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?

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.

These last few days have been filled with lazy hours sunbathing, barbecue smells – and waiting for a decision from the government. Will lockdown continue or start to be lifted?  Will health or wealth win the national argument? Sunday, it is forecast the weather will change and Britain will be plunged into Arctic cold, and the Prime Minister will address the nation with the answer.

With as many Britons killed by Covid-19 as by the Blitz – more than 31,000 deaths, the highest number in Europe, the voices urging restraint for the sake of saving lives are full of dread at the consequences of lifting restrictions too quickly. But, in much of the rabble-rousing press at least, louder voices are demanding liberation.

We’re all bored and tired of lockdown. In our house I’ve given up trying to persuade anyone to get up or go to bed at anything resembling normal hours. It’s like trying to control a tide of why-bother? My enthusiasm for cooking and baking has waned, not helped by both the bread-maker and food processor packing up.

Outside, there seem to be more cars on the roads; the high road is busy with shoppers and the local parks crammed, police saying they are losing the battle to stop people sitting around in the sunshine. With contradictory messages coming from press and official briefings, and the government itself signaling a change in policy is coming, the social cohesion around the simple message of ‘stay home’ is already unravelling.

A survey of 19-24-year-olds found a quarter of young women and half of young men had already broken lockdown rules to go out and meet friends. At yesterday’s supposedly socially distanced street party to celebrate VE Day, a neighbour came up to me and shook my hand. I was too shocked – and a little too drunk – to resist.

The loudest voices for liberation from lockdown are, of course, the businesses most affected, such as bars and hotels. I understand only too well the economic impact of a lengthy lockdown. My own yoga business needs at least clarity. All my face-to-face teaching stopped two months ago. I’ve already cancelled one retreat this year and have refunded my clients, but I am out of pocket, still waiting for a refund from the venue I’d booked. I have three more retreats planned this year – with thousands of pounds spent on venue deposits, that I can’t be sure of getting back. If yoga retreats are ruled out for the rest of this year, I will make a loss – even with the new income stream I’ve created from teaching yoga online.

But I don’t want lockdown lifted yet. It’s too soon and it will result in more deaths. Fellow yoga teacher Mahesh Dhokia, owner of Maitri Natural Health Centre on Streatham High Road, was among those who died of Covid-19 this week. This virus is still highly infectious; there is still no vaccine or cure; it still kills people before their time.

If in Sunday’s statement to the nation, the Prime Minister announces any kind of relaxing of the guidelines, it doesn’t mean we won’t get Coronavirus – it just means there’s more space now available for us in intensive care when we do get it.

Toilet rolls are back in our local Sainsbury’s – but there are no baking goods. Husband went out hunting and gathering this morning with a list that included strong white flour, plain flour, sugar and baking powder, but he came back empty-handed. How foolish was I to think I was was the only one planning to bake my way through lockdown?

I’d stocked up on yeast back in the autumn when the only catastrophe we thought was heading our way was a no-deal Brexit. Now I realise I’d under-estimated flour and over-estimated the ‘cleverness’ of my own preparations.

It turns out there’s currently no shortage of bread locally, so there isn’t any real need for me to be turning out daily loaves. But I’m doing it anyway. Today I got quite ambitious and attempted hot-cross buns, which tasted fine, but failed to rise.

Why this sudden need to bake? Jamie Oliver was at it on the telly yesterday in a show produced hastily for the current crisis: Keep Cooking and Carry On. He was doing the whole thing properly, kneading and proving, whereas I got the electric bread-maker off a dusty shelf and have been letting the machine do the hard work. Even so, there is something very satisfying, motherly even, about making bread for my brood.

Getting back to an old way of providing sustenance seems to be a suitable response to current situation. I’m aware that it’s a psychological rather than a practical repsonse. If we are honest, the most tangible effect of lockdown on our family so far is the loss of the ability to pop out whenever we feel like it.

And yet the sense that Coronavirus poses some kind of existential threat to individuals and to the economy, and possibly society, as we know it provokes a protective response that comes out as a desire to be more self-reliant: it doesn’t matter if the shelves are empty of sourdough if I can bake my own.

