I’m ten, maybe eleven, so it must be the late nineteen-eighties. It’s school holidays and my grandmother is driving my sister and I over to Rickett’s Point, to fossick in rockpools and numb our toes in the chill of Port Phillip Bay. It’s not the weather for the beach, but Nanna looks up at clear patch of sky and says, reassuringly, ‘There’s enough blue to make a sailor’s jacket’.

Nanna was born in the last few months of the worldwide Spanish Flu pandemic. As I write this, just over eighty people have died in Australia of COVID-19. When acknowledging this number it has become a reflex to add that ‘every one of those deaths is a tragedy’. But we don’t say this as a prelude to dwelling on those tragedies. We do not speak the names of the dead (often enough we cannot), do not speak of the rasping sterility of final hours and days in intensive care.