When writing is going good, it’s amazing. When it’s not, well, it can sometimes feel like you’re quarreling with the atmosphere.

Each morning, when my eyes snap open, I rush to check the little digital screen which feeds me a sleep score. Most of the time, my unconscious-self disappoints. The average score for women my age is 70, but mine ranges from 30-50. That’s out of a hundred. Not only am I below average, I am also failing by basic mathematical standards.

For the first time in nearly three decades, I approached my birthday with resentment, anger. I had been trying my best to ignore the year, to treat it as incidental, and here came an event — yes! Event! — which would force me to confront not only time past, but time wasted.

I had no idea that we could not afford a pet, and so I badgered my mother constantly for one. Desperate, she came home one day with a little electronic dog that one of the other children in church had outgrown. It was small and hard, with a layer of fuzz over its plastic body, housing AA batteries and a mess of wires.

Uniqlo has launched masks in their famous AIRism fabric, triggering long queues all around the city, which seems counterintuitive, but what do I know. How can I find it so hard to hold on to things but remember every last mask-related detail?

In the past, writing was an oasis, now it has become a mirror in the desert of my inadequacies. Today, the act of sitting down before a computer, and staring at a blank page, frightens me, sickens me. The words emerge but I have to coax and negotiate with them, and when they finally appear in full, they display themselves bashful and deformed, already half-turning away at my disappointment.

It was easy to pretend that my short-temperedness was a temporal glitch rather than an assimilated state of being. What’s more, my newfound grouchiness was not unique. Just a few weeks ago, a girlfriend texted me to express her deep and uncharacteristic hatred of a mutual acquaintance who had lost ten pounds via a strict exercise routine this lockdown, while the rest of us inhaled pasta. I replied: Amen, sister.

A producer on a show I cameoed in once very generously described me as ‘mildly directable,’ but I watched her face when she was saying it. She’s a bad liar too.

One day you wake up and the government tells you you’re in Phase Two / your friend reminds you that the demarcation of time is a man-made construct / Google News alerts you to the new rules that have unfolded overnight / Channel News Asia pings you with the latest numbers on cases: community and otherwise.