I’m sorry. I am about to do an enormous Covid barf.

I just have a bad feeling it’s coming. I don’t know how rational this feeling is. Since we’ve all been traumatised in some way or another. It’s hard now to rationalise.

For a recent while it seems we’ve been burying it. Baked a lot of shit. Cakes, brownies, macaroons. The list goes on. Delicious bread. Granary rolls. In the meantime, people have still been getting sick. A little more quietly maybe. My friend has seven colleagues from UCL’s surgical team who are now in ICU themselves. He says waves of illness pass through him and his colleagues like mini-tsunamis. He says they are all becoming conditioned – to being sick, getting better, getting sick again.

Meanwhile, nothing seems to fit. The news is a jigsaw puzzle. In the UK for example, we are listening to how lockdown is being eased. Home is set to march back towards normal living again.

The pandemic is weighing down in Latin and South America. This region is considered the global epicentre now. America too is exploding again. Four thousand new cases in Florida in just one day.

And the islands here are the freckles of land on this region’s face. The only thing seemingly keeping them safe is keeping the borders closed. But airports are set to re-open. Some, like Antigua already have re-opened.

Countries like Barbados have been watching. Today, 39 new cases in Antigua were announced. Antigua is a relatively small island, with a population around a third the size of Barbados. 80,000 compared to 286,000. Barbados isn’t big – but it is much more heavily populated.

It’s being reported that these Antiguan cases are from repatriating Antiguans and Barbudans, who have arrived from the corona-rife Dominican Republic. Patients have gone straight to a Covid facility. Because these are the new normal places – the Covid homes.

In Aberystwyth, we used to live above above an old tuberculosis sanctuary. It was down the hill from us – at the entrance of the marina, on the bridge crossing over the Ystwyth River. History looks set to repeat. That’s fine of course, I’d be happy to stay in one myself. Barf away.