A particularly cheerful bank worker once told us to expect a letter in ‘five business sleeps’. The phrase tickled me, but it also seemed quite useful. Children count in sleeps because it lends a degree of agency to waiting. You can’t make the days go faster, but you can always go to sleep.

As I write this, Melbourne has just overtaken Buenos Aires as the most locked-down city on earth. The Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, has now announced target dates for when lockdown is finally expected to end. In this house, we are counting down the sleeps. Not the days, which are interminable and indistinguishable, but the sleeps. We are navigating by the gaps between consciousness.