This article is a messy account not of the COVID‐19 pandemic but one written during the pandemic. Although written over several successive evenings it is not a linear narrative that builds on a chain of passing moments teleologically to an end. It is not a diary, just a collection of scattered thoughts about living during COVID‐19, the (lack of) care that many elderly people receive and how we, or perhaps only I, struggle to cope in these exceptional times. This is not a typical autoethnography, it is not reflexive writing and there is no conclusion albeit that the article ends.