1: This is the kind of historical inflection point that makes you write even when you fear you have nothing to say. This is my first day of real social distancing. To be less isolated, I will write one tweet a day in a Twitter journal, for future me and future us. #coronajournal

2: A month ago, news that the Australian bushfires are out would have sent me into raptures. Now it's an ice cream at a funeral.

With the borders about to close, it's as if we're waiting to see what we're really like inside. #coronajournal

3: I am obsessed with, and terrified by, numbers of cases and deaths. I am haunted by doomsday scenarios, sorrowful visions, and what-if stories. It is a war of attrition between quantitative and qualitative data. #coronajournal

4: Community transmission. Online open mic. Self-isolation violators. Alert Level 2. Touch deprivation. Just a few of the phrases that would have had no meaning to me two months ago. #coronajournal

5: 'Lock me down! Hard!' I cry to the government, like a frenzied adherent of a rational, evidence-based school of S&M. #coronajournal

6: If all goes well with the lockdown, we'll never know whose lives we saved. We each have an awesome power right now, even those of us who feel most powerless. #coronajournal

7: People are dying at home. By 'home' I mean where I grew up, not where I live. Home is the place where, when people die, you care about it, no matter how long you've been away. #coronajournal

8: Can't decide if the inevitable hundreds of 'How Prince Charles is spending his self-isolation at Balmoral' articles are the best lockdown reading or the worst lockdown reading. #coronajournal

9: Starting to imagine (hallucinate?) everything growing exponentially: our tomatoes, our youngest cat, fear. #coronajournal

10: I picked the right time to sprain my ankle. Random chance telling me to stay home. #coronajournal

11: Stress eating, boredom eating, just-plain-stupid eating. Who even knows anymore? #coronajournal

12: New Zealand's first COVID-19 death. A first cluster of cases in Christchurch. I still feel incredibly safe in the house, and I don't know what I would do if anything happened to change that. What happens if safety doesn't feel safe? #coronajournal

13: Apart from dread of the virus itself, the single biggest threat to my mental health is being exposed to the mendacious, threadbare posturing of low demagogues like Trump and Bolsonaro. Minimise the time you spend thinking about shitweasels, that's my advice. #coronajournal

14: Humanity's collective debt to the pets providing comfort right now can never be repaid. #coronajournal

15: In the midst of all this, #COP26 has been postponed. All countries are being urged to use the delay to 'significantly boost' their 'climate ambition', but I know what I do when there's a long gap between work meetings . . . #coronajournal

16: Old me: I like shaving because it is pleasant to have a smooth face. New me: I like shaving so I can ensure that my mask has a proper seal. #coronajournal

17: Observed: on a bit of spare ground, three men in their fifties standing apart from each other in an equilateral triangle, drinking beers. Maybe you can't easily predict who the lockdown-flouters will be. #coronajournal

18: Fig. 1: Business. Fig. 2: Pleasure. #coronajournal

19: Passed the 1,000 case mark here. Even two weeks ago that figure would have felt terrifyingly large. Now it seems mercifully small. There is no yardstick that remains useful for long. #coronajournal

20: I increasingly see bad-faith arguments for hurrying out of lockdowns. Lockdown measures may provoke unrest among a frustrated populace—I can accept that—but surely that's nothing compared to the unrest that you'd see in a 'freer' but terrified populace. #coronajournal

21: Possibly discovered the most queue-free time to go to the supermarket, and I feel much as an alchemist might have felt upon discovering proof of the existence of phlogiston. #coronajournal

22: Continuing to think about climate change and do XR planning focuses the mind. One pain banishes thoughts of another, in the way that a twisted ankle makes you forget about a headache. #coronajournal

23: I sense that the collective mood is improving. How do I know this? Because on a walk around the neighbourhood today I saw that some children had drawn a cat in chalk and given it a speech bubble reading 'WOOF WOOF'. #coronajournal

24: It would be nice right about now to know which version of Auden's line is true: 'We must love one another or die' or 'We must love one another and die'? #coronajournal

25: I often read Herbert at Easter, and this year it strikes me that 'The Collar' works as a poem about wanting to break quarantine ('I struck the board, and cry'd, "No more; / I will abroad"') but being prevented. #coronajournal

26: Vivid, symbolic dreams are supposedly on the rise. The one I'm having is a variation on the being-naked-in-public dream, but I'm wearing pyjamas and I'm being shunned for being desperately unfashionable, for violating some mysterious, unwritten style edict. #coronajournal

