While jogging around my neighbourhood yesterday, I was slowly followed by a police car for several minutes. It observed my route and stopped to watch how I reacted when a person appeared, coming in the other direction. After I had ventured out into the middle of the empty road to pass the other person at a two-metre distance, the car left me to continue my run.

Initial measures of shutting down educational establishments, from crèches to third level institutions and beyond, were announced in France on Thursday 12 March and implemented from the following Monday. Bars, restaurants, cafés and non-essential retail outlets were ordered to close on 14 March from midnight. Businesses were told to enable work-from-home where possible and, within two days, an official ‘attestation’ was circulated that anyone leaving their home must now take with them, signed, dated and specifying one of the permitted reasons—including my exercise session—to leave home. This is being strongly enforced by the gendarmes and local police.

Because there hasn’t been much of a voluntary aspect to ‘confinement’ here in France, it feels as if there hasn’t been as much discussion about it as in other places. I haven’t noticed the condemnation and judgement of others’ choices that has seemed so loud in anglophone media and social media. More than division, anger and panic, it feels like there is unity here, and acceptance… for the moment. 

Life has slowed down, a lot. Even as people who worked from home before this (making this period less unusual for us than for others), we feel obstructed in achieving as much on a daily basis as before. Full-time childminding reduces our available hours for work, while unavailability of supplies stymies our long list of home and garden improvement projects. We are reduced to daily activities like shovelling gravel into buckets, emptying them and starting again. When would you find whole days to spend doing that in normal life? Such an activity is the very definition of ‘busy fool’ in normal life. But watching the delight and focus brought to the task by a one-and-a-half-year-old (and seeing how well he sleeps after a day of it) makes me realise that it is the sort of mindful, repetitive exercise that calms the mind, and is probably quite good for us to be doing, together.

Mind-less exercises, such as grocery shopping and taking the bins out, have also taken on a new level of attraction. We try not to fight over whose turn it is to go and spend a glorious, liberated, twenty minutes queueing outside the supermarket and as long as possible filling the trolley, but each of us knows the exact date and time of the other’s last great escape and is not going to let a fast one be pulled on them.

Sometimes one of us lets the other go, even if it’s not their turn. To see the uplift in mood that an hour alone in the car and the supermarket gives your loved one is worth it on some days, when you can see they aren’t coping as well as on other days.

I don’t want to make too bold a statement, but I think we might be learning to be nicer to each other.

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