This is beginning to sound like a blog about discipline.

It’s not. It’s about desperation.

Or rather, its antidote.

I don’t use the word “stressful” as a general rule, because we have a daughter with a very, very severe anxiety disorder for whom stressfulness defines life. (And yes, although I loathe unnecessarily lengthened or complicated words, I do think stressfulness is a little more specific. “Stress” is about engineers and bridges and steel and so on. Stressfulness is more of a lifestyle.)

Similarly I almost never say “depression”. Which can cover anything from a vague melancholy or malaise or even deep sadness, to such torturous screaming agony its victim doesn’t know how to live another minute.

And sometimes can’t.

Nor “unbearable”, for reasons too obvious to insult you with.

So let me not say, life at home had become any of these things.

Let’s say instead, that when we were given the opportunity to use someone’s house, because it had no lettings for the long and dismal duration of an economically-crippled Covid winter, it was a Godsend.

Which is a word I can use.

So when this most recent lockdown was announced, we poured and poured over the government website. First filled with dismay that we couldn’t. Then realising with tentative delight that perhaps we might… we maybe… we checked with others… yes, we could!

It was legal to “finish a UK holiday”.

(And checked again. And yet again.)

Yes, we could stay where we happened to be, when midnight fell on that imprisoning (or in our case, liberating) lockdown Wednesday, 4th November.

So here we are… Far from home

Indeed, it wasn’t until a week or two after that, when Shaun realised he needed all his papers from home to do our tax returns, that I realised I had to stay here.

If we went back for anything, we couldn’t come away again: that is the current law. And I couldn’t go home: I simply couldn’t.

I should explain that being without Shaun is something I hate almost more than anything I ever have to face.

In 2005 and ’6 we were apart, on and off, for eight very long months. As a family we were homeless, and had to shift where we could. The details are tedious: it is enough that for much of it Shaun and I were hundreds of miles apart, in different countries. I, where a generous friend had lent me a house: Shaun initially sofa-surfing and then staying with other generous friends, a forty-five minute drive from the church where he was employed.

That period of our lives was (for us) a lot worse than this one…

By a long, long way.

I totally understand that nothing can be more desperate than this dire Covid-19 2020 for those whose lives have been permanently diminished by the dreadful disease. Some have lost livelihoods; jobs; presumably homes.

Worse, for some, their health.

Worst of all, loved ones. Sometimes without even a goodbye.

For some, the war never did come to an end. My father lost his best friend, and his tears never dried for him, even decades later.

But thank God, for most of us this pandemic will not last forever.

Whereas for us, when we were homeless, we couldn’t see a definite end at all.

When it did finally become less awful – we hadn’t escaped, and weren’t housed adequately for another three years, but we were all under the same roof – I laid my head on Shaun’s shoulder, in the bed we were sharing together again at last, and swore I would never let myself be separated from him again.

And yet, when he said he might have to go home for bank statements and we wouldn’t be able to return until 2nd December, I thought about it overnight and the next morning said I was really sorry but in that case, I would have to stay here alone.

For most of us right now, distance feels like a curse. A lifesaving one, perhaps; but a curse nonetheless.

But please forgive me, at the moment distance is proving a healer for me. Or a soother anyway. (Sometimes, when we haven’t the luxury of physical distance, we have to find distance in our head. I admit that would have been a lot harder.)

But at last, thanks to heroes in white coats with leaky lab biros in their breast pockets all over the world and throughout this most extraordinary and blessed human race, that distance is getting smaller and the light is getting larger, and an end is already in sight.

Probably in the first half of next year. Lambent in a very dismal darkness, at a distance now very slightly closer, shining in a sky which will burst gloriously upon us, surely sometime in 2021…