After initially denying there were any problems, the government then blamed the public for demanding unnecessary tests; then admitted the backlog in the labs would take “a matter of weeks” to resolve; and then the odious Rees-Mogg accused the public of “carping”.

Health secretary Matt Hancock finally admitted the September rise in demand was far outstripping the supply of tests, although failed to concede this might have been predictable as millions of children went back to school and started picking up the usual autumn-term colds and other bugs. His proposed solution is to prioritise tests for hospital staff and patients, other health service workers, staff and residents of care homes, teachers and other key workers. That’s a long list of priorities.

The incompetence of this government speaks for itself. Rees-Mogg’s sneering comments speak of an out-of-touch entitlement to rule that cares not one jot for the everyday predicaments of families being left to make potentially life-affecting decisions on their own without the information needed to assess properly the risks we are taking.

Our family’s experience illustrates something of dilemmas being played out across the country.

Our youngest son had a sore throat from Sunday 6th Sept, with other cold-like symptoms including a cough starting on Wednesday 9th September, his first full day back at school since March. So that night we called NHS 111 and were told he should get a Covid test and until we got a result the whole family should self-isolate.

I spent the next two days failing to get through on website or phoneline to book a test – and eventually a friend gave us a home-testing kit they had ordered in the summer holidays and not used. I got the completed test into the last post on Friday 11th September. It was another four days before the result came back negative on Tuesday 15th September – six days after we’d been told to get a test.

For the virus to be kept under control, people who might have Covid have to stay away from other people. If you know you definitely have the virus, you’d be incredibly wreckless to fail to isolate. But self-isolating just in case is quite another matter. And the longer it takes to find out if you have Covid, the harder it is to stay away from people.

Every day self-isolating has its costs. For some it’s loss of income; for some there are profound mental health challenges; for both my sons who are in their A-Level and GCSE years, it’s loss of precious teaching time in a vital year when they’ve already been out of school for six months. The possible consequences for them of a couple more weeks’ missed school – at a time when teachers are working hard to make up for the already missed months – could be lower grades in the summer exams, a lost opportunity for higher education, and all that flows from that.

We all balance risks and their possible consequences. It’s human nature. And I have to report that our family struggled to properly self-isolate “just in case” youngest son’s “cold” turned out to be Covid.

In the full six days it took from him first getting a cough to the negative test result arriving, he did stay in his bedroom most of the time. Meanwhile, I methodically disinfected light switches, taps and door handles several times a day. But not everyone in my home stayed indoors the whole time. There were dog walks, a couple of shops, football and even a meal out.

If it had turned out to be Covid, how many people might our family have infected?

I’m sure we’re not exceptional. I’m sure plenty of usually socially responsible people will find it hard, after the year we’ve had so far, to self-isolate again “just in case” a family member’s cold symptoms turn out to be Covid.

According to Prof Andrew Hayward, director of University College London’s institute of epidemiology and healthcare, during a typical winter around half a million people a day could be expected to have Covid-like symptoms even in a year without a pandemic. The reality is that many of those people and their families are not going to stay indoors for 14 days while they try to get hold of a test.

It is not “carping” to suggest this government might save some lives by organising an accessible and speedy testing system enabling everyone with symptoms to get Covid tests and results back within a day or two. Without it, infectious people are not going to stay away from others and the virus will again spiral out of control.

Youngest child has a runny nose, headache, sore throat and cough. In normal times I’d tell him to soldier on, but he’s just started back to school and his whole year ‘bubble’ of more than 200 children will be told to stay home if he turns out to have Covid-19, so we’re doing the responsible thing and keeping him at home.

When we called NHS 111 last night they told us to book him a Covid test. More than 12 hours later and I’m still trying, refreshing the page periodically since I got up this morning. The website responds ‘no test sites found’ for our London postcode. I’ve now called the 119 helpline, which tells me unhelpfully, but repeatedly: “Your call is in a queue. There will be a wait before your call can be answered.”

So, after six months off school he has managed precisely one full day back at what is the start of his GCSE year.

The talk on the Streatham mums’ Whatsapp group is of private tutors and special catch-up clubs at some schools. I’ve emailed Dunraven to see if they can send work home for him to do – but I’m not hopeful. He had his fill of working through PowerPoints for the whole of the summer term. He didn’t do it. He’s 15. He needs teachers.

