There was a point in art at which the work ceased to speak for itself.

Before then - you paint something, case closed. You go back to your studio, and your Mona Lisa is hung above the cot in the del Giocondo's second bedroom.

After then - you declare yourself an artist, prove it with an exhibition,and forever after, journalists want to know what you think about Brexit.

But can you get them to look at the pictures?

I was thinking about that as I sat outside with a mug of tea first thing. The World was (is) still tied up to Queen's Wharf, where it's been since the lockdown started, and red-and-white tugs were towing, very slowly, a big grey naval vessel across the view.

I came inside and turned on the radio. A Senior Arts Administrator, didn't catch his name, was talking about saving Theatre. Not any particular theatre, you understand, but Theatre. Not some travelling band of thespians who'd run out of greasepaint, but - yeah.

Theatre is in trouble, apparently. And this bloke is going to save it - or, from the gloomy way he was talking, fail to save it and blame the government.

I know that there are people out there writing plays. I know that there are people staging plays.

Just as I know that there are people out there painting pictures, writing novels and poetry, drawing and writing graphic novels, making art generally. Making films.

I don't know what any of them think about Brexit, and if I had the chance, I probably wouldn't bother to ask them how they feel about being rescued, or not, by a Senior Arts Administrator.

I'd ask to see their work, though.

What I really think is, the virus will come back to the UK with a vengeance around September/October.

We'll all learn hard lessons about the (un)wisdom of coming out of lockdown because The Economy needs us.

We won't realise the worst of what's happening until November, when the reporting catches up with the reality. Then there'll be a political bloodbath.

Central  government paid us to go out to lunch, et cetera, urged us back to work, and insisted that we send our children back to school - just in time for the virus to meet them, and their teachers, and their parents, at the school gates. Children don't mean to spread viruses, but in the language we've all learned, they're a vector.

Local lockdowns will shift the balance of power from central to local government. Roads will likely be closed to all but essential traffic. We'll all be told to stay at home, and The Economy will mutate into an inefficient system for distributing limited welfare.

Out of necessity, we'll build a new normal.

In the more extreme version of this scenario, Cornwall (for example) develops its own currency based on a barter system, and closes its coastal waters to fishing vessels from elsewhere. To protect stocks, only licensed Cornish fishing vessels can use their engines while fishing.

Cities empty. The population continues to fall. Farms and smallholdings across the patchwork of local-authority fiefdoms recruit migrant ex-Heads of Structured Finance (EMEA) and Global Risk Management Professionals to help with their seasonal picking.

Banks, food-banks and supermarkets merge. Regional police authorities and other such bodies come under local-government control. Parks and green spaces are dug up and planted with vegetables.

By next Spring, we're all outside, working on our gardens and allotments, toughened by the Winter, browned by the sun, fitter than we've ever been, and immune to everything our immediate local area can throw at us.

We don't travel. There are taboos against travel.

We're sad, because we're all bereaved, but we're also happy.

We're the survivors, and we've found purpose.

What bothers me most about this virus is that it keeps getting things right.

Walked past the "Follywood" sign this morning. Read about it here, for example. Nestled into the side of a medium-sized, mostly residential street in Falmouth, the "Follywood" sign faces the entrance to the Woodlane campus of our local university.

[Universities, I mean. In the same way that Star Wars Episode IV is actually the first film, our local university is actually two universities. But that's too much detail, right?]

In its pursuit of academic excellence, our local university put up the "Follywood" sign at roughly the high point of its drive to increase the number of fee-paying students it could attract. That was early 2016 or thereabouts. [What? Oh - £9,250 per annum now for a UK student, more for an overseas student, but you're not suggesting that a university would increase its student numbers just for money, are you?)

Across Falmouth, property developers responded to the university's pursuit of mass academic excellence by applying for planning permission to build student accommodation - and the planning authorities gave their answer.

To give you an example, when one application near here was opposed by everybody locally, from the local council to the fire brigade, a planning inspector was sent all the way from Bristol to declare that the application had been approved. Silly old us, getting it wrong like that.

Walked past the "Follywood" sign, and later, I'll be walking past that very building site. An open, empty space, flat concrete, gravel, a skip. No builders; the company hasn't come back. Brambles at the edges, first weeds showing, birds, bees.

We can't get in, because there are metal gates. But nature's hard at work, reclaiming the space.

We use the word “mutate” when we mean “evolve”, surely?

The virus wants to be caught. Becoming easier to catch seems an obvious response to whatever we do to stop ourselves catching it.

Hard-to-catch strains die out; the easy variants live long and prosper.

I speak from ignorance, of course. I was reading about the so-called D614G mutation (so-called because that’s what it’s called; as I said, I speak from ignorance) which is all about a change to the “spike protein” whereby the virus, er, impales the cells it wants to infect (see above re: ignorance).

