​Eva de Jong is in her second year of studying for a Bachelor of Arts at Victoria University and completed a Creative Writing Course at the Institute of Modern Letters in 2020. Eva’s story ‘Islands’ was short-listed for the 2020 National Flash Fiction Youth Competition. Eva is passionate about writing and won the Prize for Poetry at Epsom Girls Grammar School in her senior year.
 
Over a socially-distanced morning tea break, Max tells Mary he loves her. Mary is looking into her coffee when he confesses:

“I love you, Mary.”

Mary pulls her dark hair behind her ear and removes a single Air-pod.
 
“I’m good Max, how are you?” 

“What?” he gasps, and then, “I-I’m good.” 

Two metres of hollow space separates their tables. It is a government-ordered chasm, a distance that sets everybody apart for their own good. It could have been an ocean.
 
“Lousy isn’t it?” Mary holds up a limp mask between her fingers. Max thinks again about how she has the most beautiful pale hands he has ever seen. 

“Lot of good it’ll do me; I can barely breathe in the bloody thing,” she sighs and Max gulps back the last of his coffee.

“It’s hard - it makes it hard, you know, to in some ways...breathe,” he agrees. Mary looks at him blankly.

“Yeah,” she says, “You alright mate?”

The curved points of Max’s ears are shiny and red, and he runs his hand over his glistening forehead.

“Yeah. Fine.” He drops his hand into his lap, eyes staying fixed on the wall ahead. 

“I think the extra shifts are getting to everyone,” she says gently. 

Max can feel her green eyes on him, soft and blinking.
 
“I better get back to work Mary,” he whispers hoarsely. Then he leaps up from his seat and yanks his mask back over his mouth.
 
“Oh. See you soon then, Max!” She calls.
 
Max turns from his table and walks quickly away. There is a single moment, between turning and walking, when he could reach her table across the two-metre gap.  He could touch the hand that rests there, wrist upturned and the palm glowing white, like light pulsing from a bacteria-ridden angel. 
 

Keith Woodley has been resident manager at the Pūkorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre for 27 years. He is the author of Godwits: Long-haul champions and Shorebirds of New Zealand: Sharing the margins.
 
What pandemic? The weather was benign. Across the paddocks to the north west, the bulky Hunua Ranges under a cloudless sky: across the bay to the east, the ridges of the Coromandel. A wheeling harrier overhead, and above the shoreline flocks of oystercatchers commuting to their high tide roost on the shell bank. Hard to countenance that, away from this idyll, the world was plunging into turmoil. 
My bubble was a big one: the Shorebird Centre and its grounds and the long strip of coastal reserve opposite. On one of my walks there were two figures in the landscape, about half a kilometre away. Just two weeks earlier, it had been common enough as people used the trail system between the bird hides. Now the first thought, though fleeting: who are these intruders into my space?

Familiar features were encountered in a new context. The pukekos normally resident around the pond and wider centre grounds, were now fossicking at the front steps. A white-faced heron took to standing on the deck peering in through the ranch slider. This I took to be neighbourhood watch.
Quite new was the scene at the eastern end of the Kopu bridge outside Thames. Trips to the supermarket were once routine, almost unthinking exercises. Three weeks into Level Four my return home was interrupted by a police checkpoint. The middle-aged constable leaning in through the window asking the purpose of my journey was certainly novel.

On Thursday April 2, a friend called.  ‘Commiserations’, she said. “For what?’ “The Listener, it is gone.’ I was a long-time subscriber but said I would only miss some of it. In recent months I was probably reading only one in four cover stories. There were, however, columnists I would certainly miss: Jane Clifton and anything by Paul Thomas. But it was a sudden death in the age of Covid. So was losing songwriter John Prine who had been part of my soundtrack since the 1970s. The concert in Auckland early last year now assumed enormous significance.

