Jonny McCambridge: The lockdown diaries: A week inside the bunker

My son plays on the swing while my wife weeds the flowerbeds. I want to be useful too so I count the daffodils. There are 64. I volunteer the information to my wife but she seems not to share my enthusiasm for nature.

My son is now playing on his scooter while my wife is on her hands and knees scrubbing moss off the garden path with a wire brush. I curse the bad back which prevents me from undertaking such labour.

My wife points out the length of the grass, which is snaking around my ankles. She suggests I get the lawnmower out of the shed. I hold out my hand and look at the sky doubtfully.

‘Looks like it’s going to rain. We’d best go in.’

MONDAY: I’m working when I receive a phone call. It is from a friend who works at the daycare nursery which, before the lockdown, my son attended. He had been going to this facility since he was a baby.

After the restrictions, the nursery had attempted to keep going, offering support to families of key workers. Now, my friend informs me, they are being forced to close.

Her voice is cracking with emotion as she tells me that she hopes it will only be for a short period and that everything will be back to normal soon.

I agree and wish her all the best, feeling her emotion spill into me. I try, but fail, to think of something useful to say.

TUESDAY: I’m worried about my hands. They are delicate items. The fanciful part of my mind likes to think this is because they are the tools of an artist. My da likes to tell me it is because I have never done a proper day’s work in all of my life.

Now, weeks of vigorous scrubbing has changed them. The skin on my fists has cracked like the ground beneath a puddle in a drought.

In desperation I burrow into my wife’s bag of lotions and squeeze some unidentified white cream onto my hands. No sooner have I rubbed it in than my paws begin to swell alarmingly.

I stumble downstairs, showing my grotesquely oversized mitts to my family. My wife exhales in fright. My son laughs.

While my wife rifles through the medicine cabinet for allergy cream my son quickly extemporises a game where I have to run around, pounding my grotesque fists on the floor while shouting ‘Hulk smash!’

WEDNESDAY: I look out my front window and I can see soapy water running down the road. I know what is happening. One of my neighbours is washing his car.

It is the middle of a weekday and, until recently, he would have been at work at this time. But he doesn’t have a job to go to anymore. Now, he washes his car every day.

There is a couple in my estate who had a baby last month. I can see that their family is visiting, standing outside the window while the baby is held up, waving at her through the glass.

THURSDAY: I have to do the weekly food shop. After queuing outside the supermarket for half an hour, I am finally admitted.

I’m browsing through fruit and veg when a large man wearing with a mask comes running towards me, yelling something indecipherable. I’m frozen in confusion and fear.

It turns out that they have introduced a one-way system in the store and I’m walking in the wrong direction, having missed the large arrows stuck on the floor. I turn around.

There is a cauliflower which I had my eye on, but it is behind me now. The large man is still watching and I know I can’t go back. The arrows forbid it.

Defeated, I move onwards. I’ll just have Super Noodles instead.

FRIDAY: The three of us go for a walk, just to get some exercise. When we meet someone coming along the footpath we stand well out of the way.

My wife stops to talk to an older woman. They have to raise their voices slightly because they are standing apart.

When we resume our stroll I ask my wife who it was she was chatting with.

‘I don’t know,’ she replies. ‘I just think we should talk to people.’

As we walk home we pass the house of an elderly neighbour and notice she has got a brightly coloured piece of paper stuck in her window. It is a drawing my son completed this morning and posted through her letterbox.

There is an image of a rainbow. Below it reads: ‘Stay safe, stay happy.’

SATURDAY: In an effort to maintain some peer contact for our son, my wife has organised for him to take part in FaceTime conversations with his school friends. As I watch him through the door talking into the computer, I’m moved by how much older he seems than his six years.

I decide to give him a cuddle, but as soon as I enter the room he shoots me a savage glare.

‘Excuse me, can’t you see I’m having a private conversation here.’

I meekly retreat.

Later, on the phone to his cousin he is overheard.

‘You know, when this coronavirus is all over there’s going to be a lot of hugs for everyone....even nana.’

In the afternoon I’m listening to the news. Naturally it is dominated by the pandemic. I turn the volume down as my boy enters and sits on my knee. He seems quiet, perhaps a little troubled.

I wonder what this world must look like through his juvenile eyes. He knows about the coronavirus pandemic, but how heavily is it weighing on his mind?

‘Is there anything,’ I begin, ‘that you want to ask daddy about?’

He looks thoughtful for a second. Then he answers.

‘Daddy, I’ve noticed that your underpants don’t have pictures of dinosaurs or superheroes on them. How are you able to tell the front from the back?’

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