We are trying to move again this summer, to Ireland. I am, in the way of life at the moment ‘at’ University College Dublin already, although that ‘at’ is an @ and I write this in the room where I’ve done most of my writing for the last few years in my house in Coventry. The house is unnaturally tidy, the bookshelves have space on them after repeated culls (and the closure of bookshops interfering with my usual habits). I still have more clothes than a person ‘needs’, but they all fit me and I have actively decided to keep each one. (I am still arguing with myself about some favourite dresses and what my mother-in-law accurately identified as ‘an evening coat’, which I had previously considered an expensive but glorious mistake since it’s too long to wear on a bike and has no pockets; to keep such clothes now seems either an act of stupid naiveté or a necessary assertion of faith that one day there will be parties again, depending on the mood of the hour.) My son has a school place in Dublin and we rejoiced when Leo Varadkar announced that Irish children will be returning to real-life school in August. I have an Irish social security number and a tax certificate, a long email explaining Irish health insurance that I need to read. We’ve worked out, we think, how to take a Siamese cat across the Irish Sea during a pandemic, and I have permission from my husband to buy a treadmill and take it with us so that I can run from the first day of the two-week quarantine with which our new lives will begin. My sons remarked that as long as there’s water in the taps we’ll survive fourteen days without food, but I’m working towards a better arrangement than that. (I did catch myself wondering if we could eat a lot in Wales before taking the ferry and then get 168 meal replacement drinks delivered, but for any readers with an interest in child protection I promise I won’t do that.)

We started planning this move in the wake of the Brexit vote. I went to the West Cork Literary Festival and shared an event with John Boyne, who spoke of the Equal Marriage Act and the difference between theocratic, conservative Ireland of his childhood and the progressive liberal democracy of today. Someone in the audience said something about living in a time of progress, everyone else agreed, and I thought how good it would be to live in a country where things seemed, by and large and with inevitable exceptions, with a glance towards the climate emergency, to be getting better. Over the following months, I went to more Irish literary festivals, made friends with Irish readers and writers, began to see that the idea that literature is valued more in Ireland than England is not just a stereotype. I liked the much wider range of ages and backgrounds at Irish literary events, and most of all I loved the sociability, the conversations over lunch and in the bar and in taxis and shops, the way almost anyone would chat about books and politics and history and ideas. I found myself staying up late talking to new friends and strangers in a way that I haven’t done since I was a student in England. I want to live in Europe. I want to live by the sea again. I want my kids to start their adult lives in a country more interested in the future than the past. I know Ireland is no eutopia – its environmental record is alarming, there’s a housing crisis that may or may not be solved by a Covid crash but certainly wasn’t solved by the government, it has all the disadvantages as well as benefits of a small country and despite exciting changes in law, the Catholic church casts a long shadow over healthcare and education – but I am excited about the move, and when the emigration bureaucracy feels overwhelming I think of all my conversations with Irish readers and writers, how it will be to teach literature in such a place. It’s embarrassing, but I think I might be moving to Ireland for the craic.

I just hope the craic survives social distancing.

For years I have liked to listen to science podcasts while I run. The English education system required me to choose very early; by fourteen the English are artists or scientists and two years later, often, linguists or social scientists or arts people. I wanted all the languages, because I didn’t plan to stay in England, and so my scientific education was over by sixteen. It took me longer than it should have done to realise what I’d lost, and I began, haphazardly, to fill some gaps. I’m not sure a person can be a critical thinker without some understanding of data and statistics. I rediscovered a childhood fascination for human biology, and in conversation with scientist friends remembered that ‘science’, after all, means ‘knowledge’, and it makes no sense to construct walls between ways of knowing.

Epidemiology is particularly interesting to novelists, whose characters imagine themselves autonomous but are in fact patterns in the author’s mind. Many real-life humans also overestimate their own autonomy (if you doubt this, drop a brick on your foot and see how much freedom of action you have in that moment, only don’t because the NHS has enough to deal with right now). For lucky people in lucky places, it’s possible to forget that we live at the mercy not only of our educations and our neighbours and whoever is in charge, but of our nervous systems, the electricity in our hearts, the bacteria in our blood and guts and, of course, any viruses looking for a new home, which is what viruses do (they have no autonomy either).

Anyway, I listen to epidemiology podcasts, and a few days ago I listened to one from The Guardian exploring, among other matters, why it might be that men seem more vulnerable to Covid-19 than women. Since at that point it was being suggested in the UK and Ireland that people with chronic medical conditions and those over the age of 70 should be subject to indefinite house arrest – in Ireland this is sweetly called ‘cocooning’ but it’s the same thing – it occurred to me that the same logic would imply that men should be locked down longer and harder than women and children. I wrote to The Guardian wondering if anyone else had had this thought. I don’t, I emphasise, think it is a good idea, it just seemed no worse than several ideas that were apparently being taken seriously at the time. Since people of colour also seem more vulnerable than white people, fat people than thin people, poor people than rich people, the same logic would eventually liberate affluent, thin, young white women and all healthy children and leave everyone else locked up. Though I’d have some faith in a world run by children, I have no taste for the racist, sexist and sizeist implications of the rest of that arrangement. My point was that Darwinian thinking destroys some earlier than others but will come for everyone in the end, that ‘solutions’ to contagion that are solutions only for some people are not really solutions at all. Covid-19 in the UK reinforces and even exacerbates most existing social injustice, harming poorer, older, more vulnerable people and people of colour more and faster than it harms the traditional holders of power. The only moment when this disease seems not to conform to Tory priorities is in killing more men than women, and so I gestured in jest towards the logical conclusion of the Malthusian story of the plague year. I don’t want a world run by women or by men, I want a world run by decent human beings with an adequate grasp of social and environmental as well as medical science and a commitment to social justice.

(All that said, I’d rather be in Germany, New Zealand or Denmark than England this summer, but I dare say that’s just coincidence. And I still think school-aged kids might do quite a good job of running the country – it would give them constructive occupation over the summer while their parents get back to work.)