The Great Indoors - a short story about lockdown

By Christian Hayes

The Great Indoors is a humorous look at the challenges of life under lockdown.

Eric Baker likes his life to be neat, organised and clean. So when coronavirus makes its way across the world to his doorstep he can't help feeling that every surface in the city has been contaminated by a sinister, invisible enemy. Not only that but he also has ransacked supermarket shelves to deal with and a girlfriend who wants to isolate with him.

The Great Indoors is a free and funny look at the early days of lockdown by the bestselling author of The Fat Detective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Hayes
• Release date: Dec 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215465776

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The Great Indoors

Christian Hayes

Touchpaper had been lit and an invisible threat rushed across the planet, infiltrating not only the outside world but also the inner world of Mr Eric Baker (Flat 5C, Wilmington Avenue). In this man’s mind it was crawling across every surface out there, contaminating every railing, lift button and door handle across the entire, sprawling metropolis.

Eric had always stood firmly on the side of self-preservation. He was the only one to wait patiently for the little green man before crossing the road; he never ate anything beyond its expiration date; he went to the doctor for every little thing, just in case it became, you know, a very big thing. He always ate his greens, got a reasonable amount of exercise and aimed for eight hours of sleep every night. It goes without saying he had never hang-glided, parachuted, or bungee-jumped.

Only a week ago, on Thursday 12th March 2020, the virus seemed very far away, an intriguing curiosity that he was sure would never creep across all those thousands of miles to his doorstep. He had first seen the outbreak in China on TV and splashed across the internet, but that seemed like a crisis unfolding in a remote world he knew nothing about. This was the first time he had heard of a place called Wuhan even though, as was reported, it covers as much space as London itself. This was a working town, not a tourist hotspot. There were no holiday brochures promising A Wonderful Week in Wuhan, that now-notorious epicentre of the disease where, at a ‘wet’ market (surely all markets have an element of