In any normal week, Sunday morning finds me leaping upstairs after breakfast, taking the steps two at a time, my twin titanium hips working overtime to get me seated in front of the computer with not a moment wasted, as I struggle to keep the ideas that are bouncing around my head from bubbling over before I can capture them on the screen.

Not this week. This week I have taken pains to put off the moment when I flip open the laptop, open a new file in Word, and start to write my post. I lingered in shul after the morning service today. Once I got back home, I found various ways to delay starting to dice the fruit for our breakfast, even emptying the dishwasher, taking care to count the various types of cutlery, to ensure that nothing had gone missing.

After breakfast, I disappeared upstairs to do some vital filing until it was time for us to leave for the trip I had insisted we take today to IKEA. Because we were looking for items for ourselves and also for Esther and Ma’ayan, this involved over two complete circuits of the store, and then, of course, it made no sense not to stay for lunch. As soon as we arrived home, I simply had to assemble the standard lamps we had bought for the salon.

The result of all this elaborate avoidance strategy is that it is now gone 7 on Sunday evening, and I am only now starting to write.

Why, you may be asking, this unaccustomed reluctance? I could pretend that it is purely out of consideration for you, because this will, I’m afraid, not be the usual jaunty laugh-a-minute cheerful-chappie piece, but something rather bleaker. The fact is that I’m not looking forward to writing it any more than I’m looking forward to you reading it.

I feel that over the past week this bloody pandemic has caught up with me. Let me make it clear, quickly, that neither Bernice nor I nor any of the family have caught Covid, in any of its Greek alphabet strains. No, it’s just that everywhere I look there are Covid aggravations, and it’s really getting me down.

I can actually put my finger on one specific straw that broke this camel’s back. Last Thursday, we received an email from TAP. Now, when the Portuguese airline writes to me out of the blue, it is seldom in order to tell me that I have won this month’s raffle, or that Bernice and I have been upgraded to business class. As I glanced through the email, my eye was caught by the subject – Cancelamento devido a nova variante do CoronaVírus. Even your Portuguese must be good enough to get the gist of that. The text of the message began: Operação Suspensa: Lamentamos informar que… You surely get the picture.

So, our flight from Tel Aviv to Lisbon on January 16 has been cancelled. The good news is that we are eligible for a voucher to the value of 110% of what we paid, or a full refund. The bad news is that the email makes no mention of the status of our return flight from Lisbon on February 13.

Since receiving the email, I have spent hours on the phone, trying to speak to TAP. On one occasion, I even got through to a rep; however, when he put me on hold, while he was retrieving the details of our booking, TAP’s system bounced me to their automated customer survey, asking me how satisfied I was with the way my problem had been resolved. (On a scale of 1 to 5. When are they going to invent a phone keyboard with negative numbers?) From there, I was, of course, disconnected. On Saturday and Sunday, they do no work at all (hands up if you sang that line with me), so tomorrow (as I write), Monday, will find me wasting the day trying to establish whether all flights out have been cancelled, or we can reschedule, and whether we are entitled to a full refund for the return flight that may, now, be of no use to us.

In today’s news, we learnt that Portugal is on an extended list of countries that Israel is contemplating declaring to be red, and also that the Israeli government is considering closing the airport completely for a week or two.

We would probably be a lot more devil-may-care about flying out, and risking being stranded in Portugal, were it not for the fact that Esther is due to give birth in March, and we (particularly, but not exclusively, the Bernice parts of we) feel that we must be sure of being in Israel to offer help and support and, b’ezrat Hashem, to shep nachus (something that can only properly be done in Yiddish, of course).

So here we are, faced with the task of attempting to make a decision when we are not in possession of any of the relevant facts that might inform such a decision.

Please don’t think that this is just a moan about poor little me, or even poor little us. I’d like to crave your indulgence while I extrapolate. Our problem, writ large, is the problem faced by Naftali Bennett and his corona cabinet, by Boris Johnson, and, indeed, by every world leader. They, like us, are all being asked to decide on the best course of action when nobody honestly knows enough about the situation we find ourselves in.

For Bernice and myself, dithering for a few days, or even a week or two, is very draining, and is already making us very tense, but at least the eyes of the nation are not upon us. For our elected leaders, the situation is very much more fraught. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that for a long time we have been led to believe that modern science provides us with the tools that enable us to make scientifically sound decisions in all fields. Suddenly confronted with the clear fact that it ain’t necessarily so (a song for every occasion), we feel at best cast adrift, at worse betrayed. (A friend pointed out to me over dinner on shabbat that while this is true for part of the population, there is another part that rejects entirely the validity of all science. This certainly doesn’t help the situation.)

Initially, way back in what now almost seem like the halcyon days of early-to-mid 2020, the zigzagging of governments and the tension between politicians and scientists could sometimes raise a laugh, or at least a wry smile. But now? Lately, I look around me, and, indeed, inside me, and see only frustration, frayed tempers, intolerance, embittered skepticism. I listen to radio interviewers not attempting to conceal their anger or contempt for civil servants outlining plans currently being implemented; I see friends falling out over restrictions; I hear and read inflammatory language from those on both sides, on all sides, of the debate about how to handle the crisis, even about whether there is a crisis.

We are told that, in many cases, the long-term effects of Covid may be worse than the symptoms experienced when the virus infects an individual. I am genuinely afraid that the social effects of long Covid may be equally serious. As we approach the end of Year 2 with no end in sight, I fear for the entire fabric of society.

So, perhaps, making our way to Portugal and living off the grid in a tepee is the best thing we can do. It certainly looks nice and cosy.