What I’m really watching is nothing. What I’m really doing is nothing. I watch the clock, reply to messages, cook myself another meal and run to put the news on 12 minutes past the hour, to find it’s already on to The Archers. I go for the shortest run I’ve ever done, fretting and puffing. I head to another room to see if I will be able to write better there, and check Twitter instead of working. I apply for universal credit online, stumble at the first technological hurdle and give up. I spend some time thinking about a friend’s father who died last week, whom I never met. Someone from the dating apps asks me how I’m getting on; he’s been furloughed and is sitting in his mum’s garden, reading Jon McGregor’s novel Reservoir 13. I have a shower, have a cry. I watch a clip I have been sent, of a popular song whose words have been changed to coronavirus terminology. I write a pitch to an editor. I do 30 minutes of the cryptic crossword with my mother, who is putting on a brave face for me, four weeks into her own lockdown away from her home. I sit on my windowsill to catch the last of the sun with a bowl of tea or a glass of wine, then do the briefest lifting exercises I’ve ever done, fretting and wheezing. I wave to a neighbour. I soak some dried beans. By now it’s evening, and friends who have been – somehow, by character or obligation – working, message me to see if I want to group-watch a film. We WhatsApp our way through a rancid Keanu Reeves movie with a nu-metal aesthetic, and I make myself a tea infusion before bed.

I’m lonely and I am worried. What I am watching, when I watch things, is University Challenge, RuPaul’s Drag Race, the news and cookery shows – Ready Steady Cook, MasterChef, Floyd on France. I am a film critic, but films haven’t been doing it for me lately. I can’t focus on them for very long. Perhaps their fictions seem like too much of a lie at the moment. My whole life I have loved cinema – so the inability to sustain an interest in films is an additional sorrow for me. I can manage to watch a lighthearted romp: the films I have most enjoyed during lockdown include The Legend of Zorro, RoboCop, The Terminator and Dangerous Liaisons, all of them with groups of friends. Even while texting with them I’m left with a crushing feeling of flatness. As for more serious films, I’ve managed to watch two by Jean-Pierre Melville (for work), a French documentary (for work) and 23 minutes of Seven Samurai (for pleasure).

I miss the cinema. I miss taking myself off to the movies on the spur of the moment; getting a ticket, entering the room and finding my seat. I miss the trailers and the ads, the movie-hall carpets, the smell of popcorn. I even miss my old annoyance at elderly couples shout-whispering plot points to one another.

I always watched films at home, too, but now I am catching mere dribs and drabs – mostly drabs – of lightweight TV and cooking programmes, things I can easily jump in and out of. I chide myself for feeling so disconsolate: things could be so much worse! Nobody I know directly is suffering. My children are oblivious and content. Outside my window, the tree that was in blossom last week has shed its petals in yesterday’s breeze and coated all of the cars in shimmering pink. Yet I feel the weight of what is going on around us. I can’t stop thinking of the death toll. I fret about my younger child’s ability to socialise once this is over, after weeks spent only with family. I worry about my parents and grandmother.

What has been missing from my viewing is any sense of joy or rapture – the idea of losing myself so completely in a film that I forget my own concerns, carried away by the thrill of it all. I think back to the last films that made my spirits soar like that: my second viewing of Parasite, marvelling at the sequence where the Kims return to their underworld of penury, back to their basement flat awash in muck; or Portrait of a Lady on Fire, whose subversively warm and intimate abortion scene made me feel a swell of pure love. Those feelings are gone now – but perhaps I’m not meant to be feeling them right now. Perhaps I just have to sit this out, wait for the passing of this misery before greeting films once more like so many other distant friends.