In his former job as a war correspondent, novelist James Meek witnessed the thin line between everyday life and chaos - but no experience prepared him for our current emergency

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.