I am on my way to Mumbai for an event I didn’t want to miss, to meet someone I have wanted to meet from a while, a last minute and really need to do and go travel.

And so here I am in Heathrow airport. At six in the morning it is not deserted but definitely not humming with activity. Through security in less than ten minutes. I should commend my excellent packing but there were only a few folks in front of me, a few behind, all of us with steely expressions of we have to do this and we are ok and we will all be ok expressions on our yet to drink coffee faces. A small group of Asian men with disheveled hair wearing face masks stand in a small group talking to each other. Not many people traveling the lady behind the counter at Duty Free tells me. Buying deodorant and face cream are symptoms of my vanity and optimism. The headlines on white newspapers inform us in CAPSLOCK that the NHS is preparing for an epidemic.

I told my husband this morning before leaving that it would serve us, the world of adults burning up everything with our plastics and airline travel and fossil fuels and cutting down of forests, if the children of the future in a subconscious state of self preservation were carrying a virus that did not effect them but only us.