Cooking and clearing up has been relentless – and that’s without adding a special birthday cake to my range of signature dishes

I’m sitting down to write this having just cleaned fox poo out of the tiny grooves in the soles of my four-year-old’s sandals. She also, somehow, smeared it all over her legs, her dress, my legs, my shorts. The only plus I can take from it is that, for once in our crowded corner of south London, social distancing was not an issue.

Of course, even in non-coronavirus times, 98% of anecdotes about young children end in someone being covered in something or other. But for many parents – at which point I insert an enormous caveat to make it clear that I’m talking about those who haven’t been infected, or made redundant, and aren’t frontline workers, and are extremely lucky enough to still be operating in a strange bubble of “normal” – I’d suspect that the greatest challenges of the past few weeks, and moments of profoundest despair, have come in the kitchen.