There was also a question of latitude. Diurnal cues – changing day-length – trigger hormonal changes that prompt a migratory bird to complete its moult, store fuel, and migrate. By the second half of April birds from New Zealand, bound for the Arctic, are refuelling along the coasts of China and Korea. Since 2015 that is where I have been at this time, counting shorebirds in North Korea. Now I am on the wrong side of the equator: thus, Anzac Day at home for the first time in five years.
​
But there was uplifting news of normal systems still functioning. Several of the godwits that had been fitted with GPS tags at Pūkorokoro in November, were now refuelling on the shores of the Yellow Sea. By Level Two, they were at breeding sites in Alaska. Even better was news of some particularly special red knots. These small shorebirds specialise in eating tiny shellfish. A few dozen birds had been affected by a suspected toxic algal bloom in February.  After two weeks recovery at rehabilitation centres, they were fitted with coded leg flags and released. That this happened on the eve of their normal migration departure for eastern Russia suggested they would be behind in their preparations and would remain here for the winter. But there was to be no lockdown for them. They too were seen in China.

​






























Based in Wellington, Gregory O'Brien is a poet, artist, essayist and art curator. His most recent books are 'Always song in the water' (AUP 2019) and Melvin Day--Painter (VUP 2019). An exhibition of his paintings, 'The wading birds of Drybread' opens at the Ashburton Art Gallery in August 2020. His art is also included in the group exhibition 'Wai--the water project' at Pataka Art Museum, Porirua.
 
Janet Frame’s The Carpathians will be the last of the novels published during her lifetime to be translated into French. Esperluete will be releasing the book early in 2021 (a few months later than planned) in a translation by Pierre Furlan. It was Pierre who contacted me in March this year to see if I was interested in doing cover artwork for the French edition. The last time I provided cover art for Esperluete had been a few years earlier—for John Mulgan’s Man Alone (‘Seul’), also translated by Pierre.
​
During the course of my correspondence with Pierre concerning the cover, he asked me a few questions about Janet Frame and some minor linguistic details of the book which were perplexing him. After what must have been a useful exchange of emails, he mentioned to the publisher the fact that I had visited Janet Frame a number of times while she was drafting the novel. As a result, they asked if I would be interested in writing an ‘Afterword’ for the forthcoming edition, offering a personal response to the book and possibly a way-in for French readers who, they suspected, might struggle with the strangeness of the novel and the unfamiliarity of its setting.

So it was that, during the Covid-19 lockdown, I found Janet Frame was very much in my bubble. I re-read Michael King’s biography, and I spent many hours mulling over two novels in particular--The Carpathians (‘Les Carpates’ in the French edition) and A State of Siege— both of which felt disarmingly attuned to the present global crisis. To be honest, both novels felt darker—and, certainly, more real—than when I last read them. Janet’s accustomed themes of social disintegration, dysfunction, toxicity, sanity, health and states of well-being had never felt more relevant. She remains, inarguably, the New Zealand writer most attuned to individual and societal manifestations of fragmentation and collapse. Towards the end of The Carpathians, the residents of Kowhai St in Puamahara (a thinly veiled Levin) are swept up in an apocalyptic course of events. It’s easy to start thinking that Janet Frame’s Memory Star, which is to blame for the empty streets and the altered ‘reality’ later in the book, is a precursor of the coronavirus: Covid-19 reconfigured as a satellite or asteroid. Her prescient novel has much to say of our current predicament and how we might eventually come to terms with it: ‘The inner tempests of a street, a town, a country, a world may be sensed, perhaps measured and recorded by poets and other artists, and later by historians, but it is certain they are not announced at the time of their happening.’
 
Gregory O’Brien

​Trevor M Landers, MA, MPM, MEd, is, currently based in New Plymouth. He has published six volumes of poetry, the last Heart of Joyful Fortune (2019) exploring his Buddhist praxis, in New Zealand and internationally. His next collection, Happy Birthday Suit, is due for release in early 2021.  He has been university lecturer, a senior public servant, a hospital orderly and a strawberry picker in Central Finland. He begins training as a psychotherapist in 2021. Ko Ngāti Airani rāua ko Ngāruahine tōna iwi hoki.
 
If you mistakenly think
       the shift to Level 2, renders you safe & immune
             read some COVID literature; this virus is a reproductive specialist
& emerging evidence,
                  + Professor Michael Baker,
                              apply to jittering amygdalas
           As influenza season approaches, brushfires can be bushfires in an instant
Look across to Japan, Singapore and then to Taiwan.
                 The first two allowed complacency and low infection rates,
                   did what we are doing ushered in public complacency,
                          the familiar upward curve,
                              the repellent sign of stacks of unadorned coffins.
 
