Though I had being skimming headlines about Coronavirus for weeks, I only clocked that something was truly up when I went to our local airport hangar-like supermarket—the sort of place you never visit unless you absolutely have to, like at Christmas or if you’d ill-advisedly committed to an Ottolenghi recipe. It was a surreal vision: the 50-foot long dry goods aisle looked cavernous in its desolation. There wasn’t a single bag of pasta left and only a few sad morsels lying about—I imagined packets being fought over and ripped apart by a now certifiably insane population.

That evening Boris Johnson was scheduled to make another public announcement, this one heavily rumoured to be announcing the lockdown—rumours that had been circulating on WhatsApp for days and that always include intel “from a friend of a friend of a friend who was in the army and was being deployed to London imminently”.

First it was the pasta, and then, weirdly, all the jams and marmalades but fairly quickly, pretty much everything else was gone too. Toilet paper hasn’t been available for weeks and yet, I can’t avoid judging those I see with trolleys full of kitchen roll. Especially with information about how the sewers will struggle with all this new DIY bathroom material being pumped into the system. I took the millennial step of ordering TP online. What I thought was one pack of nine rolls turned out to be six whole packs—on reflection, a great deal. Never did I think toilet paper would provide me with so much anecdotal content.

While surrounding countries went into lockdown with stringent measures like army deployment and the requirement of hall passes, the UK government was just giving the odd gentle (and seemingly optional) nudge to keep up the social distancing—which, as it turns out, wasn’t clear messaging. People were happy to work from home and avoid the Tube but at the first hint of sunshine, the parks were thronged and it felt like any other spring day in East London. The only time I saw anything other than passivity on the streets was when a man sneezed in a small shop and those around him looked as if they’d come into contact with the Ebola virus.

Since park-gate emerged, NHS workers particularly have been crying out for stricter rules—claiming they were already on the edge of war medicine and that triage-like conditions (such as those over 60 not accessing ventilators) will soon be implemented if the population continues to act in this way. Now, thankfully, we join the rest of Europe in lockdown.

Like the rest of the world confined to their homes and reaching the end of Netflix, I find myself frequently bored and increasingly frustrated at the bombardment of content telling me that now is the time to write that book, create a perfume, learn a language or knit a kite. Somehow, having a global pandemic raging around me doesn’t inspire creativity or productivity. I have however enjoyed mornings of fake yoga (more akin to stretching on a mat), afternoons pottering in the garden and evenings in Skype quizzes with friends. It’s also given me time to plan and create (completely in my head) a new dating app that allows users to swipe past profiles—which contain info on favourite isolation activities—in real time; if they match, they are directed to a live video chat whereupon the date starts. It’s Chat Roulette meets Tinder and I call it OKCovid. I’m hoping it’ll make me my first million.

As a freelancer, my income has been hit very hard—something which only became clear on Black Paddy’s Day (as I’m now calling it) when I heard from nearly all my clients that work over the coming months was unanimously cancelled. As a graphic designer and copywriter, lots of my work is events-based and much of it had been booked in up to a year ago. So I am now left without a stable income for the foreseeable.

I don’t know what the next few months hold, but personally, I’m hoping it’s a Universal Basic Income.

Cathy: stocking up in London