Humans and microbes are interdependent. Humans are often the hosts, but so too are animals, plants and nature generally. In the main, these relationships are beneficial and harmless.

The lockdown triggered the second biggest migration in the history of India.

If, in our capitalist economy, homo sapiens is fundamentally homo economicus, what might be the implications of living in a time, and for a protracted period of time, when as human beings we ceased to be primarily economic agents?

For a year or so in my teens I was convinced that I – and almost everybody I knew – would die in a terrifying brain-disease epidemic.

The case for the prosecution seems open and shut. Viruses are life’s disrupters – nature’s spivs, gangsters, the ultimate parasites; dogging the lives of all other organisms through their single-minded yet mindless compulsion to replicate.

Poems by Carol Rumens

Medina Tenour Whiteman’s The Invisible Muslim: Journeys Through  Whiteness and Islam, explores what is means to be a white Muslim.