He can’t responsibly go back to school until he knows for sure he hasn’t got Covid. And he can’t know that without a test.

So, please, please will this useless government stand aside and let someone competent take over?

Morale has been wobbly this last week or so. There are money worries as the reality of having to cancel every yoga retreat planned for this year hits home. Two close friends have been made redundant after decades with their employers. A nephew let go from his job in retail at the start of lockdown has yet to find work.

Our family’s summer excursions to Devon and Kent are fading into memory. The days are cooling.

On the bright side, the garden is blushing each morning with newly ripened tomatoes. There’s a new baby safely arrived in our extended family up North – and another on the way. And hooray! – the teenagers are finally going back to school next week.

Looking ahead just brings anxiety. Will next year’s yoga retreats be able to go ahead? When will it be safe to open my home yoga studio once again? Will the boys’ GCSEs and A-Levels take place – and if so will the months of lost schooling put them behind students from better resourced schools?

Restaurants and cafes are open – but few are busy. As the government’s furlough money and self-employment grants come to an end in October, how many more jobs will be lost and how many households will be able to keep their heads above water? For people across huge swathes of the economy, the immediate future looks bleak.

Covid-19 is still close by; a group of south London sixth-form leavers tested positive after a celebratory holiday in Croatia last month, but have succeeded keeping it contained to their group.

Friends who had the virus early on in the pandemic are still suffering the effects. One, who was previously a runner of half-marathons, hasn’t yet recovered his usual strength and stamina. A local friend, an NHS nurse who contracted the virus at work in February, says her lungs and heart have not fully recovered and she now struggles to cycle to work, something she’d been doing for 20 years.

To counter the end-of-summer blues, I’ve had some long-distance face-time with family in New Zealand and arranged dog-walks with local friends. Whatever the weather, it’s always better to get outside than to stay indoors moping and I always feel better after a bit of real human contact, not mediated by a screen.

For the time being, this is ‘the new normal’.

Tooting Bec Lido opened today for the much-delayed first swim of the summer. I was one of many who spent Monday hovering on the overwhelmed website trying to book a ticket – and with success. So at 10.55am this morning I rode down on my bike, had my name checked off against a list of bookings, and followed the marshal’s instructions for the new socially-distancing lido protocols.

It’s online booking only and you are limited to a 45-minute slot, free to members of the South London Swimming Club, or £7.90 for non-members. It’s all quite regimented with lane-swimming only. On arrival, I was asked whether I was ‘fast’, ‘medium’ or ‘slow’ and allocated a socially distanced queue for one of eight lanes.

Having been told to come ‘swim-ready’, cubicles not in use, we stripped off to our swimsuits and were then led round the pool to leave our belongings spaced out along one side; then led all the way round the one-way system to the other side to get into the water.

The eight lanes are across the 33m width of the pool and only the shallow end was in use this morning; the vast expanse of deep-end water stretched out tantalisingly beside us, undisturbed and unused. Meanwhile, between six and eight people per lane began swimming back and forth.

I was a little anxious as to whether I’d chosen the correct lane; I’d said ‘slow to medium’ when asked my preference, but seemed to have been put in one of the fast lanes. It was fine, but I definitely felt a pressure to keep up my speed and not to spoil it for anyone else by getting in their way. “It’s quite intense,” said a fellow swimmer as we both took a break at the edge part-way through.

But despite the constraints of the new regime, it was wonderful to be in the water. In the midst of the London heatwave, with the temperature reaching 34 degrees every day for nearly a week, nothing could beat the feeling of plunging into the sparkling water and moving through its coolness.

Towards the end of the 45 minutes a few people got out of my lane and I swam a few widths almost oblivious to others as it was possible to swim with more distance between us – usually one of the joys of swimming in the lido’s huge expanse of water. The sun was strong, bouncing off the water and lighting up the coloured doors of the not-to-be-used cubicles lining the edge.

At 11.45am a whistle blew and we obediently got out, dried and put our clothes on over swimming costumes, meandered towards the exit, savouring each last moment, forming a happy stream of people trickling back out onto the parched grasses of Tooting Bec Common. It was strangely moving to be part of an almost-silent distanced crowd, knowing we’d all just shared sensations we’d been thirsting for these last few months.

