I was fast asleep. Not even dreaming, outright gone, the slumber of a man who rises before the sun, and has three kids in the evening.
The siren came in surround sound, my wife's phone and mine bursting to life with the alert of Covid's return.
Thoughts came rushing to the forefront, rousing me quickly from my rested state, "Where?" "How Many?" "Do I have enough wine?" "I can't be a teacher again" as I scoured the news sites like a puppy sniffing for scraps.
Like so many people I had become mildly complacent, enjoying the freedoms of our hard-fought win against an invisible enemy, with nary a thought to the pandemic raging like a Californian wildfire across the globe. "Don't panic," I told my quickly spiralling internal monologue "there was more than enough bog roll last time once we all stopped buying ten thousand rolls a shop, and the supermarkets were always open."
I didn't panic-buy last time, but hiding somewhere in my evolutionary chemical reactions, was an urge to rush out and stock up, just in case.