The bike and the cat have both arrived. They’ve shut the local park, a preemptive action ahead of a hot and sunny weekend. The endless internal and external dialogue about what is okay and not okay to do to stay happy continues. The cat gives some respite. Our minds can be filled with fretful thoughts about her instead of about the virus. The death toll is climbing quickly here, as in other places, but it feels much less visible now. We are in a kind of stasis now that the conditions of how we should live have been established.

Birthdays are coming and going basically unmarked. The new hospital has opened in London. I can’t image what a weird space it must be. We’re still cooking large evening meals and eating together as a house and it reminds me to be grateful I’m not isolated completely on my own, like many people I know.

We went on a long bike ride through South London yesterday and ended up by the river in Battersea Park. The tarmac path that runs a circuit around the park was packed with people anxiously attempting to keep two metres’ distance, or ignoring that completely. Often I’d hear snippets of conversation condemning all the people packed into the park for their recklessness as I flew past on my bike. Of course all those condemnations come from others walking in the park themselves. It’s supposed to get up to 19C today and Brockwell Park is closed on police advice; yesterday it was full of over 3000 people sunbathing. I can only imagine the invective from other people in the park complaining about all the people in the park. We have, unfortunately, made national news.

The new cat is really kitten. She’s called Talisker after a distillery on the Isle of Skye. We call her Tali for short. She runs around and plays, eats, and falls asleep, all of this on a two-or-so hour cycle. She’s peeing on the bed a fair amount, which has begun to affect our sleep. Something ought to. Left to our own devices we’re all in bed by eleven o’ clock on a Saturday and wouldn’t rise again until twelve hours later. What would be the point?

People are burning down newly constructed 5G cell towers because of a conspiracy theory that the government is using them to spread the virus as a pretext to insert mind control chips into the population’s brains.