27: Can anything be more nonsensical than insisting that you have 'absolute authority' but that you take 'no responsibility at all' for the use of that authority? #coronajournal

28: This mutant strain of American exceptionalism is the most virulent there has been in living memory, and it will bring sorrow wherever it gets a foothold. #coronajournal

29: The virus is likened to many things: a flood, an army, a nuclear meltdown. I find fire to be the metaphor with the greatest explanatory power. It captures the menace of clusters, like Christchurch's Rosewood cluster: a spark settling in exactly the wrong spot. #coronajournal

30: Jesus, am I the last person to know that http://Leave.EU  panto villain Arron Banks is riding out COVID-19 in New Zealand? Anyway, it is with a heavy heart that I must report that he continues to talk weapons-grade shite on our shores. #coronajournal

31: There are really two CDCs that are at war with each other: the Centers for Disease Control and the Capitalist Death Cult. #coronajournal

32: If you hear someone framing life-saving distancing measures as 'political correctness', bear in mind that that's what they think of consideration for others *all the time*. Other people's life-and-death struggles are just an annoyance to them. #coronajournal

33: Fortunately, on the most important point of all, Level 4 and Level 3 are the same, and I won't have to have The Difficult Conversation yet: explaining to the cats that I've got to spend my days at the office again. #coronajournal

34: The contrast between civic responsibility under lockdown and ergot-brained batshittery is actually just heartbreaking. It may be what stays with me most from this time. #coronajournal

35: Spoke to one of my oldest friends today, and he reported that there have 'only' been about 200 deaths in his city. I can understand how that is a reasonable sentence, and yet . . . #coronajournal

36: Some people miss takeaways. Some people miss haircuts. And some people miss the office printer. #coronajournal

37: Went on to the deserted campus yesterday (the pharmacy is the lone open outpost and I needed a repeat) and the unraked leaves luxuriating against walls and stairs gave the place the aspect of a tranquil hibernaculum. #coronajournal

38: Ran into a friend, another poet, today on my state-mandated walk, and as we talked (across several metres of grass) we were joined by an astonishingly white cat, like a wizard's familiar. #coronajournal

39: Pandemic stress → undisciplined lockdown eating → urge to take up running again → resurfacing of old knee niggle → reminder of ageing, mortality. The circle of life. #coronajournal

40: Finally made it to the Making Sourdough Stage of lockdown. #coronajournal

41: Trust seems to be like a language: it can be taught, but it's harder if you don't learn it young, and it helps if everyone around you is doing it. #coronajournal

42: No, I'm not reading any first-fast-food-in-a-month! stories. Media, don't carry water for an industry whose business model requires labour exploitation, environmental destruction, and industrial slaughter. #coronajournal

43: The more I hear about 'virtual tourism', the more I'm convinced it's like the obsession with recreating meat dishes for vegans: it might have its charms, but it won't be 'tourism'. (And I say this as a vegan.) #coronajournal

44: Bolsonaro saying 'So what?' when asked by journalists about Brazil's highest death toll yet is nearly breaking me. I mean, I know there's no bottom, but I didn't realise that meant we'd be in absolute freefall. #coronajournal

45: No longer completely estranged from the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea. #coronajournal

46: As the new case numbers seem to get smaller every day (two today), it's like we're counting down to a Big, Meaningful Zero, at which point we will all burst out singing some yet-to-be-written song of thanksgiving. #coronajournal

47: Wow. For the first time since 16 March, no new cases in New Zealand. I know jinxes aren't real, but all the same I'm going to end my comments here. #coronajournal

48: Crises bring out the best and worst of organisations. This example is both: being told to turn up for a flu jab at 9.29, exactly, in the morning. #coronajournal

49: I'm actually finding that the sheer quantity of virus-related disinformation online is now a significant aspect of digital weather, like a kind of morbid humidity or something. #coronajournal

50: In a meeting I have uttered the words 'That's a me problem, not a Zoom problem' about my levels of energy and creativity, so obviously I am not in any way burning out or getting Zoom fatigue. #coronajournal

51: Watching the US from this distance: seeing a teacup falling from a refreshments trolley on a train approaching a fault on the line somewhere on the surface of a planet drifting into a black hole. Nesting disasters. #coronajournal

52: The Botanic Gardens: because you can't hug your mates, but you can hug a redwood (which I recommend generally, not just in the Plague Times). #coronajournal

53: If we're coming out of Level 3, at least I can be proud of myself for having got through three of the approximately thirty books I fondly imagined I would read during lockdown. #coronajournal

(To be fair, I did read all of Twitter and every alarming news story in English.)