It’s the lido, but not as we no it. No sunbathing or lolling about on the side. No family groups having picnics under the trees. No teeneagers larking about or striking poses for their friends. No chips, icecream or anything else to eat as the cafe’s closed.

But I will be back.

This weekend is the closest to ‘normal’ we’ve done since the start of Lockdown. On Friday afternoon we went down to Broadstairs, the traffic as congested as any other I can remember on the first weekend of the school summer holidays. We got there about six, just as dog restrictions on Stone Bay beach lifted and and we could go down for a heavenly swim in the sea.

After so many months barely ever venturing beyond the confines of our little corner of south London, the vast expanse of sand, sea and sky was almost as shocking as the cold water. How wonderful to be able to see beyond a few hundred feet without bricks or rooftiles; how beautiful the long shadows stretching out across the sand as the sun dipped behind the cliffs.

We stayed with much loved friends and, of course, we couldn’t hug them when we met, but we had a whole evening and the next day to catch up, listen, share and feel supported in ways that Zoom meetings and phone calls never manage to do.

Our first experience of a meal in a restaurant under Covid conditions was at Prezzo on Friday night. We had booked an outside table overlooking the sea. There were floor markings and hand-sanitiser at the door, a one-way system for moving around and instructions from the staff on how to navigate it all.

To read a menu, you had to take a photograph of a QR code with your phone, scan it and enter your table number. We were laughably rubbish at using the technology, not helped by having only 12% battery left on the phone we were using. There was no time for prevaricating over whether to go for pasta or pizza; choose something quickly or the phone might die.

The next day we were up early for another swim on an almost deserted beach, breakfast and then a walk with the dog to Ramsgate. There we stopped for lunch where the cafe was much more low-tech: paper menus on the outside tables and order at the bar, a much more relaxed (and risky?) approach to social distancing perhaps.

By the time was got back to Broadstairs, Viking Bay beach was busy – but still with space for people to stay 2m apart. The pavements in the town centre were crowded, though, with clusters of people snaking from side to side trying to stay apart.

Despite the summer season being so vital to local businesses, not all the bars and restaurants in Broadstairs have reopened. Notices in some windows said social distancing was too difficult in the space and owners weren’t confident they could keep staff and customers safe.

So summer at the seaside this year feels almost, but not quite, normal. What was totally new for us was leaving both teenagers in the house alone for a night while we went away. What state would they – and our home – be in when we got back? “If it’s unnaturally tidy you’ll know they’ve had a party,” warned our friend.

But, it wasn’t. We returned to find the kitchen a mess of take-away cartons and unwashed dishes and the bathroom floor buried under smelly clothes and wet towels. Eldest son was out at a friend’s; youngest was on the X-box. All is normal in SW2.

I’m making face-masks out of old T-shirts. As the government has stopped dithering and made face-masks compulsory in shops as well as on public transport, we are going to need a supply. I don’t want to be adding to the plastic waste in the oceans, so I’m hoping my family can be persuaded to use washable re-usable ones. So far, they haven’t been too keen.

For the style-conscious teens, I might need to splash out on cooler designs; I fear my random bits of T-shirt material don’t pass the embarrassment test. It’s got to be something they want to wear – or they just won’t.

And now that lockdown has fizzled out, it’s become harder to get them to take precautions. Are they hand-washing as much as they did at the start? Are they really staying a metre or two apart when they meet friends? Almost certainly not when they are playing football or basketball.

Life outside the home is resuming, albeit in a new form.

I drove to north London to walk with a friend in Highgate Woods at the weekend. It was the first time I’ve crossed the river since early March and it felt like quite an adventure. The journey was long and slow; widened pavements to make space for more pedestrians mean narrower roads for those of us travelling inside a tonne of metal.

After four months of sticking mainly to SW2 and SW16, it was strangely exciting to pass by the capital’s landmarks again; I can report that the MI5 building is still there; as is Victoria station; Buckingham Palace and Marble Arch. In our lockdown lives, our physical worlds had shrunk. I was struck by how in life before lockdown, the ability to travel was something I took for granted. It’s one of the privileges of affluent 21st century life that we don’t notice until it’s gone.