In Taiwan mass-masking and all-island traceability
                vested a crown for the least per capita infections and death in the world
to wit, to be fully insured,
             we should be masked up outside,
              and be tracing much more rigorously
              than  the past three days,
               we have encountered ‘she’ll be right” and “the worst is over”.
 
  Naturelment, we hope to be spectacularly wrong,
                that our stringency is well-intentioned, misplaced, because if we are right
                                 21 dead will seem like a faraway Christmas present.
                                  So, stay safe, little Aotearoa,
            let caution and circumspection over-rule our complacent urge
                   to return to an unreachable past, the way we were.
              Let’s not stuff it up now.
Indeed, let’s do it a damn sight better,
       elaborate a vision so the next national emergency
                is not bequeathed to our mokopuna
         where the water dries up, when the mantle of the earth sizzles
        & their admonishing hands curse our reckless inaction.[1]
 


[1] This poem was originally called: ‘CoVID19: An admonition on opening up from Lockdown L3 and a strong hope that our stringency desires are overzealous (WIP), May 17, 2020’.

Yvonne van Dongen is a journalist of many years who did have a weekly newspaper column until Covid. She has been told it has been paused, not canned. Given the state of the media she is very thankful for this distinction. She lives with her son, his dog and a flatmate in an old house in Freemans Bay.

They’re reminiscing fondly now, the lockdown survivors. About the endless time, the calm, the quiet, the civility of the people passed on the street but also, how pleased they were that they didn’t miss friends, cafes, music, gatherings. Well good for them.

That wasn’t me. For me it was the best of times; it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness, it was...oh that clever Charles Dickens, he had all the best lines. Put it this way, for me lockdown was an emotional and metaphysical see saw. Time for instance. Usually so well behaved, so tickingly predictable, so reassuringly routine but not under lockdown. Under lockdown time got away on me. It became elastic, stretching to infinity, days longer than weeks, weeks longer than months and months longer than well longer than months should be, longer than waiting for your birthday when you’re four years old. Days when I thought if this goes on any longer I’ll explode from the pressure building in my head like toxic gas in a small house with all the doors shut, days when I felt suffocated by the restrictions, stifled by the limited interactions with people, gone for all money when it came to waiting in socially distant lines at the supermarket.

And then there were the other days. Days when I gazed out my door and everything looked ripe and plentiful because admit it, didn’t we have the best autumn ever? The sun flared molten gold backlighting the magnolia, illuminating the fig bearing its load of little green edible puffed purses while the liquid amber dripping leaves already looked like it was on fire. I barely noticed the grass was dry as breadcrumbs and the earth baked biscotti hard. And the birds, the birds, they sang as if they knew they had the place to themselves, what with reckless homo sapiens banished to the naughty corner. The people were at home. The people were hibernating. The people inhabited a time out of time, waiting, heart in mouth, for time to kick start again.

In these infinite stretches of time I did not make sourdough bread. I’d nailed that sucker well before lockdown and learned I didn’t ever want to eat that much bread again or think about my starter with the obsessiveness of a child feeding their tamagotchi. Nor did I learn another language, master the ukelele I’d foolishly requested as a birthday present or do daily yoga with Kassandra. Not after she insisted on a mantra and said hers would be ‘I am a money magnet.’ A friend who recommended her said ‘She’s keeping it real.’ I considered switching to yoga with Adrienne but what I needed was self-discipline with Brunhilde.

Since that wasn’t on offer I went for walks with my son and wasn’t that the best thing, next to a great autumn? You see my son is on the autistic spectrum and walking for him is like breathing. It’s a physical necessity, a life saver, a compulsion that must be executed daily. Better still, twice daily. Long rambling walks where he releases the little babbling person in his head and returns with stories about annoying people who congregate on the footpath impeding his progress, thoughtless folk who litter and the others who talk too loudly and self-importantly but equally he might also recall the nice man in the dairy who sometimes gives his dog beef jerky from a brand-new packet and the fish’n chip man who steps outside just to say hello. None of them New Zealand males he mutters. I know, I know I say consolingly. Am I not a New Zealand female?

