Which is to say, I got a new laptop that is virtually indistinguishable from my old laptop, it arrived today, and I am writing this blogpost on it. There is literally no difference in the experience, in that I am looking at the same external monitor, and using the same bluetooth keyboard. But the laptop itself has double the RAM, and a decent processor bump, and is running very snappily.

Actually the biggest observable difference is that I’m using the new machine as an excuse to switch browsers and have installed Firefox, replacing Opera and Chrome. We’ll see how long it lasts, although I have to say I like it so far.

In lockdown related news: Ocado have switched how they’re managing delivery slot allocation, and we haven’t had a slot available in over a fortnight now. We’ve had one delivery from a New Covent Garden Market grocers who are now doing veg boxes, and a Sainsburys order is due on Saturday. This is trivial nonsense, but it’s sort of reflective of life these days. There’s this huge, scary, hard-to-comprehend-it’s-so-massive thing going on Out There, but day to day, nothing important at all happens, so major life events consist of the shopping.

Well, I say that – I saw my first humans-who-aren’t-Miranda in months at the weekend, now that we’re allowed to meet up one-on-one with people not in our household outdoors. It was, of course, lovely. It helps that the weather was pretty damn good, too.

(Although we’ve already tipped into the “it’s too hot” part of the year, and it’s basically disgustingly hot and sticky in the flat.)

What scares me about all this – aside from job worries, worries about the broader economy, and the prospect of someone near and dear to me catching this – is general fear that this will not end, in the same sort of way that Terrorism never went away after 9/11. The idea that lockdown will be eased, but never actually go away. That life we remain more or less reduced to online gaming and phone calls, and the biggest excitment to be had will be which supermarket is delivery the groceries this week.

I mean, there are other things happening that provide little blips of dopamine. We’re watching the so-far-superb final season of She-Ra one episode at at time, which I think means we’ll watch the final episode this time next week. I expect to be a wreck. But more broadly, there’s something a little bit The Machine Stops about our current existence, and it’s the not really knowing when or how we get to whatever will be “normal” in the future, that is becoming increasingly hard. And the longer this goes on, the weirder “normal” becomes likely to be.

You’d never know that I felt like I was in a better mood than this time last week, would you?