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.

​Sue works as an oral historian for Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. She is passionate about amplifying lesser told stories. Sue is a daughter, sister, mother and partner. In her down time, she likes to play scrabble and take walks in nature.
 
Lockdown Level 4 – Thursday 21st April
 
Within the first couple of weeks of lockdown level 4 we began a new and extended walking route, one that took us past the Eden Wesley Rest home on Mt Eden Road where my Granny Nora spent the last year of her life. Some time ago during a weekend ramble, we’d come upon the place and it had triggered memories of childhood visits to see Granny. When I asked Stacey this morning, Did I tell you that this is where my Granny Nora lived in the early 1980s at the end of life, she said yes, but in her generous way left me the space to expand on my memories. This time I find myself remembering earlier, happier associated memories of Granny Nora.
 
Granny Nora was my mother’s mother. She was born in England in 1903. By the time I was born in the late 1960s she was already less than her full self. She had a tremor in her hand and often a vacant look in her eye. She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and most likely also Alzheimer’s — or one of the early onset dementia illnesses. Until I was six or seven, she’d lived in a flat with my Grandpa George. This was in Johannesburg South Africa. They had left England to follow their only child, my mother, and to be with us grandchildren too I imagine.
 
I remember a small flat, or perhaps it was just that it had a lot of furnishing, it’s hard to say. It felt busy and crowded. My fondest memories include finding spaces under tables and in various nooks and crannies in order to set up for play with the plastic farm animals. These were kept in a Little Red Schoolhouse ice-cream container packed full of hens and ducks and geese, cows, pigs, horses and sheep. I would organize the animals into groups using the patterned carpet as pens and play the farmer role in a series of farmyard fantasies. 
 
Playing cards was the other much loved and shared activity. We would play simple games like rummy or ‘follow suit’. I remember as Granny’s illness progressed the card games deteriorated into bemusing and highly unpredictable hands. Quiet unexpectedly in mid-game Granny might pick up half of the pack or randomly shuffle the deck, she’d discard an odd number, put aces on sevens, or a heart on a club when playing follow suit. Rules went out the window. At first, we might say something, but then my sisters and I had the presence of mind to just go with it, we learnt she wasn’t all in her right mind.
 
All my childhood she had a sort of vacant dullness about her, like the edge of her personality had been worn away or faded like fabric too long in the sun. I am sure this was the effect of the medication, some of which was given to pacify her reported rage and the discomfort of mind that can come with dementia.
 
When our family came to New Zealand in the late 1970s, my grandparents once again packed up and followed my mother, a year or so later. It’s extraordinary now to think that family reunification was permitted by immigration for someone so ill. I can’t imagine it being possible today.
 
By the time Granny came to live at the Eden Wesley Rest Home her world was reduced to a shuffle between a chair in the lounge and her bed, and then for what seemed like an age, she was just in bed. It was excruciating to visit her there. I can still recall the feeling of fear and perhaps even horror at hearing the moaning and shouting of patients, the smell of urine and cleaning chemicals and the institutional food smells of cabbage and stew. I remember my mother patiently talking to her about family news and my grandfather holding her hand and combing her thin grey strands of hair. I can still see the light blue comb that would sit on her bedside table.
 
I am intrigued by how this morning walk in lockdown, with its glimpse up the wide driveway marked by the big oak tree to the Eden Wesley Rest Home, has unlocked childhood memories of my Granny Nora. In her lifetime she experienced the trauma and uncertainties of two world wars, Spanish flu, and the Depression, and the social and personal challenges of chronic physical and mental ill-health. I wonder what she and the other ancestors would make of our current time.

​Michelanne is a playwright and author. Her work has been performed  by theatre companies throughout New Zealand, and in the UK, USA and Australia. 
 
During lockdown I painted. I started playing with drawing and painting  as a hobby, something fun to do in my spare time after moving from Auckland to Nelson in 2016. Now, four years later I am enrolled as a Master of Fine Arts student at Massey University on the Wellington campus. My studio is in the old Dominion Museum, somewhere  between what my husband remembers as the Egyptian mummy display and the  hanging whale skeleton. When lockdown commenced the university  shut down and our access swipe cards stopped working. Luckily our tutors warned us this was on the cards and I'd taken most of my art supplies home. I set up a studio in the back bedroom which I shared with my thirty year old son who was between jobs.
 
Our lockdown  family was me, my husband, my younger  son  and my two new kittens from the SPCA. Surprisingly,  aside from a constant low-grade worry about my elderly parents in California, I felt fine. 
 
Do I still feel fine? About New Zealand, yes. About the country of my birth, no. The news there grows darker and more surreal with each passing day. These paintings, done in lockdown  start with cats and end with racism. In between you'll see a Covid fireball heading into a New Zealand landscape, but thank god, it never lands.

Robyn Welsh is a journalist, creative writer and author who lives in central Auckland. Her first non-fiction work is Wired for Sound – the Stebbing History of New Zealand Music (2019). It was released, thankfully before Covid-19 messed up publishers’ launch schedules. But not everything to come out of Covid-19 has been bad and Robyn shares with us an experience that reminds her daily of the power of human kindness.
 
