Writing from home

I am writing from my home.

If I felt my life was as difficult as everyone else's, I would write war correspondence, detailing the traumas of teaching my children or the terror of facing an infectious public or the panic of finding an unpayable rent.

But it isn't.

My children are gone, my parents are too, my secure job can easily be done from home. I have hobbies and people to talk, and writing for pleasure and gain. It all sounds so easy.

All the same.

I never relax in case I forget and go into a shop with no mask. Each morning I wake and check for the cough, although I haven't left the house for days. I watch the news and the data - national, local, worldwide - and I read the stories of ones that have died in the hope that the numbers and numbing will stop.