Yet again the world has been rattled and shaken, the pieces left to fall where they may. As I wait for the dust to settle and the dark to ease after solstice, I cling to the little things.

The fact that the football field one block over has been flooded with water to create a skating rink, and the boy’s joy of what is only his second winter of skating. The scrape of the blades against the ice (such a familiar sound), the cold fingers, eating cinnamon buns and tangerines, or maybe sausages from a thermos, sitting on the snow on the edge of the rink, before putting on gloves again – such cold fingers! – and heading back out on the ice.

I tell myself I need to get my own skates sharpened before I put them on and join the boy. I vividly imagine the shaky feeling in my ankles and the joy of becoming more and more steady as I go (fifteen years since I last skated).

We’re baking gingerbread cookies in preparation for Christmas, a couple of dinosaurs having joined our family of cookie cutters since last year. The smell spreads through the apartment as it always does, and the boy wants another, as he always does.

All the while omicron ghosts around at the back of my mind. Alpha and Delta at least were relatively familiar words from other contexts, but Omicron?! I googled it just now, and turns out it means quite simply o-micron, that is, ‘small o’. Somehow this prosaic explanation makes it, irrationally, seem slightly less scarily unknowable.

‘Little o’ as opposed to Omega – o-mega, or ‘big o’, the final letter in the Greek alphabet. I hope and pray we never get to meet the Omega version of Covid.

~All the best from Jenny G.