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?

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.

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…

My reaction to last week’s news that British Airways may stop flying out of Gatwick and concentrate its London base at Heathrow, may not have been typical. My heart lifted a little. Could the scaling down of international air travel signal the beginning of a significant change in what we consider to be economic and political certainties?

Could we, at last, be willing to consider the possibility of moving from an economy based on environmental and human exploitation, to one that nourishes us all – people and planet? I know, I know, I’m a privileged hippy and it’s not my job on the line. But please bear with me. We’ll come back to jobs and livelihoods soon.

Hasn’t the fresher air tasted better? If you live on a flight-path, hasn’t the peace in the skies been beautiful? Have you loved hearing the birds sing? If you suffer from asthma, haven’t you been breathing a little easier?  Here in London, toxic emissions at major roads and junctions has fallen by almost 50%.

For how many years have Green campaigners have been calling ‘Fire’, only for the response to be, “there is no alternative”; change isn’t possible; our economy is dependent on the burning of fossil fuels; perpetual economic growth is the only way to reduce human suffering?

I’m old enough to remember a surge of environmentalism in the early ’90s, when the ending of the Cold War seemed to signal the start of new possibilities of global co-operation that through the Rio Declaration might protect the planet from destruction. But the alarm bell was being rung before that.

As it turned out, all these voices were drowned out over the next 30 years as we fell for a promise that happiness was to be found in cheap flights, cheap food, lots of cars and endless supplies of disposable consumer goods. Never mind if the seas clogged up with plastic, the coral and the rainforests died and the planet kept warming.

Until now. In the face of Coronavirus, we have discovered that we can do without throw-away fashion, take-away meals, and all the rest; we have agreed this is a circumstance in which human suffering can only be prevented by sacrificing economic growth.

I’m not for a second suggesting that this pandemic is a good thing. The deaths, the isolation, the loss of livelihoods and fear and insecurity should NOT be the price we pay for addressing the flaws in our economic system.

But I think it is significant that in our response to the pandemic, we have jettisoned some assumptions that we previously agreed were unquestionable. It turns out we can fly much less, drive much less, commute much less than we thought – and still survive.

More than that, we have discovered that we humans are not entirely short-sighted and selfish; we are, in certain circumstances, willing to put our individual wants to one side for the common good. We have rediscovered that humanity can act together to prevent its own destruction.

If we, as society, are able co-operate in ways that go against our immediate individual needs in order to flatten a curve of Coronavirus infection, perhaps we should do it in order to flatten another curve, the one that signals another emergency threatening to overwhelm us: global warming.

The drop in carbon emissions is heading for a record-breaking 5-5%-5.7% this year, but that won’t be anywhere near enough to halt climate change. Carbon dioxide is so long-lived in the atmosphere that a small decrease in emissions will not register against the overwhelming increase since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Some local and national governments have recognised that this sudden and extraordinary pause to ‘business as usual’ offers an opportunity to address environmental concerns.

Milan has announced an ambitious scheme to reduce car use after Lockdown. Governments from New Zealand to Scotland have made funding available for temporary cycle lanes and walkways amid the pandemic. In Brussels, the city centre has become a priority zone for cyclists and pedestrians. Temporary street closures to cars have taken place in Brighton, Bogotá, Cologne, Vancouver and Sydney as well as multiple US cities including Boston, Denver and Oakland. In England, restrictions have been lifted to enable councils to more easily close streets to cars.

Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, who was one of the architects of the Paris Accord on climate change, has gone even further. Interviewed on C4 News recently, she described the next 3-24 months as a window of opportunity for governments making decisions on how to kickstart economies, to do so in ways that decarbonise the world and build “a thriving economy that will protect the wellbeing of everyone”.

“Because these crises have collided, we have the responsibility to converge the solutions,” she said. If not, “we will be jumping out of the frying pan into a raging fire. We cannot rebuild business as usual –  it doesn’t work for humanity or the ecosystems that sustain us.”

In other words, the new jobs and livelihoods we create coming out of Coronavirus could be sustainable ones, for example in renewable energy, carbon capture, home-working technology, sustainable transport and infrastructure.

It is clear to me that all this suffering will not make the planet any cooler. But it might be presenting us a moment of pause in which to check what our priorities really are.

Read more on this subject

The Covid-19 crisis creates a chance to reset economies on a sustainable footing
: New Zealand climate minister says governments must not return to the way things were.

How has Coronavirus helped the environment?: BBC Futures investigation

I am a mad scientist: Death, poverty, loneliness — are ineffective blueprints for climate solutions, writes Kate Marvel a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University

Improvement in natural conditions should not come at the expense of human lives – Christiana Figueres: C4 News interview with the Costa Rican diplomat who was an architect of the landmark Paris climate accords

In whatever ways the lockdown eventually starts to lift, I’m hoping we don’t return to normal. Some things I would like to continue. Here are a four of them.