While shops, pubs, swimming pools are all now opening, my yoga classes will stay closed. Instead I will be teaching classes online for the forseeable future. My little home studio, where I normally teach up nine people at a time, isn’t large enough to space people out. The loss of income from this – and retreats – is considerable. And it’s the same story for millions of other families. We know we are heading for a deep recession.

So the chancellor ‘Dishy Rishi’ Sunak, is keen to get us out spending. He has been filmed waiting tables in Wagamama and from August will be offering us half-priced meals at restaurants up and down the land.

In Streatham, I’ve been trying to give some custom to our local charity and gift shops, but it isn’t always easy to stay distanced in the smaller spaces inside these little, independent stores.

We have also booked a table at Bar 61 – our local restaurant-bar – for younger son’s forthcoming birthday. We’d be heartbroken to see Bar 61 go under, having had one of our first dates there more than 20 years ago – and celebrated many family occasions there since. We all want and need our local businesses to stay in business. But already, the live human experiment of easing lockdown is showing some worrying results. New Covid-19 infections are beginning to rise again.

According to the Covid Symptom Study, run by King’s College London, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals, some 25,356 people had symptomatic Covid-19 on 13th July, a figure that has been rising since 7th July. The R number, which needs to stay below 1 to indicate that the spread of the virus is reducing, is now 1.1 nationally and 1.3 here in London.

At the start of lockdown, there was a sense of community spirit; we were all battening down the hatches together to weather a storm. But now, four months in, we’re being allowed out again even though it’s still raining. It’s very unsettling.

Clearly we’ve all had enough – of no pubs and clubs, no summer holidays, no birthday parties, no fun. The pressure has been building and now the lid has blown off and we’re streaming to the seaside, to party in the street, to have barbecues with neighbours. You can’t blame us on these long, hot midsummer nights.

Our household has been gradually slackening its lockdown regime – and not strictly sticking to the rules. Our eldest teenager has had two or three friends round and not always sat in the garden; and he’s met up in the park to play football with friends more than once or twice.

Last Sunday I hung out with about 20 others by the statue of  Sir Henry Tate in Windrush Square, Brixton, to hear Rashid Nix talking about the legacy of the colonial sugar trade on black lives today.

We went to see our niece’s new home on Tuesday night and on Wednesday we went to the seaside with a friend, who was desperate to get out of London for the day; she sat in the back of our car and we kept the windows down; and we’ve had drinks in our neighbour’s garden once or twice, staying two metres apart – most of the time.

Our local supermarket is still managing to control the flow of customers so it’s easy to stay apart once inside; but the deli next door seems to make no attempt.

Both boys have been back to school for two half days each in the last fortnight. We’ve just booked a week’s holiday in Devon – and are hoping that the holiday park’s swimming pool will be open by then.

But the virus hasn’t gone away. In fact, the rate of new daily cases stopped falling this week for the first time in months. As more of us are mingling with more people more often, the opportunities for the virus to be transmitted are starting to rise again.

According to the Covid Symptom Study, there are currently over 2,300 new cases in the UK every day and its spokesman Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, writes: “With lockdown being eased over the last few weeks and more changes soon to come it’s interesting to see that we are now seeing a tail off in the decline. With Covid still very much in the population it’s really important the UK continues to be cautious when it comes heading back to normal life.”

I listened to Prof Neil Ferguson being interviewed by Nick Robinson on Radio 4’s Political Thinking yesterday. He is the epidemiologist at Imperial College whose warnings of the scale of the epidemic have been credited with contributing to the government’s introduction of lockdown in March.

He seemed to be saying that scientists are now better equipped to provide effective and timely advice than they were at the start of the year as the amount of data being collected is much greater. But they have never modelled the effects of an easing of a lockdown in so many different ways at the same time.

In other words, we are all part of a live, human experiment.

I thought my days of sharing a home with inconsiderate flat-mates were long gone. But three months out of school and our teenagers are displaying some pretty anti-social tendencies.

I’d become fairly used to washing-up piled in the sink and late-night frivolity waking me in the early hours; but now there is a new development and it crosses the line of tolerance: one of them is drinking my booze!

Inspired by my old friend Jane, I’d bought a bottle of vodka to make flavoured liqueurs. The elderflower is already brewing nicely in a dark cupboard and there were more plans to do something with rhubarb from the garden. So about a third of a bottle was in the fridge when I went to bed. When I looked for it this morning there was only an inch of vodka left.

