Quick recap: The Bell rang, The Enemy was vanquished, we would all live happily ever after in 2020.

Present-day: I walk around, elbows in, assiduously avoiding touch, using previously redundant parts of my middle-aging body to open doors like an osteoarthritic Nadia Comăneci.  I view everyone as a “bipedal distributor of infectious agents”.  Yesterday someone kissed me on the cheek and I promptly performed a crude chemical skin peel using a hospital-grade bathroom cleaning wipe.

In light of this, my wife and I have decided to keep our kids at home while still trying to work.  The schools haven’t shut down but our attitude to risk has changed.  After your kid gets a 1 in 10,000 cancer, the phrase ‘low risk’ becomes akin to other meaningless concepts like ‘looking forward to the new year’ and ‘vegan cheese’.

It is Day Two of the homeschooling experiment.  What I lack in pedagogy, I make up for in chalk.  Think John-Nash-hosting-a-kids’-show-called-A-Beautiful-Minder quantities of chalk.  Sidewalks and pavers, driveways and walls record my attempts at ‘lessons’.

The theme for today is ‘cycles’.  We talk about the water cycle and the breathing cycle.  I draw circles of things, leading to things, leading to other things, leading back to the first thing.

I think it is clear to them that I actually don’t know what I’m doing and that they are leaderless and in peril, chalk notwithstanding. Today, they used the contents of my shed to create a post-apocalyptic settlement on our back lawn, like a scene from Mad Max.  Empty boxes, pipes, camp chairs, rocks, rugs, a Peppa Pig phone, pretend tins for food.  The clear implication of their shantytown is that Chalk Man cannot help them.

At 2.35pm with 15 minutes left of my ‘shift’, I decide to teach my eight-year-old to Google a question.  As I do so, I worry that everything else I try to do from this point forward will seem redundant to him.

Education sorted, I show him that funny little YouTube clip of those nice children being tackled to the ground while their father gives an interview to the BBC about South Korea.  Then, totally unrelated, I announce that I’m about to dial into a video conference.

Point taken, he goes to the lounge room to watch Netflix and I spend the next forty-five minutes not hearing most of what the other participants in the call are saying because my bandwidth is straining under the pressure.  By the end, I think I’ve agreed to do something but I have no idea what.

Taking a lesson from my own book, I think to ask, “Hey Google, when the fuck will this end?”

“I don’t know how to respond to that”, comes the reply.

Me either.  But I reckon we’ll get through it.