Through the slice of daylight beyond the bedroom curtain, it is the gloomy clouds that set an ominous tone. It is one of those days when I wonder, an hour in, whether I should just slip back into bed and then put my feet back on the ground a second time. To ‘restart’ the day all over again, as a computer would instruct when its worldly inner workings have become skewed. But I don’t and I push on into a day awash with a growing sense of weirdness as the hours tick on. 

Today is Monday March 23, 2020 and New Zealand, as we know it, is progressively shutting down. Call it ‘sign out’, ‘sleep’ or ‘shut down’, as a computer does, this is what our country is doing from the grass to the skies. 

Our government calls it ‘Lockdown’, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic threat to our population of five million. This will happen rapidly in stages. This morning they are calling level 2, dialling down to level 3 this afternoon. Our little moated land mass is on notice that lockdown level 4 will start on Wednesday night at 11.59pm.
 
In a world moving forward, every task has its processes. On this day, businesses of all shapes and sizes are working through lockdown processes, as per lists no-one has ever compiled before. 

The enormity of all this hits me like an icy smack in the face, as I tuck my hands into my jacket pockets and set off on my early morning walk. I need to see what the world, as I know it, looks like as it is coming to an end. I want to do it on foot, slowly and mindfully, just because I can. It is a walk that I shall never forget.
 
It is the rattle of metal that cuts across my vacant train of thought as I cross the road. I look up to see a high viz jacket and a hard hat, downward facing, rattling a gate lock one last time. It is lockdown time on the construction site at the park opposite ours. The lone worker gets a cheery ‘Good morning’ from me, which is what we do around these parts. The eyes beneath the hard hat lift and a youthful voice offers a surprisingly formal ‘Good morning back to you too, ma’am.’
 
He steadies his hand on the tall mesh security gate. That’ll not keep this virus away, I’m thinking, but there is distance between us all the same. Two metres of distance, as I take my first walk and he ticks off his last task.
 
Right now, at this stilled moment in time, I think, ‘We are all one people in this.’ I feel it and I can tell he is feeling it too. It is difficult to know what to say right then beyond a ‘Take care’ or an ‘All the best’.
 
As I wave an acknowledgement to this young man I’ve never met before, he pauses and says: ‘And if you need anything …’ 
 
It is that kind of a day. 

Jane Bissell lives north of Auckland on the Hibiscus Coast. She is a writer, ghostwriter, writing mentor and tutor, and the author of two books about her own journey with breast cancer. Jane kept a journal for the duration of the Level 4 lockdown and here is an excerpt. The full journal can be seen on Jane’s website at www.janebissellwriting.com  
 
Author’s note: During Level 4, one of the houses on our beachfront would set a different tableau every day in their front garden, featuring Ernie (the Sesame Street character) doing something fun: sometimes he’d be fishing, or having a tea party with his stuffed toy friends at a small table. Neighbours would come by daily to see what Ernie was up to. On this particular day, Ernie had his life jacket on and was sitting in a kayak, paddle at the ready, on dry land of course but looking seawards with such longing. He was the inspiration behind this particular journal entry.
 
23 April 2020
(From The Isolation Journal)
Yesterday the weather was simply divine so Ernie here decided to do some kayaking in the front yard at his beachfront home. What a brilliant idea, I thought to myself, and I almost hopped in to join him.

Right now we are prohibited from kayaking in real water because if we get into trouble, that means a call-out from the rescue people which would heighten their risk of exposure to the virus.

I really miss going out in my kayak.

Our bay is perfect for this activity, with the shelter of the cliffs, plenty to see underwater as one drifts along, and if you really want some action, paddle out beyond the point and get into the swells and 'high water' ... well, actually not much rougher than in the bay but it feels adventurous. 

I miss this kayaking gig because when I'm out there, I'm really calm and at peace, if one can say that. At peace meaning my thoughts are stilled, my breathing is even, I relax with the motion of the boat on the waves and I'm aware of the world beneath the sea, the creatures doing their aquatic thing, probably looking up at me peering down and saying, 'bugger off.'
My only concern is getting to where I want to go (out to the point), sitting there a while and looking up and down, then getting back before the wind gets up and blows me halfway to Rangitoto ... oh yes and I'll often have a snack with me, a drink and some crackers or such, so I like to sit out there and have that.

I do want a reprieve now from all of the COVID-19 thoughts that whirl around us daily so I am really missing my kayaking.

I have stopped watching the daily 1pm televised press conference with the Prime Minister where the latest statistics and suspicions and confirmations about 'spread' are revealed and in the evening, I've taken to singing out loud when they start talking about the lack of PPE and how many businesses may go under. It's not that I am insensitive to these things - far from it because, having worked in transport and distribution for years here in New Zealand, I am not surprised by how hard it is to get product in a national emergency from A to B in a country where you could drive from one end to the other of the North Island in a day (well, a long day) and how this absurd distribution problem is still depriving our front line workers of the gear they need to protect themselves. And of course, businesses going under affects us all. 

So there is a rant from me. Suffice to say, I have had enough of the virus news. My walking buddy keeps me up to date and the people we meet on our travels like to discuss what they've all heard. I am pleased though because trends are so positive, we are getting there, but I need a break from the relentless media and their continual thrashing of all that is difficult and hard and tough and the bad behaviour of some of us during this time.

Make room Ernie. I'm coming with you. 
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