Joining him, I learned, wasn’t about the conversation since that’s not really his thing but rather it was about seeing my city, or rather my suburb, in a whole new light. There were shortcuts, parks, boardwalks, sculptures, houses, rambling digressions I’d never allowed myself to explore, hellbent as I usually was on a destination, also, and don’t judge me now, reluctant to go out of suburb. He knew our suburb and the one next door and the one next to that like the rooms of his house, which they were in a way. His mental house.
​
Given the much touted benefits of walking from every ambulatory expert, I should have returned a creative genius with low blood pressure. Alas no, but he did wear me out and afterwards I was happy to find that the capacious day had shrunk to more manageable proportions.

Fiona writes novels and lives in a house overlooking Cook Strait. She stayed on her own during lockdown, supported by family and friends. Her sleep patterns changed and she found herself waking around 5 a.m. most mornings. The greatest pleasure was to open the curtains and watch the light dawning over the hills and sea, until she slept again. 'Normality' is still elusive.

Self isolation made perfect sense to me when news of the pandemic and its reach into New Zealand first began. My mother lived on her family's sheep station near Opotiki during the 1918 influenza outbreak. She and her siblings lived comfortably in the grand old farmhouse, untouched by the epidemic. Night after night, they heard the crying and wailing from tangi across the valley, as word spread of the deaths accumulating at the nearby pā. One world separated from another, by a dip in the landscape. And I knew very well about the famous Dr George McCall Smith who helped save the Hokianga from even worse suffering than it endured, by calling on armed constabulary to help him block the roads into the area.  His daughter. Janet Irwin, was my good friend and now she has gone, I visit her grave at Rawene as often as my journeys take me north, remembering her stories.
 
So when my son paid a lightning visit from Australia in early March, and hurriedly returned as their border closed the following day, I decided straight away that I must isolate myself. It didn't seem hard. I have a large house, a garden and a wonderful view over Cook Strait. What was there not to be brave about? This would soon pass. By the first day of the official lockdown, my chin had started to quiver. It was, in fact, my 80th birthday (it was also the 80th anniversary of Michael Joseph Savage’s death).  There was to have been a family gathering, people arriving from around the world, London, Australia and the north. I ate fried rice on my own that night. But unless I make it sound too bleak, there had been calls all day, and neighbours ringing to say they would be leaving small gifts at the gate, my daughter coming to wave from a distance, a house full of flowers delivered in the previous days; somehow by the time I went to bed that night, it felt like a birthday. My challenge was to be a brave old woman, reminding myself of my privileges.
 
That is still where I am at, though some days are harder than others. I love the bird life all around me. For three days a long-tailed cuckoo took up residence outside my kitchen window, eating ripening olives. It's a migratory bird and fairly rare. I worried that it should have left for its journey to where ever it was leaving. I try to imagine where the bird is now. Neighbours have dropped by with baking, left at the door. I think I should be doing the baking, that's what I would have done once, but now I am the old person who needs to be minded and cosseted and I'm grateful.  But I walk regularly and the way we distanced from each other in those early days of lockdown interested me, walking down the middle of empty roads so as to distance from oncoming walkers, jumping on and off the pavement, like a new dancing ritual.
 
I have had a small amount of work come my way, but contrary to expectations, I have not written very much. The focus has been on getting myself safely through each day, making lists for my ever faithful daughter when she shopped for me, making sure I ate well, kept in touch with family and friends.
 
I am finding it harder than I anticipated to return to what passes for ordinary life these days. The solitary life has become the way it is. At nights I look out to where the airport lies. I cannot remember in fifty years of living above it, nights when it didn't glow with the green lights illuminating the runways. Now they are dark, as if an arm of the sea has extended out in a new tributary, linking Cook Strait with Evans Bay, a dark river of nothing. Last night I caught a glimpse of the passing Interislander ferry, the first in months. The lights moved like a stately castle above that torrent of night. A return to the world seems just possible.

 ​tTessa Duder has written YA novels, picture books, non-fiction for children and adults – forty-plus books over as many years. She loves writing on a computer and gives thanks daily for emails and Google, but knows both the many benefits but also downsides of working from home. The lockdown period convinced her that Zoom meetings, while useful during those months, are not the brave new world, and she manages well enough without the strident voices of social media.
 
Lockdown is a pretty ugly word, don’t you think? Originally it meant confining prisoners to prevent further violence, then was applied to schools under siege; in the last few months it’s been whole populations to halt the spread of a dangerous virus. But I suppose quarantine or confinement aren’t much better and media prefer shorter words for click-bait headings. Lockdown it is.   
 
