I will always remember where I was when I heard the news that the government had changed the lockdown rules for shielding.
Warning: this is almost certainly the most predictable “Where were you when you heard the news about…?” you will ever come across.
I can tell you exactly where I was — in my room. Of course I was in my room. Because, save for occasional visits to the garden, loo breaks and some time in the kitchen when it’s empty — and one trip to the hospital — that is where I have been for every moment of every day for the past ten weeks.
Along with two million others, I have been shielding. In my case, because I have a “serious underlying health issue” — leukaemia, which was diagnosed over five years ago (but which I have probably had for much longer) and for which I have been treated since January.
Which is why, when I left the house yesterday morning after the guidelines changed to allow me outside, it was not just the first time I had gone for a walk in 10 weeks. It was also one of the most weirdly emotional few minutes of my life.
When I received my NHS letter advising me to shield, on 24 March, I wrote for UnHerd about how it brought home to me what the cancer diagnosis, perhaps strangely, had not done: that this could be it for me. Were I to get Covid-19 I would tick almost every ‘he’s a goner’ box going because, in addition to my suppressed immune system — worsened by the treatment — I am clinically obese. So my mortality suddenly became a very, as it were, live issue for me.
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