By the time the Prime Minister finally changed policy course and announced his bumbling version of lockdown on 23 March, it had been long overdue. We had been essentially locked down for eight days before it was announced, following a return from a glorious birthday trip, now difficult to remember in detail, reduced to blurry bursts.

The first month of lockdown was characterised by dejection, which took different forms – eating bread slathered in butter, drinking wine, fearing the virus, reading about it constantly, committing to the first jigsaw puzzle of adulthood, slowly sorting through papers, letting the apartment get dirty and then half-assedly cleaning it, moving very little, listening to sirens, staring at the empty busses going by, cursing the capsulitis in my right shoulder that was steadily getting worse and worse.

Two ideas, at war with one another, ruled my life:

I am responsible to myself & others and can do this for as long as it takes

This is unnatural and claustrophobic and I am ill-equipped to deal with most aspects of it.

***

Across March, April, and May, friends came down with the virus; a friend of friends died; an acquaintance, a very sweet man, died, too. I have spoken to my mother and my sister and her family every day since the start of March, with just one exception. Politics continued to proceed detached from science and sense in both the place I come from and the one I live in. It became clear to me in a new way that neither Boris Johnson nor Donald Trump cared if I lived or died.

Things looked up when I started walking, at first from home to a park in the Docklands called Russia Dock Woodland, which takes two to three hours there and back, depending on my route; then farther afield. A few weeks into my new walking programme I began to embark on a six-hour journey to various far-flung bits of south London once or twice a week. 16,000 steps became normal; then 25,000 steps; then 29,000 steps; then 35,000.

The thing about a long walk is that you have nobody but yourself and possibly your phone, which can provide fairly good company. You can stay furious on Twitter or delighted on Instagram or consternated over an email. Or you can take long breaks from these distractions, breathe in different air, track the season by the degree to which your eyes are made itchy by pollen, and gaze at different things.

This has been the most satisfying yield – the opportunity to see different bits of London. Brexit has slowly and steadily corroded my love of London. This is an intimate tragedy, for there is no other city where I have felt more at home as an adult than this one. This is the city where I have felt free, unconstrained, able to be whoever I am without the impositions of social expectation. I know it’s not like this for most Londoners, but it has been for me. The feeling of the city along with the country slipping away from me over these last four years into a stupid future has been very painful.

These walks provide reminders every day of how lovely London is to me – the enormous parks, teeming with people as soon as the sun shows itself; the whirl of languages; the utter satisfaction of imagining that the smaller streets in between the enormous thoroughfares will be charming and then finding that to be true; the beautiful, to me at least, housing estates strewn across south London, some modernist architectural tours-de-force, others workaday; the posh streets with named houses, the hard-up streets, and the trees lining both; the pockets of distinct communities; the scripts; the hubbub; the overheard conversations.

These walks also feel like the best approximation of travel I can come up with, though a particular version of it. All along the pandemic has felt like a preview of old age. I recall when my father moved into a retirement complex there were regular postings of miniature adventures, like an afternoon in a rose garden. I have long been obsessed with the coach day and overnight trips operated by travel agencies in the UK: bluebells in season; Margate; spring garden tours. I like that they say: I might not be up for a long-haul flight but I’m not down for the count. My daily walks transport me to my future.

The past three weeks have been different, of course, watching the Black Lives Matter protests actually transform mainstream thinking in the US, with ripple effects in the UK, Belgium, and elsewhere, watching Trump not just fail to respond adequately – as expected – but also to be so out of touch with the country he has no interest in actually leading. I know we are in a lot of trouble, in a lot of ways, but I am full of hope again.

***

This has been my very long and very quick spring, with walks around London, trying to make the everyday extraordinary, getting lost on occasion in a good book. (Jane Kramer’s Europeans wracked me with envy, even the bits that felt imprecise; Eva Holland’s Nerve, which arrived last week, is my model for a particular type of storytelling.)

Every day I think about the things I long to do once this virus is better controlled.