Living In Lockdown: A Coronavirus Journal

Eleven days before full lockdown in the UK my wife and I, conscious that the government were being very slow to act, imposed our own self-isolation regime. On that day (12 March2020) I made the very first entry in a journal which would document our experiences over the coming months. The last entry in the diary was made on in the middle of May, shortly after Boris Johnson announced the first stage of relaxing the lockdown rules. The journal is a mix of personal experience, observation, science, politicalcommentary and psychology,tempered occasionally withhumour.It is averypersonal record of a period of social history, albeit brief, which will be seen by future generations to have triggered a radical change in the way we all live, think and feel. It was also a period during which we as a society were challenged to redefine what is meant by "normal" and to leave behind the comfortable memories of what that used to mean, in the knowledge that things would never again be the same.