“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts”
March 17, 2020.
A virus with no cure was sweeping the world. Borders closed, governments in chaos as they sought answers to questions they didn’t know existed. Glassy-eyed panic buyers plundered the supermarket, stockpiling toilet rolls and baked beans and nervous memories.
Amongst the bedlam and confusion, hidden from view behind a hastily assembled classroom in the living room, in the kitchen, in the bedroom or wherever there was space, parents across the world trembled.
They had closed the damn schools the night before.
People were dying.
Global cases nearing 200,000.
This was France.
And this was not a test.
After forty years rehearsing for the end of the world, a lifetime of films and books on every imaginable dystopian future, I thought I’d be ready. But nothing had prepared me for the supermarket at 9 o’clock this morning. The French closed the country. They should have opened more tills.
Who knew the end of the world would be so expensive?
I was lost in the baby aisle trying to calculate how many nappies a six-month old would need in a lockdown. Three per day? Nine? Nineteen? How many days? They said fifteen on the radio. Fifteen multiplied by nine nappies? A hundred and thirty-five nappies? That’s an odd number, they only come in packs of twenty-four. Humanity was ill equipped for such a question, the survival of the species having never come face-to-face with a lockdown.
As I stood there, trying to make sense of what was happening, a quote from Marcus Aurelius squirmed into the space between headaches. Or maybe I read it on a cereal box. Either way, it made me do something reckless.
I raced home and told my wife I’d chosen ancient wisdom and re-framed the lockdown as a gift. And not just any gift, the greatest gift of all: time with my children.
“You forgot the nappies,” Apocalypse Mommy said. “Didn’t you?”
“That’s why I went,” I said. “I’m so bored of nappies. I can make up for it. I want to do the home schooling. It’s only fifteen days. I get to spend some quality time with Alice. Build bonds. I’ve been a lousy father of late. I’ll take care of the kids, you can have a rest. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“That’s what Scott of the Antarctic said,” she replied. “Didn’t exactly work out for him, did it? Go back and get the nappies, and it’s all yours. Rest? I’ll drink for fifteen days.”
What nobody knew back then was those fifteen days would turn into twenty-seven, forty-one, and then fifty-three days. Fifty-three days of home school. Fifty-three days of Zoom, yoga, clapping, home-made pub quizzes, Stoicism, maths, English, science, pyromania, paranoia, psychosis, sweet addiction, Joe Wicks and, ultimately, a savage journey to the heart of parenting.
Nothing would ever be the same again.
***
School started at nine o’clock. Parenting 101: Routine is sacrosanct. At 9.05 a.m. the lack of ideas or strategy crashed into the classroom, which was really the back of the sofa. There were still seven hours to go and Alice was already bouncing around the apartment like a meth-lab kangaroo.
The world. That seemed like a vague place to start. I took a map from the basement and stuck it to the wall. We could go through outbreaks, country by country. Start with China. Could she place it on a map? Put a pin in Wuhan?
“Alice,” I said, standing at the front of the classroom like a supply teacher. “Where’s Wuhan?”
“Daddy,” she said. “This felt tip doesn’t taste very nice.”
She was eating the fucking pens. “They don’t eat pens in blue zones,” I said, keeping my composure. “Japan is a blue zone. Can you point to Japan on the map?”
She could. I was impressed. Small victories. I asked her where Italy was. She pointed to Bosnia. Then ate a pencil sharpener.
At 10.04 a.m. I put on Netflix. I’d lasted an hour. Forty-five minutes if you include the tea break. Twenty-five minutes if the toilet break counts. It was a documentary about high definition tropical fish. The intro was chic and glossy and everything you would expect, but then the narrator went to Florida and told us 95% of the fish were dead.
Alice did handstands at the back of the classroom, which was really the living room, which is where she usually does handstands, so she was right to do so.
“It’s OK Daddy, sharks eat all the fish. Sharks eat everything. I’m scared of water.”
I thought about my own time at school. Could I drag some lesson plans from 1986? It was all a haze before I was ten. The memories were all from high school. The food-chain, the water cycle, the Kreb cycle, the carbon cycle, weather cycles, migration cycles, planetary cycles, the oxygen cycle, the Tour de fucking France.
Alice had no idea what I was talking about. She looked at me like a dead sandwich. I ordered an encyclopedia on Amazon.
Infections hit 220,000 worldwide.
I put on Spotify. We listened to The Lion King. Alice asked what that had to do with sharks and I said, “Nothing. Do you like Elton John? I don’t.”
“Can you play Baby Shark?”
“What about the Great Barrier Reef?”
“It’s OK,” Alice said. “It’s in Australia. It’ll still be there tomorrow.”
“It will,” I said, “won’t it?”
We had lunch. Pasta. At three o’clock we filled out a form the French government had made mandatory if you wanted to go outside and play in the park. We wanted to go outside and play in the park.
Later that night we sat on beanbags and invoked the Buddha, and wondered what day two would bring.
And the breath.
And we breathed.