I remember once trying to get a tangle of little green weed-seeds out of a dog’s ears after a country walk. Burrs. I know all about things getting hooked on and not wanting to come off.

Anyway, D614G is the new easy-to-catch version of Covid-19. While we’ve been locked down, the virus has been sharpening its spike proteins.

And now we’ve come out into the open.

Central government is urging us back to work and offering us incentives to go out to lunch.

Oh, and the virus has sharpened its spikes.

But hey – the sun’s shining and the shops are open and that little café has put tables out in the open.

Central government really wants us to get back to work and then take a long lunch-break. So let’s grab a table under the trees and celebrate the end of the lockdown.

Except – Melbourne, Australia locked down again; Leicester, UK, locked down again; various pubs in the UK that opened at the weekend – closed again.

All along, the most striking feature of this virus, for me, has been how well it knows us.

No, not quite that – how well it adapts itself to us. It’s not “meant” exactly, but it fits in spookily well with the way we behave.

We hid. The virus seemed to go away. We came out of hiding and started to talk about how we could go back to making taxable money.

Still no sinister rustling in the undergrowth – we started to use phrases such as “after coronavirus” in our speeches.

But mostly, we just settled in cosily to policing each other’s mask-wearing. Relaxed our social distancing and joined the crowd.

We came out of hiding, and we got accustomed to being out of hiding, and let’s just suppose that we began to ease off on our precautions.

Do we really need these fiddly masks?

The ten-second rule applies to snogging as much as to dropped food, doesn’t it? I mean, mmm, the thirty-second, mm, two-minute rule. Nothing infectious there.

I suspect that the virus is giving us time.

It hasn’t been defeated. It’s waiting for us to get complacent, and while it does that, it's gone South for the Winter.

Stock up on essential supplies while the sun shines.

Not that this changes anything, but I picked up an old copy of the Weekend FT magazine (25/26 April 2020) and found a piece by the author Siri Hustvedt in which she describes the virus as a "biological zombie".

So we are, after all, facing a zombie apocalypse. Not important, makes no difference, I know, but I like the reminder of how persistently The Unexpected makes fools of us.

Don't be ridiculous - of course there's no such thing as a zombie apocalypse.

Except that now, there is.

Such confidence! The world fits within our understanding.

Except that now, it doesn't.

Today, I'm not so much bothered by the prospect of a Second Wave of the pandemic, as I am impressed (but not in a good way) by how clearly, and in what detail, we can describe what's coming.

Just as we've convinced ourself that the present pandemic - the exact problem we face now - was foreseeable all along in just precisely the form it's taken - look up all the measured explanations of the recent past - so we're clear on the form that the Second Wave will take.

Autumn is Coming, and with it the flu/Second Wave season.

No. Don't see it. The predictability, I mean.

The virus has a morality to it - Dr Fauci was just on my radio saying that people should think of others when they refuse to, ah, socially distance - and it seems to challenge every attempt to reduce it to a known quantity. [See also Is Covid-19 meant, and if so, what does it mean? from a few weeks back.]

Once The Second Coming Of Covid-19 has decimated the population - and feel free to look up the correct meaning of the word 'decimate' - perhaps we could also talk about the role of central government.

There was the farce of the 100,000 daily tests, not, and now my radio is telling me that local authorities have been fighting to get infection data out of central government. Boris is jumping up and down shouting "Build, Build, Build" and we're all supposed to get the hint that this is a New Deal, geddit?

I know the people in my Nextdoor group - my neighbours. I know several of the people on my local council. I'm a moderator on a local self-help Facebook group. We sent a woman to Westminster in the General Election, but her voice is one among hundreds. I don't remember her name.

I'm not so much exasperated by central government's incompetence, as exasperated by the whole idea that central government could be competent. Whatever "government" is, it doesn't seem to work at that scale.

I'm unequivocally a local, and as I write that - intending to continue with something vaguely sarcastic about fragmenting national identity - I remember the local feeling about non-locals coming down here during the lockdown. Burdening our one hospital ... all that.

PPE, testing and tracing, that app - I don't want to get sidetracked. My point: incompetence by virtue of scale. My follow-up banging-on-about-it same-point-again: they're too far distant from us to do any better. In a crisis, in practice, England is too fragmented to be a viable administrative unit. Maybe economically, maybe internationally, but not when we're facing a social, cultural, health, existential crisis.

Maybe after all, the New Normal won't evolve in response to people not going out even when they can. Maybe the New Normal will be forced into being by local authorities wresting control from the centre and closing their own borders.

Or maybe we'll just change without realising we're changing. We'll look back one day and say, did we really behave like that?

So many deliveries. So many parcels. My innovation of the day would be re-usable packaging. Not just plastic that mulches down into fertiliser, or whatever it does, but cardboard boxes printed on the inside with puzzles and games. Perhaps also large-item cardboard boxes that can be refolded origami-style into tables and children's castles. Dotted lines and silhouettes of scissors.