For many writers, whose working life, to make daily progress on a novel, requires them to lock themselves down, for days, weeks, months on end, I suspect I’m not alone in welcoming the quiet, uninterrupted hours ahead each day. School visits cancelled, writers’ festivals (much as one enjoys them and sympathises with their financial plight) cancelled, talks to Rotary/Probus/U3A clubs, concerts and theatre bookings, all cancelled. True, bookshops and libraries were closed, no walks on the beach, but we shared or re-read books and walked around the block instead, admiring the many dogs out and about. I watched more television than usual, great series like  Bodyguard and Endeavour.
 
Notwithstanding, did others of my colleagues also find they moved into a lower gear, accomplish fewer words a day than they planned? Did they also feel less guilty at taking time to sit in an easy chair in the autumn sunshine, and simply read: I took a whole month to savour every glorious word of Hilary Mantel's third Cromwell book, The Mirror and the Light, followed by Maggie O’Farrell’s equally impressive Hamnet and Becky Manawatu’s Ockham winner Auē.  
 
And the time taken to read and compare the online news websites (Radio NZ, stuff, the Herald, the Guardian, BBC, MSE) has been instructive. The weak links were gradually, inexorably exposed by a hyperactive press: a struggling Minister of Health, a tone-deaf opposition leader putting party politics above his country, a new leader who’s also shamelessly  politicising our current situation (everything a ‘shambles’ or ‘fiasco’ or ‘national disgrace’ but mate, look at what’s happening in Victoria or Brazil or the UK or most other countries!) Other politicians, mostly of the right, trying to discredit every government effort, committing appalling errors of judgement:  leaks, resignations, apologies, social media going bananas …
 
And the media itself in these contentious times, equally going bananas?  I became fascinated by their editors’ obsessive emphasis from Level 4 to 1 on the ability or otherwise of Kiwis to enjoy a beer or a frothy cappuccino. From the headlines and endless columns of comment, one could reasonably deduce that the worst deprivation suffered by this country concerned the protracted closing of bars, restaurants and cafes. 
 
Of lesser interest, apparently, was the plight of families coping with two parents at home, jobless or trying to work online, put food on the table, pay the bills, keep kids entertained/from killing each other. And what about the heroic efforts of welfare agencies, checkout operators, delivery drivers, medical staff and ordinary kiwis helping their old folks, their neighbours, their communities. 
 
The media saw no obligation to keep the populace regularly informed about when the libraries would open, the banks, the post offices.  That German family business, Bauer Media, showed no mercy in abruptly closing down some of our most loved and necessary magazines, for me notably the Listener and North & South, but also the women’s magazines enjoyed by thousands. No Diana Wichtel, Paul Thomas, Jane Clifton, Joanne Black et al, the country’s finest writers. I can live without fish and chips, even a daily flat white, but I’m finding it hard to be (probably) permanently deprived of my Friday morning lie-in treat with the Listener, cover to cover.
 
As the whole world re-examines every aspect of the society, culture and values that we’ve carried into the 21st century and so took for granted (global tourism, working hours, online work, schooling, to name a few), one recent Guardian story took my eye: ladies, ditch that bra!  Apparently we western women in lockdown (that includes me) have been enjoying the freedom of going bra-less! No longer do we feel obliged to hoist our boobs into a bra every morning. Except for energetic sporting activity, the tyranny of the underwired, engineered brassiere, constricting us since the 1930s, is over. The nubile, pointy ice-cream cone look from the 1950s is over. Hallelujah! 

​Philip lives in Dunedin with his wife, author Diane Brown. He has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, and some have won awards and fellowships. He has been a member of NZSA (PEN) for 50 years and fulfilled many roles, especially in the promotion of the Public Lending Right. Philip completed the second volume of his biography of Maurice Shadbolt, ‘Life As A Novel’, during lockdown. Although used to working at home, he found, like many writers, that news of what was happening to the world out there was a continuous pressure and distraction. In practical ways, it was not a problem. He had been in lockdowns before (see Diane Brown’s contribution) and wrote this short piece about the first one.
 
