It was August 2020 and I was back in my family home in Sydney. Prior to that I’d been living in Manchester, doing my PhD in autobiographical women’s literary theory. I am aware that my chosen area of focus could be read as a hubristic exercise in solipsism (and maybe it is), but mostly I just wanted to be paid to read books by women for three years, so sue me.
Manchester is a cold, dark, wonderful place, but the pandemic made it hell for me. I didn’t have a support network, there was no vaccine in sight, the university was closed and I was sharing a small home with a hypochondriac. It feels like “don’t move in with a hypochondriac during a global pandemic” is part of a joke setup but, unfortunately, that joke was my life. So I packed my bags, got on a few planes to Sydney, and did the two weeks of mandatory quarantine in a government-commandeered hotel. I asked my friend who once spent a few years in jail how he recommended I pass the time. He told me to be unconscious as much as possible, so mostly I just drank wine and took sleeping pills, occasionally checking in on the progress of the building site I could see from my window. Eventually, 14 days of confinement passed and then there I was, back in the southern hemisphere, living in the country I had chosen to leave.