ONE. A recognition and appreciation of the huge role immigrants and the descendants of immigrants play in the National Health Service and other essential parts of our society. The next time some newspaper editor or pub philosopher attempts to stir division with racist tropes and lies, I’d like the image of the faces, overwhelmingly black and brown, of the 100 NHS staff who have given their lives in this pandemic to be in our minds. I’d like us to feel their presence spurring us on to challenge and reject the politics of fear every time it rears its evil head.

TWO. Could that appreciation also take into account the largely female face of the frontline in this pandemic? Of the 3.2 million workers in ‘high risk’ roles, 77% are women. Over a million of these workers are paid below 60% average wages. 98% are women. (There’s a good briefing on this by the Women’s Budget Group). The low-paid status of caring work done largely by women is huge structural injustice. Let’s turn our appreciation of carers into a determination to right this wrong.

THREE. I’d like the appreciation we currently feel for people doing all kinds of public sector and service jobs to continue. Could we agree, as a society, that while we love our footballers and TV presenters, and might envy the power and choice of people with high-paid jobs in finance, we love our bin men, care home workers, supermarket shelf stackers, teaching assistants and farm workers even more? Could we turn the enthusiasm with which we now clap for key workers every Thursday night into a great pride in the working class jobs that most of us do and on which all of us depend?

FOUR. Could that appreciation translate into a rejection of any future austerity? When the reckoning comes and the debate begins on how to get public finances back in order after this crisis, we refuse absolutely to make low-paid, public-sector, working class people pay the price. We refuse absolutely to accept benefit cuts, public sector pay freezes and cuts to public services. If we don’t reject austerity, we will in effect be sending the bill for our survival to the very care workers, shelf stackers and nurses who have saved us.

I constantly struggle with the tension between a life-long desire to change the world (still undiminished at 50!) and yoga’s ideas of acceptance and contenement with things just the way they are.

In the days since the momentous Brexit referendum result, it’s been hard for even the most detached yogi to avoid the murky world of politics. Almost every conversation I’ve had since waking up on June 24th has begun with expressions of disbelief and dismay.

Here where I live in Lambeth in south London, 79 per cent of us voted to Remain. I can’t think of anyone I know locally who voted to Leave. I guess we’ve been guilty of complacency. We’d forgotten how much we take for granted the multi-cultural brew that is Brixton and Streatham. We don’t even notice it any more.

I have to remind myself that friends, neighbours and my students have their origins all over the world, including many from the EU. We once joked that our sons’ primary school was more diverse than the United Nations – and more amicable.

Since June 24th I’ve had tearful conversations with local friends whose children wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the EU;  children born of mixed partnerships between English and Spanish, Czech, German, Polish, or French parents.

The atmosphere in the playground that Friday morning was grim. Were the families of European origin no longer welcome in our previously friendly school community? And what about families originally from Africa, South America and Asia? One English mum (also a teacher at the school) told me she wanted to wave a flag saying “Not in our name”.

I’m not going to accuse all the Leave voters of racism. I believe people voted Leave for various reasons – with one thing in common. Unlike general and local elections, where voting in a safe seat can seem like a waste of time, this was a referendum in which every vote counted. So for anyone who felt their needs had been overlooked and their voice unheeded – perhaps for decades – this was a chance, at last, to be heard.

For communities in the Midlands and North of England, where I grew up and lived for more than half my life, London seems like a domineering, greedy and thoughtless older sibbling. The bankers, politicians and media people who amass there seem only to look inwards, barely noticing the lives of people in the rest of the country. And yet the decisions they make have enormous effects on everyone.

We didn’t crash the banks and the economy in 2007-08, but we’re the ones suffering austerity cuts in childrens’ centres, libraries and the NHS.

We didn’t vote to go to war against Iraq – in fact in 2003 over a million of us marched against it – but the war went ahead, killing untold numbers and creating millions of refugees, who are now desperately scouring the earth for safe homes.

We didn’t choose to close mines, shipyards and steelworks; we didn’t cover up police actions at Hillsborough or Orgreave; we don’t hide money from the taxman in offshore accounts; we don’t claim duck houses on expense accounts; we don’t hack phones.

As much as a verdict on the EU, June 23rd was a howl of anger against the outrageous abuses of power perpetrated over the last 30 years by those that have through privilege or ambition acquired it.

All the main political parties – including Labour – are guilty of being so focused on their tit-for-tat rivalry for power that they’ve carelessly ignored everyone outside their bubble in the way an older sibbling thinks their little sister is irrelevant. And a few shameless politicians have whipped up fear to serve their own ambitions.

My hope is that out of this creative destruction emerges a more consensual politics, one in which it will be impossible for a government elected by only 24% of the people to impose its will on the rest. Instead of winner-takes-all, a politics in which it is impossible to govern without listening and responding to all the people – not just those who own newspapers.

And what’s all this got to do with yoga? Perhaps nothing. But perhaps something.

Yoga – as a philosophy, not just a set of exercises – actually means union. The tools of yoga – the postures, breathing, chanting, meditation – are ways of peeling away the illusion that we are all separate from each other and the planet.

It’s very hard to treat someone badly if you genuinely feel a connection with them. Which is why people of quite harsh politics can be extraordinarily generous and kind to an individual in need.

