CAN I tell you how I feel? I feel, sometimes, like everyone in my life has suddenly been reduced to flat, distant images on a computer screen, like we’re in Star Trek. And I don’t like it.

And I feel, too, like it’s harder to put things into perspective during the lockdown. You get an email or message, or more importantly you don't get an email or message, and there’s no one to turn to straight away and say, “what do you make of this?” so they can say, “don’t worry, it’ll be fine” or “get a grip, you idiot”.

Then there are the recurring negative thoughts, and the irrational ones. The way my chest tightens sometimes when I go to the shops, the way my face starts to itch when I know I shouldn’t touch it, the way I convert twinges, pains, and symptoms into the first stages of the virus, and my chest tightens again at the thought of it. Tell me it’s normal.

When I call up the flat, distant image of a friend and tell them what I’ve been thinking, they assure me it’s perfectly normal and some of them even say they get those kind of thoughts too. But are they just saying that? Do they have their fingers crossed out of sight of the camera? I can only see their head and shoulders. Negative thoughts.

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Then I’m distracted by something at the window. It’s a kind of scratching and clattering against the glass and a flash of black and white and then I see what’s going on out there. It’s the latest skirmish in an avian war, a struggle between two birds over territory: my garden. Blackbird versus magpie. The blackbird wins and sits high up on the wall to gloat.

This has really helped me: watching the animals that live around (and sometimes in) my house, and as the people in my life have grown flatter and more unreal, the animals have grown larger and more important. They’ve far louder too, or is it that we are quieter? And sometimes I think: the animals can’t possibly know about coronavirus so how come they seem to have all the answers?

I mean the pheasant that’s moved into the long grass at the back of the garden with the customary pheasant harem, in his case it's a couple of birds. He strolls self-importantly across the bottom of my drive, a maitre d’ in his best togs barring entry to anyone whose name isn’t on the list. But he’s curious too: he comes up to the French windows most days and has a little look at the guy inside with the negative thoughts. Yes, he’s still there.

I’m also thinking about the field mouse that lives under the sandstone slab by the lime tree. His routine is to come out, when the coast is clear, and dig down for the niger seeds that have been dropped by the goldfinches from the bird feeders. Sometimes, the wee man is so engrossed in his niger mining that I can creep right up on him and lean in close. Then he suddenly spots me and darts under the stone again until I’ve gone. I get it: it’s good to be wary.

And at tea-time, or thereabouts, there are the lambs in the field next door. They usually start to gather in a gang and at first their mood seems bolshy to me, rebellious, like they’ve worked out what the farmer intends to do to them and are going to storm the farmhouse and do the same to him. But actually all they want to do is play. They run from one end of the field to the other and back again, and I get it: it’s good to play.

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Ah but, they don’t know what I know. They don’t know that in eight months or so, they’ll be off to the fate they were bred for. I can’t help this thought occurring to me whenever I see them: eight months, five months, one month, now, and it seems to drag at the happiness of the sight. Negative thoughts. Until I realise it’s better to be like them surely, and suddenly I wish I could be. I wish, like the lambs, that I didn’t know that it ends. I get it: it’s good to be ignorant.

And at dusk, with the bats writing the end of the day in the sky and the field mouse under the slab at the bottom of the lime tree, I listen to the robin at the top of it. He’s here most nights, right at the end of the uppermost branch, singing away. It sounds beautiful to me, and I stand under the tree with a cup of tea and listen to it, but I know what it really means. I know it’s not an aria, it’s a klaxon, a siren, a war cry. Come anywhere near here, he’s saying, and I’ll rip you to pieces. Charming.

But the sound of him is helping. Sometimes, when I’m bored or restless, I put on one of my favourite albums and sing along to it until I’m hoarse and there are never any negative thoughts then, while the music’s on. Maybe that’s what the robin has taught me, up in the lime tree: sing as if you don’t know that one day the singing ends.

Fidelma Cook is unwell. She is in hospital recovering from a broken shoulder. Everyone at The Herald Magazine wishes her a speedy recovery

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