock to keep a roof over our heads (guilt!) and my children rot their brains watching endless hours of television (more guilt!), I pop bubbles and blast ducks and bash piñatas. I refuse to spend a penny on these apps, so luckily I get timed out pretty quickly, lose all my lives, and am forced to walk away and function semi-normally again.

And of course I am losing my life in much bigger ways, which is what this is really all about. On the plus side, there is meditation and flow and, frankly, fun to be had; on the downside I think I am starting to scare my children. I point out that they play games on their devices, or watch TV, so why can’t I? Because I am supposed to be the grownup. I am supposed to be creative and fun and reassuring, and I still manage that for a reasonable part of most days. But all day, every day, all summer long? Right now, that’s just too tall an order.

Perhaps the biggest guilty pleasure of all is the fact that I am taking any pleasure whatsoever in this strange time of fear and sickness and death. My formerly Catholic husband says I am the guiltiest Protestant he knows, but my WASPy roots also mean I’m genetically programmed to feel bad whenever I am not working and doing. My real work has dried up for the nonce, as publishers delay and rearrange and frantically scramble to adjust to a world where bookshops were closed for months on end, and people bought toilet paper instead of stories. And all my dozens of ideas for new projects just languish, because I am languishing too.

Please don’t misunderstand me: it’s not all as bad as I am making it out to be. I am feeding my children semi-nutritious food multiple times a day; they are usually clean (banshee hair aside); they are cared for and cuddled and loved. We watch movies together — because while before I was busy cooking or cleaning or being a generally productive parent, now I just flop down with them, guilty but happy. We read books together, albeit fewer than the huge stacks we normally dive into during summer vacation. We go to the beach several days a week, splashing in the surf together, taking huge lungfuls of ozone-rich air. We see friends, outside, at a distance, the masks hiding our enormous grins.

But it’s those small, in-between moments which are so radically different these days. Restless, bored, worried, angry at the mess this country is in, I need mindlessness. I seek it out and have grown to depend on it. I’ve always enjoyed a bit of mind candy, but now I depend on it like a drug.

When I’ve been depressed in the past, I have learned that I need, sometimes, to let myself sink down to the bottom so I can kick off and rise back up to the surface where I belong. Perpetually Pollyannaish, I am a natural optimist, but I have realised over the years that sometimes I just have to let myself frown on the world instead. It’s exhausting being relentlessly positive, so I know that I need to allow myself to stop. Even Pollyanna had her low moments, when she faced the probability of paralysis. I’m facing paralysis of a different sort, as our lives are on a semi-permanent pause, so I see that I need to hit a low, which will allow me to then rise from the ashes of my own self-immolation, like a phoenix. But what if I can’t stop? What if I like it too much? What if I can’t get back up for air?

The other day my seven-year-old, tripped into my bedroom in full makeup and high heels (at least she’s being creative during her incarceration), and said to me, scathingly, shaking her mop of hair, “You used to be a really good mom, but now it’s all smeared mascara and video games.”

I said not a word, because there was nothing to say.

Excuse me, but I need to go blow up a duck.