So the lockdown life trundles on… children are no less wild, make-up has been entirely renounced (not that anything other than mascara played much of a part in my life anyway), vegetables are growing and the grass has finally been properly cut.  The weather lends life the atmosphere of fondly remembered long summers of my childhood.  Basically, I feel as though we have been marooned on holiday.   This lockdown life is unplanned, and externally enforced, but not at all unpleasant … for us.

I have been allowing myself to feel safe in our bubble here in Cornwall.  No-one I know is sick yet, the sun is shining and reality is far away, isn’t it?  I catch up with a doctor friend and she tells me her husband is now working on the hospital Covid ward.  I think of their small children, similar ages to mine, and the difference between their experiences of this.  I imagine my children having to wait to cuddle daddy when he gets home so he can make himself safe after simply doing his job. 

I think of the BBC’s Emily Maitlis and her fantastic speech about the inequality of Covid-19.  We are not all experiencing this in the same way or even together after all.  The inequalities of this disease and its after-effects will be the challenge of our generation.  I look at our current module about the Enabling Environment with fresh eyes and wonder what challenges we will face as new teachers in a few years’ time. I have been feeling useless: in awe of the heroes working on the frontline of this crisis, and perhaps uneasy about the insignificance of my worries about passing this module.  Now I wonder if perhaps we all have our part to play, perhaps this course will even allow me to be a hero to someone in a few years when my classroom will be filled with children affected by this strange, uncertain time.