Before the lockdown, I went to see a friend who lives a few miles away in south London. I cycled from Nunhead to her home in Blackheath. On the way I passed a tense crowd of people being forced to wait to get into the Iceland store in New Cross. I reached my friend’s block of flats, climbed the stairs to her front door and laid my satchel on the doormat. She opened the door, greeted me from a distance of a couple of yards, removed the groceries she’d asked me to bring, some salmon and a bottle of olive oil, and put them away. We chatted for about half an hour, me sitting on a step out in the hall, her standing in the doorway, neither of us getting closer than two yards. Her husband, whose mild cough a couple of days earlier had triggered her self-isolation, was a disembodied voice offstage. My friend and I always kiss hello and goodbye; we’ve known each other for 10 years. Not this time. I went back to Nunhead, to queue for more food for my family – the butcher, the fishmonger and the greengrocer all had queues outside – then went home and washed my hands.

It’s the small necessary tasks that get you through the abnormality: the assignments, the missions, the good deeds. They break down the fearfulness and strangeness of the greater emergency into smaller, more manageable chunks of personal time where we can see what we have to do and see, just as importantly, that we can actually do it. The more we have to confront the enormity of the changes around us, and our own individual powerlessness to alter the tide of events, the more likely we are to break down or be paralysed. The merciful paradox of crises like these is to bring so many new chores and duties that the difficulties – sometimes the novelties – of solving each step helps occupy the part of our brain that yearns to know what’s going on and do something about it.

Large, terrifying realities like the growing death toll from an incurable infectious disease, the collapse of the world economy, the sundering of all natural intimacy with wider family and friends – the fact nobody has any idea what happens next – take second place to immediate tasks. How can S and I entertain our four-year-old today? Do we have enough milk? How can my siblings and I help our parents in Scotland, who are in their 80s, if we can’t go to them? Am I two metres away from that guy? How much salmon is appropriate for a care package? Can I cycle up this steep hill to Blackheath, or should I get off and walk?

I spent a couple of years in a world where the only way you could get petrol was by buying it illegally from a taxi driver’s official ration

In the past I saw the saving power of urgent personal tasks when I went to wars to write about them. It was quite frightening to head to a place where a war was: not knowing how you were going to be able to do your job in an unknown situation, the possibility of being detained and the (very remote) chance of being hurt. But I found that the closer I got to where war was, the less frightening it became. It broke down into a series of tiny surmountable personal tasks, surmountable, invariably, with the help of kind strangers as well as cash. Getting transport, the right ID, food, somewhere to sleep, finding people to interview, trying to talk your way past checkpoints, working out how, in a pre-mobile, pre-internet world, to communicate with home: seeing these problems and being obliged to overcome them created a set of stepping stones through chaos.

It doesn’t always work out. If it’s impossible to win those small personal battles – because you’ve pulled a 14-hour hospital shift and there’s no food in the supermarket, or you haven’t got any money, or you’re a single mother with a young child and you’ve just fallen sick, or you missed the NHS-111 callback you waited all day for, or because the struggles you overcome are in your job and your job has disappeared – the anxiety about the bigger picture rushes back into the empty space left by a task undone.

Grozny after the Russian bombardment in the late 1990s Photograph: Eric Bouvet/EPA

Or you may find yourself dragged by the need to feel a personal win to more extravagant projects. Early in the series of wars that wracked Chechnya as it tried to secede from Russia I came across an army of volunteers, drawn from the cohort of middle-aged, working class, ethnically Russian and Ukrainian women who did much of the municipal manual labour in late Soviet times. They were attempting to rebuild, pretty much by hand, the railway station in the centre of the Chechen capital Grozny, using the bricks from the shell-demolished rubble of the old one. I suspect they probably knew in their hearts that their work wouldn’t stand – as it turned out, the worst of the shelling of their city still lay in the future – but that was why the sight of their self-consciously cheerful labour was so moving: they toiled feverishly in the moment to smother their misgivings about the future.

