As I write, it is late April. Spring this year is warm, anxious, sunny and uncertain. It is unusually quiet in our village. The constant ebb and flow of commuter traffic has stopped: it has been like this for weeks since the lockdown. There is much less pollution, the skies are bluer than normal. There is a path near our small, terraced house that goes down to an old wood covered in a sea of bluebells. We are allowed one walk outside a day, not to be taken near others. This path, like all others now, is measured strictly in units of two metres. But the path is rarely busy, so I can follow it down to the wood.

Standing in this sea of blue, it is hard not to reflect on the duality of nature, on its ability to be both deadly and sublime. Today the death toll from COVID-19 is almost 800. I feel powerless, calm, vulnerable. In a week or two, this wood will have changed, the blue will be gone. But nothing will have changed. The crisis will not have passed. We will still be confined and isolated. The feeling that each next step will be taken in an ocean of uncertainty will remain.

Not all crises cause change. About 17 years ago, I survived a category four hurricane. Hurricanes of this magnitude are extremely dangerous. We were living in Bermuda at the time and had two very young children. The islands took a direct hit. Bermuda is tiny, the remains of a long-extinct volcano, isolated in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean about 600 miles from the nearest landmass and with only a fragile coral reef for protection. Our children were thankfully too young to understand what nature was about to unleash. The emergency radio station went dead two hours into the storm and there was no contact with the outside world. The night that followed was terrifying. I remember most stepping outside the morning after the hurricane passed. It was warm, sunny and eerily calm. We would have no power or water for a month.