I shouldn’t really complain. Back in the 80s when I was a teen, drinking was quite normal from about the age of 15. I remember how clever we felt when we drank a bottle of a friend’s parent’s port – and topped it up with plonk from the local off licence. I must remember not to tell our boys that trick.

In fact, when I think about it I was a hideous flat-mate myself. I remember in my first year at Newcastle University thinking the builders outside my window were SO inconsiderate starting their noisy work at 8am – when I’d only just got to bed a few hours earlier. Later, in my 20s, I’d play (badly) my out-of-tune piano when I came home from the pub. And I definitely left more than my fair share of dirty dishes in sinks.

So I suppose I’m in no place to criticise our eldest. At least he’s doing his own washing and cooking a family meal once a week. He seems to have given up completely on his A-Levels though.

His school have only recently started providing any live teaching online – and getting Google Meets to work on his laptop has taken us over a week.  For most of the last three months, emails have been piling up in his inbox suggesting articles to read and essays to write. But he’s a 16-year-old boy not yet mature enough to realise how little he knows or how to organise his time to study effectively on his own. And of course anything I suggest is automatically wrong.

Today the government announced a £1bn  Covid catch-up plan for schools.  I’m glad they realise there’s a problem, but I don’t envy teachers and schools working out who needs help and how to offer it. Socio-economic factors will play a part, but so will children’s different personalities and peer-groups. For example, my youngest has friends who are largely keeping going with the school work set and that makes him want to do the same. For our eldest, the opposite is true.  Our boys have the same parents, the same home environment, the same access to computers, but a very different experience of their schooling during lockdown.

Our boys are in years 10 and 12 and are due to take GCSEs and A-Levels next year, but they will have missed, in effect, about half a school year. I’m beginning to think the fairest thing would be for this whole cohort of children to re-do this academic year. Just forget 2020 ever happened. That might work for all of us.

Is this a tipping point? After all the moments when people said “never again”: like after the 1981 riots, like after Cherry Groce, like after Stephen Lawrence, like after Grenfell… As the list goes on and on you realise that racism doesn’t sink as easily as a statue of a slave-trader under murky waters.

I’m taking my cue from black friends and commentators on how to support Black Lives Matters. How can we prevent this being just another moment that passes without real change? So we joined a (socially distanced) protest on Tooting Common on Saturday. Everyone wore masks and there was space to stay two metres apart for the 30 minutes we gathered. It was solemn and serious.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about the books that opened my eyes to the reality of racism, including my culture’s part in it. For what it’s worth, here’s my contribution to the reading lists many are now sharing.

Staying Power by Peter Fryer was a game-changer. After reading this history of black people in Britain some time in the late 1980s, I realised my school education had been a sham and history lessons had been a whitewash.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is an epic tale across many generations from slaves to their descendants and how the pain and trauma passes down from parent to child again and again.

Natives by Akala. British hip-hop artist expands from his personal experiences to a wide-ranging critique of British education, society and politics. The shocking fact that stayed with me from this was that even today black students receive better marks in exams when their papers are marked blind; teachers underscore their abilities.

British Poets: Benjamin Zephaniah, Jean Binta Breeze, Lemn Sissay, Patience Agbabi, Jackie Kay are all musical storytellers of their experiences in Britain. Jackie, Lemn and Patience in particular share the special insights of growing up as children of colour adopted into white families.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or anything by Maya Angelou! I particularly love poems from her anthology And Still I Rise. Plus the classics by other African-American women: Alice Walker ‘s The Color Purple and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

British contemporary classic novels: Andrea Levy – Small Island; Hanif Kureishi – My Beautiful Laundrette; Monica Ali – Brick Lane; Alex Wheatley – East of Acre Lane

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie is a book I’ve read more recently – a compelling story about radicalisation in a British Muslim family.

Girl, Woman Other by Bernadine Everisto is a moving and generous telling of multiple interlocking stories of black British women over several generations that was co-winner of last year’s Booker Prize.

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge is the book that grew out of a blog about white people’s blindness to structural racism.

Auto-biographies of Malcolm X and Angela Davis.

I’d love to hear more recommendations…