I was woken by the bangs, the screaming and the bellowing. Woken into a room so dark that I could not tell if the bedlam was within or without. I yelled and burst into tears, bawling, hysterical by the time my mother rushed into the room with a torch, plucked me from my cot and held me close, jiggling me up and down as she told me everything was all right, everything was all right, but then she dropped the torch and I could sense the doubt in her. Until the noise ceased suddenly and there was only a distant groaning. It’s just the cows, she said, just the cows. She put me back in the cot with soothing sounds, promising me warm milk. Soon all was dark and silent again.
 
In the morning she held me against her shoulder while she pulled back the blackout curtains. The sun streamed in on another warm autumn day. Everything outside seemed the way it had been the day before and the day before that. But I could not see the cows standing in the fields beyond. She told me they had been taken away now and there would be no more noises like the night before. I was not to worry.
 
Much later, when I could understand, she told me that the guns, the anti-aircraft guns, had been firing at the German bombers and pieces of falling shells, the shrapnel, had cut and wounded the cows. Some of them had died, and because of that they did not keep cows in those fields any more.

David Hill lives and writes in New Plymouth. His fiction for children and young adults is published in various countries.
 
The 2020 lockdown was an easy time. We slid into the groove of taking orders; became complaisant pupils in a class of five million; sat back and felt virtuous about doing so.
 
Almost instantly, Level 4 developed its own aesthetics. Orange-and-black, yellow-and-white diagonal stripes on the government website were Autumn's fashion palette.
 
Visuals blossomed. Cartoonists had a glorious time semi-anthropomorphising the virus; it became one of those super-bouncy balls that ricochet off interior walls, with nasty little arms attached. The same cartoonists worked hard to semi-anthropomorphise Donald J Trump (note how the US has followed a part-black leader with a part-orange leader), as he tirelessly turned his country into an Orwellian parody. Ashley Bloomfield proved far too modest-featured (and voiced) for caricature, but Jacinda's teeth remained iconic.
 
Some neighbours didn't know what they were going to do with themselves, at home all day. Others did, and it meant power tools. Our street was an atonal symphony of grinders, cutters, mixers, choppers.
 
We read instead. More specifically, we re-read. I'd managed not to get to the library before we avalanched into Level 4, so I eased books from our shelves, exclaimed at how their print had shrunk over the preceding 15....25....40 years, and began revisiting times past.
 
I went through Shakespeare's four last plays again: those golden narratives of reconciliation and innocence triumphant. They made a wonderful emotional antidote.
 
In 1963, at Victoria University of Wellington, I'd written a thesis on Aldous Huxley. Now I read the novels of that dapper, nearly 2m-tall polymath once more. Has there ever been a fiction writer less interested in narrative? His books are symposiums of talking heads. Oxbridge talking heads: exactly what I wanted to be when I was 21. Along with Huxley's printed words, I re-read my own hand-written words in the margins. You pretentious little prick, I thought.
 
Lockdown developed social aesthetics as well. People went walking along the footpaths, dlwn the middles of empty streets, even. Everyone greeted everyone else. Everyone smiled, including elderly male mouths usually pursed like dogs' bums. Smiles ranged from hesitant to orthodontic. Our cul-de-sac became a community, and it hasn't all faded.
 
Language suffered sometimes. The war metaphors were inevitable but dull. 'Eliminate' turned out to be less absolute than we thought. 'The New Normal' went from catchy to cliché inside a week. 'Honest' was kicked into new shapes: 'The government needs to be more honest about jobs....closures....border plans'.
 
And language was used well. I listened to, registered, admired the skills of our PM and her speech writers. The 1 pm news conferences were mistress classes in logic and lucidity.
 
I worried about money. We have National Super; I have royalties and the boosted Public Lending Right. But Bauer amputated its NZ magazines in an act of breath-snatchingly arrogant meanness. Other publications lost advertisers, therefore income, therfore book reviews and features. My little squirts of income were flicked off.

I tried not to moan to anyone except other writers; knew how fortunate I was in comparison to....well, to Air NZ pilots plummeting from $200,000 to supermarket shelf-stocking.
 
We didn't particularly want to leave lockdown. It had felt special, focused, worthy, exciting. We saved money. We reassessed a few priorities. We were praised for doing nothing. We briefly became....not a more compassionate society, but a more aware one. Aware especially of how potent any suspicion of unfairness or entitlement is. We were all supposed to be in this together; hints of anyone turning the crisis into personal gain brought out fangs and claws.
 
