An eye infection stresses domestic life | Seamas O'Reilly

I run to the nursery to pick up my daughter. According to her caretaker, she has "sticky eyes" and I'm driving from Soho to Walthamstow to remove her from the group.

Pinjunctivitis is a troublesome eye infection that is relatively minor, moderately disgusting and highly contagious. I'm thrust back into the high-octane paranoia of the lockdown era, arriving to find she's been happily sequestered from her friends, in an attempt to contain her burgeoning plague.

Part of me wonders why this is one of those infections that are so minor but so dangerous at the same time, but I think it's better not to think about it too much, because I'm the 'one of the few human beings not to have emerged from confinement with an associate's degree in chairside virology.

Childcare workers help us keep distance by standing between the kids and me, on the understanding that I usually wouldn't hesitate to grab each of their eyeballs in turn and give them a good rub. No fun this morning. No, today I have to stay home, stay safe, save my eyes.

We take the short walk home, she miserable, me tense. She rubs the gunk out and into her eyes and I settle down for at least a day to clean up my work schedule and separate myself from people with kids. I hold it to my chest and position myself with wipes within arms reach. These are essential, as his eyes and nose constantly ooze, like lather from a squeezed sponge. I don't want to exaggerate the pictures on this. You may be eating or planning to have a child, and I'm afraid going into much more detail will put either plan on hold for a while. But let's just say that applying pressure to any part of my daughter's head right now would be like forcefully grabbing a welly filled to the brim with green custard. Again, best not to think about it.

Within an hour she's comfortable and my clothes are ruined; my shoulders, my arms and my knees all stratified with a patina of mucus, laid like a snail's trail wherever she laid her sleeping face. Drowsiness is, at least, a benefit of this ordeal, as it cocks its comically large head in puffs of sleep aversion, but spends most of the hours after I take it in and out of consciousness.

We have eye drops she hates, and a hot cloth she hates. I spend my time rubbing the disjecta that continually accumulate, carefully wiping the eyelashes that stick together like a cow's tail. Obviously, I never do it carefully enough, and she reacts every time like I'm using sandpaper to rub bleach in her eyes.

We continue like this for the next two days, and she seems to be back to normal. As the infection subsides, she looks much more like herself, as we drop her a few days later with a bushy tail and, more importantly, bright eyes. She is warmly welcomed by her friends, and a mixture of exhaustion and relief causes me to rub my eyes myself, grimacing slightly. Probably nothing, I think as I walk away. Better not think about it too much.

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