Virus Diary Week 28

It all feels like a big fat charade but as long as the schools continue so will this semblance of normality. Up early, lunch packed, on the bikes – or in the car depending how late it is – home, coffee, then climb the, er, ladder to the roofspace for work. Normality. Since the start of the outbreak we’d wondered how new regimes of classroom cleanliness would affect the regular bouts of coughs and sneezes and vomiting that puncuate the school year. Would dreaded norovirus die out as the coronavirus raged? And surely gross infestations such as nits would be brushed away by social distancing. Not all bad, eh? But, even with the best will in the world, there is no accounting for where those little hands will be and our six-year-old didn’t even make it through his first week back before he was off again, sneezing and snottery. Normally he’d have been sent in anyway but in these sensitive times it didn’t feel right. It’s not a perfect system but they’re doing their best and, at any rate, it gives us the moral high ground to mutter about other parents at the gates.

Meanwhile, older children – those adult ones who bring equal measure of revelry and misery to the Holylands area of south Belfast – are doing their best to keep the pandemic rumbling on for longer than it needs. It’d be alright if they played together then stayed together, building up herd immunity as they, but alas, no. Unlike in more civilised societies these overgrown babies have to go home every weekend so their mammies can wash their underwear. Soundtrack of the week then? Easy: Manchild...