And of course the lockdown gave us stories. I've fallen upon them avidly. I was fortunate in that way as well.

Delis went to NYC for 6 months on her OE and ended up staying 35 years, teaching in Manhattan universities, especially The New School. Now she lives up-state with her Bronx-born husband and they spend  three months a year in their house in Thames.

Bob and I had tickets to return to upstate New York via San Francisco on the 29th of March, and I was already packing my carry-on bag with gifts, when my daughter Liz called, urging us to move our tickets up and come home right away. My reflex was to rush back to her immediately. But as the news became worse we were torn. I'm 71, my lungs are basically wrecked and Bob is 69. Then San Francisco went into lockdown and that was that.
 
We ordered a load of firewood and started stocking up on staples like coffee, Italian pasta, garlic, ginger, peppercorns, turmeric and fresh chillies. The day before lockdown here I went to the library, which was fairly plundered. A woman at the end of the row from me said, "My God, this is worse than Pak and Save!" When I checked out my books, the librarian said somewhat ominously, "Those aren't due till September?"
 
Every day we drove a little way up the coast road to Waiomu. For me, the drive up the coast and the swimming made me deeply happy, totally erasing any sense of being locked in. Our house in Thames is on a little hill, with lovely views to the Firth in front, and to the bush-covered hills in the back, so we never felt confined, but being at the beach is something else. Bob was always nervous that we were breaking the rules, but I convinced him that our bubble was totally secure. One of those gorgeous days early in lockdown, I was swimming at Waiomu, and the sea was totally calm, stretching out to what seemed like the curve of the earth, and I was immersed in that continuum, a transcendental moment, one of the unforgettable experiences of my life.
 
When swimming was forbidden, we reduced our beach trips to walking in front of the Thames Boating Club at Tararu, only five minutes from our house. Then one day Bob's worst fears were realised. There was a police roadblock at Kuranui Bay. As we pulled up and lowered the window, I hissed, "Let me do the talking" and explained that we lived above the high school and that all the streets around us were too steep for me to walk. I could have shown my inhaler but I didn't need to. The cop, who had his head right in the window without a mask, scandalising Bob, just smiled and said, "Sweet as!" So that day we went to Kuranui Bay.
 
We did a lot of gardening in lockdown. I painted all the old garden fences (trellis, what a pain in the butt!) and we ate well and read. I don't bake, but in lockdown I made soup, especially broth soups. Occasionally I felt like a mouse on a wheel, chopping vegetables, using the peels to make broth, then more veges for soup, more broth... Bob is a real hunter-gatherer, he loves buying food supplies for his family and felt rather shopping-deprived. Since he had read early on that the quinine in tonic water might be beneficial against Covid, he started buying gin on-line, and since the popular brands were sold out everywhere, he started ordering artisanal gin, and when there was a delay, he ordered different ones from different sources. So for a while there, every time the doorbell rang  we found another couple of exotic bottles, mostly New Zealand made. (We decided our all-time favourite is Lighthouse, and the tonic winner is Fevertree low calorie cucumber). It became a ritual, a 4pm gin and tonic outside in the sun, in the back at first, then as the sun moved round, in the front of the house.
 
But what about our life back home, our kids, our lovely cats, our house and garden, our friends? Liz and I talk all the time on the phone, infinitely more often than when we live five minutes from each other upstate. Bob's daughter and son call all the time, and his son sends wonderful videos of the two grandsons, one seven and the other almost two. I email friends constantly, and the crisis has inspired some old friends to get in touch. I am planning a post-Covid reunion here in Thames with my three kiwi friends from high school and I had a really great phone conversation with my sister in Western Australia, our first voice to voice contact in several years. On Mothers' Day, something that normally passes unremarked in our house, I got  a call from Liz, back home, and when the doorbell rang there was a woman with a huge gorgeous bunch of flowers.
 
We were having our 4pm ‘g and t’ one day, talking to a few neighbours at a social distance when the phone rang. Bob said hello, and then we all heard his daughter Eleanore demand, "What are you so fucking happy about?" Bob said cautiously, "We-ell, it's a beautiful day, we're sitting in the sun, overlooking the water, having our afternoon gin and tonic, talking to some neighbours..." And there you have it. In lockdown we were fucking happy.