It’s also coming out as a desire to grow food. If the supermarket salad aisle is empty, no matter; I can grow my own. So the spinach seeds I sowed under glass last autumn are now potted up in compost from our garden bin; and I’m discussing with friends in the local plastic-free Streatham group how best to grow veg from seeds when the garden centres are shut. (Answer: harvest seeds from the tomatoes and squash you buy from the shops and germinate them in egg cartons.)

And then it struck me; I’m modelling my response to the lockdown on the 1970s sitcom  The Good Life. Essential Saturday night viewing in Britain between 1975 and 1978, Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal played Tom and Barbara Good, rejecting the rat race for self-sufficiency in the suburbs. I’m quite at home in tatty gardening shorts, so put in your orders now for home-brewed rhubarb wine.

Today’s hot topic is the protocols of social distancing. How do we organise ourselves on the occasions we need to leave the house to get to the places we need to get to without breathing droplets of coronavirus all over our fellow man?

We’ve not done this before. We don’t know the rules. It’s not like queuing for a bus or driving on the left (or right depending on which country you’re in); there isn’t a set of tried and tested habits to conform to for the greater good.

But today I’ve noticed people attempting to create some protocols. The Tesco’s local in Streatham has a one-in-one-out policy and warning tape at 2-metre intervals along the pavement outside indicating where people should stand while queuing.

The deputy head of a local primary school posted on Facebook a suggestion that pedestrians always walk on pavements on the left-hand side of the road, so as to avoid the tricky negotiations of on-coming people in a narrow space.

At congested Brockwell Park in south London, community-minded locals posted laminated signs asking runners to move onto the grass so that people with less mobility and parents with buggies could take priority on the paths; this hasn’t been wholly popular with gym bunnies now flocking to open spaces and within less than 24 hours, the signs have been taken down.

The fear among south Londoners is that if we fail to work this out and people continue to move around in close proximity to one another, the councils will close the parks – as they already have done in other parts of London.

Our family headed out to more spacious Mitcham Common for our dog walk today, where it was much easier to stay apart from fellow walkers. Whether word will spread and a bow-wave of Londoners will sweep out through the suburbs as their local parks get increasingly crowded remains to be seen.

The late afternoon sun was casting long shadows on the common; geese and swans on the lake squawked arrogantly at our dog when she got too close; gorse and blossoms splashed colour against a clear sky; if it weren’t for the chill in the air, it might have felt quite summery.

The highlight of the journey home was scoring a packet of loo roll in our local Sainsbury’s – the rumour on our street’s WhatsApp group was to ask staff at the check-out and they’d find some ‘from the back’.

Brixton author Tamsin Grey first thought of becoming a writer when she was just seven, but buried the idea in her 20s and 30s considering it, ‘deeply embarrassing and big-headed’ to think she might be able to write something other people would want to read.

It was only in her 40s, with an established civil service career as a speech-writer, that she took the risk of going for it. And it was possibly yoga that gave her the courage to try. (For a while she taught a regular yoga class at Brockwell Lido.) “The yoga philosophy of dharma – or life’s purpose – set me on the journey of writing my first book,” says Tamsin. “I became obsessed with the fact I needed to do it before I died or I would regret it on my deathbed.”

That book – She’s Not There – was published to critical aclaim by Harper Collins in April.  Ian McEwan describes it as ‘a debut with a sure touch’; Lisa Jewell calls it “mesmerisingly good’.

It’s a deeply moving page-turner told from the point of view of nine-year-old Jonah, who wakes up one Monday morning to find his mum has disappeared. Over the course of a week he and his younger brother try to puzzle out what has happened to her – and whether or not she is going to come back – while at the same time keeping up the pretence to neighbours, teachers and friends, that nothing has happened and all is well.

We, the readers, want to know what has led to the boys’ precarious situation – and what will become of them. The stakes are high as the brothers fear being taken into care.

