ISOLATION DIARIES PART 9: THE SUMMER THAT NEVER WAS

I'm a little frustrated today. I can't exactly explain why: it might be the lack of fresh oxygen, the onset of cabin fever, or just that I'm a little bored. We can't afford to be bored though; there are still long weeks ahead of this.

I went for a longer walk today. I haven't been further than a mile from my house in the last two weeks, which is quaintly old-fashioned, so I walked a little further this afternoon. The streets were empty, the sky clear and golden. No cars, some pedestrians and joggers swerving outlandishly to remain two metres apart. It's still quite surreal.

My thoughts have been more fixed today as to what happens WATIO (When All This Is Over). I've been thinking it for a while actually, but I guess we're all starting to think like this. Quite when WATIO will be, none of us are sure. The government today announced that life might not be fully back to normal for six months - a number that I found astounding, but also understandable. We flatten the curve; the curve gets longer. It was always going to be the choice of the powers that be, whether they'd prefer more people to die quickly so we can get this over faster, or protect more of us from dying by dragging it out for a lot longer. I'm glad our country has chosen compassion over economics, even if 'back to normal' might not be a thing that's possible.

And that's where I'm landing today. There is no normal to go back to.

I know we like the comfort of thinking about how life was, but what if we're really leaping into the air above the chasm, sure to land somewhere, on the other side, but somewhere very different? That's how I see it for me, anyway. How we do work, family, church, friendships - all of this is changing in real-time in front of our eyes. It's a real moment of transition, and I'm not sure it's as temporary as a lot of people are thinking.

In 1783, Laki (an Icelandic volcano fissure) erupted and threw clouds of ash over most of the Northern Hemisphere. The so-called Laki Haze is a little blip in the historical records - just one summer, dubbed the Summer That Never Was. The sun went red, the air was thick with poisonous sulphour dioxide, and thousands of outdoor workers died.

Due to the extreme weather of that year: the winter that followed and then the climate change of several summers, France particularly, experienced droughts and failed harvests, leading to a national famine, which became an enormous factor in precipitating the French Revolution of 1789. Meanwhile, in Britain, 23,000 people had died from their mostly agricultural work, not to mention livestock and failed crops. The Laki Haze was a factor in speeding up the process of the Industrial Revolution in our country.

It was a blip. But it rippled - and its effects still ripple, right into the present. And I wonder whether future historians will look back at the summer of 2020 in the same way.

I guess that's why I'm feeling frustrated. Change is already here, and I don't particularly like the uncertainty of where I'm going to land. There's no surety I'll have a job WATIO. I think it'll be okay, but I sense the worry at sales-slowdowns hinted in emails. There's no certainty that I'll have a ministry to go back to either - and if I do, I already feel as though we'll be doing it very differently.

But. We're only at the beginning of Week 3. There's a way to go yet, and I also believe that difficulty creates opportunity. It is hugely likely that people with big ideas will have time to shine - and that's so exciting. All it takes is a little bit of proactivity and an amazing idea, and you can change the world, I reckon. It is the entrepreneur's age.

Gilbert White was an eighteenth century naturalist who started recording the weather as a result of the Laki Haze - in a way he's one of the first technical communicators, a forerunner of all of us who write about things in plain English. As a technical author, I owe at least a little bit of my job to the Summer That Never Was inspiring him to do something unthought of. And that might be what we all have to learn how to do - adapt and move into the new season, ready for the adventure of doing things differently.