As parents grew increasingly harried with remote learning, the signs took on a harried tenor, too: “Don’t Worry Be Happy” was the incantation on the house next door, above a giant rictus fashioned from crêpe paper. That sign, and the smile, has vanished, and now in the same child’s hand is a considerably blunter edict to “Dump Trump”.

Were it not for the closed playground, I doubt I would have learnt anything much about my neighbours.

Three houses on the street, all with Joe Biden signs in their front yards, became even better acquainted when they banded together to form a quarantine bubble. Their kids played hide-and-seek together, like Les Mis street urchins, and their parents gathered on porches in the evenings for rosé and conversation – like adults used to do.

Were it not for the closed playground, I doubt I would have learnt anything much about my neighbours. Coronavirus is too grotesque for me to call this a “silver lining”, yet it is another of those unanticipated ways in which the disease has altered my outlook, possibly for the better.

On Monday, the day of the playground reopening, my son was up bright and early, as always. But weirdly, his parents were, too, jittery with excitement on his behalf. “Take pictures!” I yelled at my husband as they set out at 7am for the park. What resulted were literally dozens of photos of a rather blasé two-year-old inspecting a play area he had all but forgotten about.

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The previous day, in a neighbour’s garden, he had for the first time in his short life run through a sprinkler. I’d always thought of this as a distinctly Australian rite of passage, and so it gave me joy to see him do it on the other side of the world.

Judging by his high-pitched squeals, the sprinkler gave him joy, too – more than all the play equipment in the park we had waited so long to use.

Perhaps there’s a message in there about the resilience of kids, or at the very least, about the futility of organised fun.

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