Set in Tamsin’s own neighbourhood on the Loughborough Junction side of Brixton, the boys (who are the same ages her own sons were when she started writing the novel) live in a ‘slightly messier version’ of her own house. She drew on her sons’ banter and experiences at school, and on recognisable local characters, like ‘Raggedy Man’,  a homeless man that frequents her street.

“They were springboards for my imagination and a lot of creative licence,” she explains. “I started with the here and now and then brought in other bits of south London like Clapham and Crystal Palace and mashed them up together.”

Tamsin’s heart is definitely in the grittier parts of south London.

“The things I relish about my area are its cultural and economic diversity. It would be better if the huge gap between rich and poor didn’t exist, but given that we are in the world we are in, mixed neighbourhoods are better than ghettos enabling the rich to be ignorant of the poverty.”

But she is all too aware that south London is changing and not everyone is benefiting.

“My fear is that even here will become one of those bubbles of privilege and that people who have lived here for years and years and have contributed to the richness of the community end up getting  pushed out.”

In the book, the community appears to be failing the young brothers as they teeter on the brink of loss. This is quite different, Tamsin hopes, to the strong community she knows locally.  “It’s the kind of place where my kids are safe to go and play in the park and you can knock on a neighbour’s door if you forget your keys,” she says.

There is a spate of Brixton-set books out this year: The Lido by Libby Page and due soon Hold by Michael Donker. Tamsin Grey’s beautiful, funny and unsettling She’s Not There is a must-read, interweaving Jonah’s memories and dreams with nonsense rhymes his mother read to him as he tries to put together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that explain her disappearance.

Buy She’s Not There online here and contribute to your local bookshop.

At St Margaret’s Church in Streatham Hill, I’ve been teaching yoga by candlight each Monday evening over the last couple of months. And I’ve been suprised at how special the sessions have felt in the big space.

Early in the evening, warm light floods in through the large stained-glass west window. As the sun sets and the space darkens the flickering light of candles creates an intimate atmosphere.

Looking up, hundreds of feet above, is a magnificent vaulted roof, illuminated by uplighters. It’s possible, while lying in savassana on the mat, or turning the head to look up in triangle pose, to lose oneself for a few moments in the space above.

The intention of yoga – to feel a union between our small individual selves and the big oneness of everything – seems to be within closer reach in the church.

I think it’s about architecture – but only partly. Church builders have known for a thousand years that part of their job is to inspire awe. The size, the height, the colour of brick and stone, the playing with light and dark at the same time bring us together and lift us upward.

But it’s also about something that’s created when people come together over and again for some special time.

Since St Margaret’s was built to serve the 900 residents of the late Victorian estate it sits in, people have come together here to marry, christen their children, bury their loved ones. And for many years they came together here each Sunday to mark a break from the demands of work and family and to spend time together as a community in song, prayer and worship.

It’s as if those repeated comings together, repeated moments of quiet reflection, joyful song,  and mournful remembrance have left echoes or imprints that are still tangible whenever we’re there in the space.

St Margaret’s closed as a parish church in 2014, but it’s still consecrated and a Ghanaian church currently congregates there each Sunday; in the longer term it has plans to become a base for a resident Christian community serving the local neighboorhood in a wealth of ways: with a foodbank, bakery, nursery and much more.

Some Christian churches aren’t welcoming of yoga with its Indian roots that bring with them traces of other spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Hindusim. So I’m thankful that Fr Gareth sees no contradiction in St Margaret’s being used each Monday night for people to take time away from their busy days, to rest, to be at home in their bodies, and to listen to the silence.

I don’t believe yoga is a replacement for the role faith once played more prominently in the life of our communities. But it shares some things in common, not least the permission it gives us to stop doing all the stuff that fills our days and for an hour or so each week just to be – and more fully appreciate the gift of being alive.

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.

The blossoms of Streatham Hill are so brilliant. Some are delicate and subtle, others frilly, lacy, blousey. I’ve been getting a cricked neck from taking pictures of them on my daily walks to and from school this week.

A.E. Housman

The Loveliest of Trees:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.