I wake up at half five in the morning., there is no time for food. To wash I simply wipe down the main areas (armpits, face, groin and rear end) with a cloth soaked in semi diluted bleach.

I wrap up warm. Thermal leggings and top, two jumpers, thick corduroy jeans, two pairs of socks, and a waterproof jacket. I wear a mask packed full of sweet smelling herbs of course but it might not be enough. I wrap my head in cling-film just to be sure. I can barely see but it’ll at least keep the disease off my skin.

I look out the upstairs bedroom window to make sure the street is clear of people, and check the spy hole of the front door before I leave, just to be safe.

Once I’m out the door I erupt into a full sprint to work. There is a twenty minute direct route but it’s too risky, travelled by too many that might be stricken with the malady. Instead I take side alleys, through peoples gardens, hop fences. There is a bridge off of King Street where you can squeeze your way through the wire fence blocking your access to the old railway tracks. I used to get covered in nettle stings getting down the embankment, but I’ve travelled this way so many times I’ve cleared a dirt path to the gravel at the bottom.

The railway line takes me an hour off course, but its flat ground, straight, and almost completely disused. There are a few other key workers that use it but our schedules don’t line up so we rarely see one another, unless someone is running late. Besides, we have a rule that you stay on the left lane if you’re going up, the right lane if down. And the closer we get the more we veer into the dirt embankment until we’ve passed.

When I get close enough to see the house I’m happy to see the lights are off inside. Because of the fever only one person is allowed inside the care home at any time, but due to labour laws three members of staff are scheduled on shift for each day. Whoever reaches the house first is allowed in to work, if you are late you remain in the garden, uttering prayers and hymns to keep the residents safe from the sickness. This is why I dress warm, you never know if you’ll be in or out that day. It’s the same reason I get up at half five, my shift doesn’t officially start until ten but I’ll be damned if I’m sitting out in the cold until six forty-five in the evening.

When you enter the house you are immediately hit with a wall of intense heat. The heating never goes off, and there are space heaters in the corner of every room. They say heat kills the illness. I strip naked and bathe myself in disinfectant, before putting on a separate pair of clothes I keep inside a locked box. There are three of these boxes per staff member, so you always have a pair that has been sitting for at least seventy two hours untouched. Once these are on I adorn myself with PPE, whispering an incantation of protection as I put on each one.

Mask. Apron. Gloves.

The prayers must be repeated and the PPE changed after each and every task, no matter how minor.

The rooms of the house are completely devoid of any objects or furniture, save for the space heaters I mentioned. The Scottish Care Commission, blessed be thy name, deemed it unwise for these items to remain. Should someone bring the foul disease into the house and leave elements of it upon an item, that a staff member or resident might touch it and contract the wicked scourge. It started with taking away unnecessary fluff about the place; pieces of tat on the shelves, Halloween decorations, the Christmas tree. But eventually the Care Commission -and the leaders of my service- saw the true path, why just rid ourselves of seasonal items? Surely the road to safety lies in the removal of every item! And it was done.

The five residents, or ‘supported people’ as my service refers to them, lie in a dream like state. Prostrate in bed. Fed, watered, and relieved by tubes, blissfully unaware of the state of the nation. the Care Commission was not content with their ability to stick to any government guidelines, so they lie in wait for a better time. Before this they stared at a blank television screen, it would turn itself off if no one touched the remote, and they never thought to turn it back on. We were too busy cleaning to do any activities with them, this is perhaps more respectful.

They used to walk freely around the home, some even say they would venture outside! Without supervision! Once while I sat in the garden awaiting my penance to be over, so I could go back to my surround sound home cinema and watch ‘The Chase’, another staff member told me they used to go out on trips. They would pack onto a bus with the common folk, nary a mask among them, and go all the way up to Ellon. She said they would sit in cafes and break bread together. I reported her to the Care Inspectorate immediately.

My day is one of cleaning. Every inch. I start with removing and replacing any contact surfaces (anything that might be touched often), door and cupboard handles are unscrewed from their fixings, buttons are pried off any remaining necessary appliances, these are triple bagged and stored in the garden to be taken away by the council and melted down. They leave a new batch of close approximations shipped in from China as replacements, which have slowly morphed over time due to budgetary and manufacturing restrictions. To begin with we got the same door handles as before, then the colours changed, then the materials, a few months later it was whatever bargain bin items they could get their hands on. A week ago was the first shipment of ‘Door Operating Fixtures’, these are re-purposed pieces of wire bent into a shape roughly constituting a handle. The intense heat of the house makes them quite malleable, eventually becoming so corrupted by the end of the shift entire rooms cannot be accessed. It makes little difference though, because they’ll be replaced again in the morning.

Any contact surfaces that cannot be removed are scrubbed to the point of unrecognition by a diluted sulphuric acid mix, four times a day. The wheelie bin lids (which the council can no longer replace) are so warped from this treatment they don’t even close. During the summer the flies got into them, and there quickly grew a roiling pile of maggots. We let the Care Commission know and their reply was “Maggots don’t carry Covid”.

Bathrooms are of particular importance. We coat the toilet four times daily in a special chemical called ‘Zeta-3’ that comes in thirty gallon drums. Over time the toilets have started to glow when the lights are off, and if you pee into them just after a fresh coat your mouth tastes like static and you get a headache. One member of staff had to quit because being in the same room as a barrel made their skin come out in blisters. The focus on sinks and toilets was understandable back when the supported people could roam and there was a risk of cross contamination, but now only one staff member uses them a day. Still, I’m not one to question the word from up on high, they do have our best interests in mind after all.

After any piece of cleaning is completed I must replace my PPE and write down exactly what I have done on a sheet, including how long I took, what room I was in, and what surfaces or items I cleaned. I then sign the sheet. There is also an electronic version of this I have to fill out on the computer, signing in and out of each cleaning task as I do it. This is so the higher ups and Care Inspectorate can see in real-time that we’re keeping standards high. They can then feed this information back to the council, which ensures they continue to receive funding for our care homes. Thank God the supported people lie in state, if any of them spoke to you, asked for food or to do an activity, it would fuck up your entire schedule and we’d all be out of a job.

Once I’m finished I remove my PPE. Gloves, Apron, Mask. Wash myself down with disinfectant and change into fresh clothes. When I’m forty yards away from the house I’m allowed to remove my mask and breathe clearly. I take the twenty minute route home, sometimes I stop at the pub or do a bit of shopping for food or clothes I need. In the evening I unwind at a friends house or at a restaurant when we are not blessed with a lockdown, so long as I have the next day off.

Many people don’t have any work to speak of. Little to no income, nothing to keep their idle hands busy. It must be horrible. I consider myself very lucky to have a purpose, a higher calling, something I can come home from at night and think “I helped someone today. I made the world a little bit safer.”

Plus the government is going to give me five hundred quid for working through all this, so things are going pretty good for me.