Lorna Irvine, 47
Glasgow, Scotland

Over six weeks now. Over six weeks and how time drags.

Locked down, burnt out, I curse the sun for shining through my curtains on my morose little face.

Skint and feeling like a cigarette butt, and the butt of all jokes today, I blink like a rabbit in a make up testing laboratory. Last night, insomnia enveloped me like an lover who knows me too well, and is trying to get rid of me. My eyes are red and black ringed, no cosmetics required. I squint a little, acclimatising to new light.

I'm a professional critic. Or rather, was? Who knows. Usually, I write articles and reviews , today I can hardly lift my head off the pillow.

I miss the comfort, gentle humour and reassurance of my mum.

I miss the warm embrace of friends. I miss their smiles and witticisms, their idiosyncratic dispositions. Queer; gay, bi, straight, non-binary, cisgender, cissy, butch, trans, asexual, married, single, poly, complicated, non-committed, just plain feckless and slutty. Black, white, brown, golden, rosy, freckled,scarred. They're beautiful, all of them, a long line of haircuts, styles, a hot mess of sensitivity, colours, creativity and cackles. I love every one of them.

I long to disappear into art, to thrill at taking in a dancer's limbic extension or contorted torso. 

Where I'd usually be in a tightly packed venue, inhaling and exhaling with the crowd as one, I'm listening to music on 6Music as ever (which keeps me sane, or as good as) but I'm a childless fortysomething, painfully aware of my status as such.

Social media is little better: people are drunk on cocktails as though it's an ordinary Saturday night here in this tough city. Or they're baking perfect loaves in their perfect kitchens. Presenting edited versions of themselves on Instagram filters. 

There's nobody really saying, "Help me. I'm alone, and I need to touch someone, or I might die right now. I'm frightened. Is this how things end? My friend has cancer, and I'll maybe never see him again. He's absolutely wonderful. I don't know what the hell to say to him." There again, they're all just floundering like everyone else out there, these social media families, just being positive and loving, when we most need it. They don't know some of us have less than they do.

Jesus, I'm not sick, homeless or Katie Hopkins. I'm not a Trump supporter, keyboard warrior, webcam MILF, or ex-member of the band S Club Seven. Why complain? Get over yourself, woman.

It's just hard losing structure. Lockdown is enforcing introverted behaviour. We've all turned inwards. It's navel gazing as survival strategy.

Writing is easy for me, but lack of deadlines expand my mental waist line. My brain is getting a wee bit flabby, never mind me. My nights are getting later with no need to rise early.

Writing is a need; thoughts have to be written down so as to be lassoed, caught forever, lest they escape.

I'm scared my words will disappear into the crowd, become indistinguishable, grey and meaningless. 

Perhaps it's the fact that art sustains us and puts life under a wider context. People pour their souls, mortgages and lives into art: a guitar line or howl that gives my hair electricity; a truth that prickles the skin in a theatre production, a dance piece that redefines how the space is used.

How will we respond when this is all over? Will we creep outside, tentatively, blinking like newborn animals spat out into daylight for the first time? Will we dissolve into a frenzied mass orgy like the last days of Rome? 

Or will we just scratch our arses, sigh, and mutter, "Right. Tesco. I'm out of teabags?"