I don’t mean to sound confident in my knowledge of how to get through this. The day of my salmon run to Blackheath was also the day I realised my experience wasn’t worth so much. I lived in Soviet Kiev when the USSR fell apart. I know first-hand about shortages and hoarding, hyperinflation and the black market. I spent a couple of years in a world where the only way you could get petrol was by buying it illegally from a taxi driver’s official ration. I was once given a brick-sized bundle of banknotes tied up with string as small change for a bottle of wine. I queued for bread. I queued for half an hour for what certainly seemed like the only hard cheese left in the city, then saw the last kilogram bought by the woman in front of me. I’ve also spent much of the past six years writing a novel set in England during the first onset of the plague in 1348.

A hefty minority of citizens have the ability to switch from Gardeners’ Question Time persona to protagonist of The Road

And yet there I was, in Britain in 2020, realising that my fellow citizens, many of whom have never been to a country in breakdown or been interested in the Black Death, absolutely had the jump on me in terms of hoarding – in the sense that every online outlet in the country had long since sold out of paracetemol, small freezers and cheap webcams. Experience and common sense tell me that panic-buying is a mistake. But if my experience had been that of a participant in a crisis, rather than a witness who always had the option of going back to a safe and normal country, it might have offered an alternative piece of wisdom: don’t be the last one to panic.

If you’d asked me a few months ago, I would have speculated that the people of Britain weren’t ready for a global health emergency. The evidence now is of a more nuanced truth: that a significant number of people aren’t surprised when everything falls apart. Even if they’ve never known quite how it would go down, they’ve been expecting it, and the reaction is not to take comfort in the achievement of small, practical, immediate steps for daily life but to act as if the only two possible states for society to exist in are normality, and the apocalypse. I feel sure now that a hefty minority of my fellow citizens harbour the innate ability to switch from Gardeners’ Question Time persona to protagonist of The Road in the blink of an eye – and, what is more disturbing, back again.

Praying for relief from the Black Death. Photograph: Hulton Getty

The boundary between the normal and the abnormal, between the states of social security and social breakdown, is elusive. Usually to arrive in the middle of somebody else’s war or disaster as a foreigner is to be dropped into a kind of mirror image of a “normal” country, where a massacre or the violent destruction of a building is a shocking event. In a country at war, or facing utter economic ruin, the sight of smartly dressed young people going off to work in an office, or a new building being built, is as shocking as an explosion. What you tend to miss, as an outsider, is the moment of transition from one state to another – when a normal country with occasional outbreaks of emergency shifts to being a crisis country with occasional outbreaks of peace and pleasantness.

Once in Grozny at the end of 1994 I experienced this transition as a visitor. On the first day, the separatist-held city, surrounded as it was by Russian troops, still turned its face to the world of civilisation, in the sense that when the Russians bombarded an oil installation, the city authorities sent a fire engine, pointlessly, to tackle the flames, as if earnest civilian effort could enclose chaos and make it disappear. The next day, the Russians attacked, and regardless of the detail of what happened afterwards, the mood of the city changed. Its civilian character shrivelled. It seemed to me that when I walked across the main square in the morning there were still a few civilians trying to go about their business but that when I walked back a few hours later the passersby were all soldiers. The peace of the city, its civic spirit, had drowned. The only sound between the gunfire was the crackle of burning roof timbers and broken glass underfoot.

I feel in the last couple of weeks I’ve lived through a similar transition as a native, but without the obvious physical destruction – a different kind of abnormality. I’ve never been in an epidemic before and yet I find myself dogged by a kind of false memory of one. When I set out to write a novel set in a time of plague, unable, as I thought, to visit an infected England, I thought I would at least make, on foot, the journey my characters made, from the Cotswolds to Weymouth, where the Black Death first made landfall. I walked the route at the time of year the plague arrived, in July, and the summer of 2013 was hot and sunny. I imagined my characters disbelieving that the pestilence could be rife in such a fair green land of larksong, downs and flowers. For all the memories of wars this is the memory, the memory of an imagined thought from an epidemic six centuries ago, that comes to my mind on these days of brilliant blue plane-free skies, when the apple, cherry and magnolia blossom is so lush on the trees of London and the gutters are filled with pink petals: how can so many people be suffering when the world looks so fine and peaceful? But in the present I can’t keep my thumb off the phone for long. And I don’t know whether there are more ambulances or I simply notice them more: I hear sirens. I remember that people are suffering, and normal has gone away.

• To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek is published by Canongate.



