Here inside, I am losing it. I watched Carry on Screaming and enjoyed it unreservedly. My right arm seems to have stopped working, making it difficult to do Nazi salutes at the television whenever a government minister comes on. And I found myself asking a pigeon, sitting on the fence outside the kitchen window, how it was getting on in the current situation. And then answering my own question about the pigeon’s welfare myself, in a stupid Eric Idle accent, presumably the supposed voice of the pigeon, as if it were talking to me. “I’m very well thank you Stewart and as a full-time denizen of the sky I am enjoying the improvement in London’s air quality enormously. Funny how you never see baby pigeons, isn’t it?” I shut the back door and went inside to seek solace in teabags and memories.

I am glad I started out as the multiple-award-winning standup I am today on what was then the “alternative” comedy circuit, at the tail-end of the 80s, back before the bills became homogenised into our modern, TV-friendly fare. And when you were still allowed to go outside. “Remember white dog shit? Remember any dog shit at all? Remember colours? Things? Remember when each day was different to the last? The unexpected smell of farts that weren’t your own? What was that all about?”

There is much that modern comedians have noticed, it seems, and a large amount of it is common to all our experience. Or at least it was, before your experience became either being inside or struggling selflessly in underequipped hospitals for a government that appears to have abandoned you. “Is it really necessary to dissolve stock cubes or can you just chew them up as a snack? Have you ever noticed, right, that if you close your eyes and grit your teeth you can actually hear time passing in slow, throbbing waves? And have you ever noticed, right, that when you’ve been forced to work a Covid ward without any protection, if you threaten to tell anyone they say they’ll sack you? Thank you and goodnight! I’m here indefinitely!! Try the stock cubes!!!”

In the old comedy circuit days of the late 80s, I remember performing at the now demolished Red Rose, which ran out of the function room of a Labour club in Finsbury Park, on a bill with an act that didn’t even make the concession of actually appearing on the stage, its slightly raised platform being too restrictive a space, with its neocolonial lights and patriarchal microphone. Instead, the usual, heady mix of social workers and squatters had to view her in an alcove by the door as they left the venue between sets, subverting the whole idea of where a performance began and ended, questioning the relative status of audience and performer, and causing a problematic blockage in the corridor by the gents.

A naked, middle-aged woman was curled up inside a box, which was mounted on stilts and lined with vaudevillian velvet, and she had invited us to look into it through a little hole. This aperture had a powerful magnifying glass lens on it, meaning that while you saw what was obviously flesh, you could have no idea which part of the anatomy you were actually looking at. It was a great gag, the sort of thing that might have won a Turner prize if it had been presented in a more respectable venue by someone with a degree, the process presumably intending to parody our voyeuristic instincts generally, and the male gaze specifically. Technically, the desire to see the subject was fulfilled, but in such closeup as to render it completely indistinct.

It also strikes me, more than three decades later, as an unexpectedly apposite metaphor for the current situation. For who can claim, viewing the world through the smeared lens of Sky News or the thin slit of their bedroom window, to really know what the fuck is going on out there? Is that Matt Handcock’s face, or a part of a naked person’s armpit seen through a high-powered magnifying glass? Is that Donald Trump, or one of those tiny swollen bugs that lives in eyebrows, feeding on dandruff, and descends to the facemeat only to die? Is this the end of world as we know it, or just harmless dirt that has formed a hardened crust behind a human ear?

I knew the situation on the wards was worse than reported because a relative told me in emails. And I knew about the care home death tolls because another online correspondent has gone back to working in them. And a man whose record I once reviewed has reported to me from a sealed cellar in New York City. I store these particles of information for posterity, to piece into a full picture posthumously.

We squint through our apertures. Along the HS2 route, unobserved contractors baffle birds and fell trees, enabling quicker journeys between currently silent cities for business meetings that will surely be conducted remotely in the post-viral world anyway. In Whitehall, even junior ministers try to dodge the bullet of the daily briefing, a Russian roulette of inevitable humiliation, where the bloke from the LADBible website asks better questions than the castrati-courtesans of the BBC. And Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Johnson emerges from intensive care, thanks Po Ling, and leaves a hollow-socketed skull that hopes to dismantle the monolithic NHS in command instead.

Upstairs, I look out of the skylight periodically. Bin bags disappear on Tuesdays. The cranes by the reservoir rarely revolve. Last week, an Orthodox Jew walked past carrying a mini fire extinguisher. And I thought I saw Miriam Margolyes on the top deck of a bus, eating a Cornetto. But I am not sure.