Being a yogi doesn’t necessarily mean you voted Remain. And it doesn’t automatically mean your politics are progressive. But now that all the cards are up in the air and no one knows where they will land, we will need more than ever some of the benefits yoga can bring: calm, clarity of thought, and kindness towards ourselves and others.

I turn 50 tomorrow. I can’t quite believe it. I feel more like 15: still a bit nervous when I meet new people, uncomfortable with figures of authority, curious about the world, full of awe for its beauty, and longing for connection with my fellow human beings.

But I have to face it; I am now in my autumn years. The high energy and excitability of youth has gone; the decade or two of focused intent on work, marriage and children is passing and I am entering a new phase.

Like autumn, it’s a time for drawing in the fruits of earlier efforts, for consolidating and building up stores for leaner times ahead.

I’m old enough now to realise how precious life is; through the death of parents and a few contemporaries, I’ve had a glimpse of what the end of life can be like. There is a non-negotiability about the body’s own story. Whatever we tell ourselves with our sometimes delusional thoughts, the body doesn’t lie.  It is a record of all we’ve done and experienced and as it ages it is less forgiving of our mistakes.

And once the body is gone, the loss of its physical presence is absolute. At this age, we know we’re not indestructable.

And so it’s a time for self-care. I’m unapologetic about needing sleep at night – and times of rest in the day. I’ve become better at tuning in to the natural rhythms of the day. When I was younger I would plough on with a project I was working on until it was done – whatever the time of day or night.

Now I try to honour my body’s wisdom: I’m most productive and driven in the morning (if I’ve had enough sleep), but there’s a little dip mid-morning and big dip mid-afternoon. If I respect this with a rest – or even better 20 minutes of restorative yoga – then I can keep functioning into the evening, by which time things need to calm down and be approached more slowly and thoughtfully, taking time to absorb and enjoy.

There’s a rhythm in the calendar as well. This year I took the whole of August off from teaching yoga. When I came back – after a month of rest, self-practice and study – I was a better teacher: more energised, focused and with more to give. Whatever our job or role in life, at 50 we have to acknowledge we can’t keep giving without regularly nuturing ourselves. It’s essential we replenish our own resources – physically, emotionally and spiritually, for me through connection with nature.

The natural cycles of the year have plenty of opportunities for taking stock, adjusting direction and setting forth, and autumn is one of them. As Pullitzer prize-winning author Wallace Stegner puts it:

“Another Fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.” (Angle of Repose, 1971)

It can be a time for pruning; for cutting out stuff I don’t need anymore. In the autumn of my life I’m less willing to make compromises on important things – and I’m a little more confident in trusting my judgement on what the important things really are.

I know it’s not “stuff”. I’m exasperated by my children’s gullible acceptance of whatever the profit-seekers tell them is the new must-have gadget. And then I remember what I was like at that age: desperate for a pair of high wedge shoes and for our family to get a colour TV.

I know also that the rights and privileges I’ve enjoyed as a woman born in the late 20th century were hard-won and easily lost. I regret not having done more to stand up to sexism and other expressions of power concentrated in the hands of the greedy few.

I thought working hard and succeeding in my own right were enough and I happily accepted the opportunities in education and work that my older sisters, aunties and grandmothers had carved out for me. It was only when I had children I hit the wall of intransigence that is society’s view that men play only a secondary role in child-rearing.

Neither did I pay attention to the way sexual objectification of young women – that I had experienced, of course, at times – was getting much, much worse in the era of instant internet access to the abusive, violent end of pornography.

I also took for granted the benefits of the social contract our parents and grandparents had forged after the Second World War. It never occured to me that it would one day be necessary to protest or demonstrate to protect council housing, the welfare state and the BBC.

Standing up to Thatcher was part of my youth’s culture in the 1980s, but those of us in work in the 1990s and 2000s happily enjoyed our supposed “consumer power” – ignoring the implicit deal that this is a power only available to those with money to spend. And the more money, the more power. Meanwhile, the checks and counterbalances to extreme concentrations of that power were being dismantled all around us.

So these autumn years are a time of renewed political vigour for me. In the last year I got off the fence, joined the Green Party and have started trying to bring together other people in my neighbourhood over issues that affect us. At the moment we’re campaiging to make safer the hideous A23 that carves a polluting and deadly division through the heart of our community in Streatham.

The autumn years can be a time of great creative as well as political flourishing. I’m inspired by authors who made their debuts in their 50s: George Elliot’s Adam Bede was published when she was 50, Alex Haley’s Roots when he was 55, Sue Monk Kidd’s  The Secret Life of Bees, when she was 54 and Annie Proulx’s Postcards when she was 57.

I haven’t yet got the space in my life for this kind of intense creative effort; having had children relatively late, I’m only just encountering the hard mill of parenting adolescents and they will be my main focus for a few more years yet.

But I’m enjoying the perspective from this mountain-top of 50 – able to see back down the slopes I’ve climbed, the possibly rocky path ahead, but also the spectacular view from here. And I’m making notes.