How are you all doing? How are you holding up in the new world order of lockdown, social distancing, state-sanctioned exercise, constant handwashing and queues to get in supermarkets?

I’ve managed fine so far but my big test comes this week when I will have a lot more time on my hands.

I’m currently working from home – I haven’t been furloughed yet but I suspect it won’t be long coming if the current restrictions go on for an extended period.

I consider myself fortunate that it doesn’t actually matter where I am based as long as I have a stable internet connection and frankly, the past two or three weeks have been fairly hectic so I’ve not really had time to ponder on the predicament we now all find ourselves in.

And I am more than happy I don’t have to commute by train into Manchester.

It’s never a pleasant experience at the best of times but before the lockdown began, being crammed into rush hour trains with a load of people coughing and spluttering all over the place was actually frightening.

So on to this week and I know there will be a couple of days at least when I won’t have any work to do. It’s already factored into the schedule and will be the first real test of my lockdown resilience.

My wife has tried desperately to engineer a sense of normality (well as normal as you can be in the current circumstances).

We’ve tried to stick to our Saturday and Sunday routine as much as possible to give us a clear differentiation between the weekend and the working week.

And because I work in a team with five or six other people, I’ve been sat my computer, ready to go before 9am. In all honesty, I have had a lot of work to do and haven’t found lockdown to be too much of a trial.

But we’ll see how I get on next week.

One of the problems I have found, though, is I’m struggling to watch television news.

I’m a bit of a news junkie and will quite happily have either Sky News or BBC News on all day, channel hopping from one to the other.

But I’m currently finding the news unrelentingly grim and while I still feel the need to keep myself up to date with what’s happening, I don’t think it’s particularly good for my mental health to be fed a constant diet of death and disaster.

And there’s no light relief to be found on social media, either. My Twitter feed seems to consist of nothing other than reports of people’s grandads dying or families struggling to get food.

I know that, so far, I’ve been lucky. I still have a job. I have someone to talk to during the day and the food supplies are holding up (no, I didn’t stockpile). I know there are people who are far worse off than me and my thoughts and prayers go out to them.

What I do find interesting about the current situation is the change in perception about who we now consider to be ‘key workers’.

You only have to go back to February when Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that ‘low-skilled’ workers would not get visas under the post-Brexit immigration plans unveiled by the government.

Companies under the new immigration system were urged to move away from relying on ‘cheap labour’ from Europe and invest in retaining staff and developing automation technology.

And it would appear the government’s definition of ‘low-skilled’ is anyone earning less than £25,600 a year.

But that was before the coronavirus pandemic took a grip of this country, so let’s just have a look at who these ‘low skilled’ people really are the government says we don’t need.

How about carers who have an average annual salary of £12,500, or maybe phlebotomists (you know, those health workers whose job it is to take blood samples) who have an average annual salary of £20,015?

Then you can add radiographers (average starting salary: £24,000); occupational therapists (average starting salary: £24,414); and physiotherapists (average starting salary: £22,866).

I would suggest that when Priti Patel talks about low-skilled workers, what she actually means is low-paid workers.

But there’s a new breed of front-line heroes who don’t work in health or care and without whom we would truly be in a mess in the current lockdown.

There are the shop workers and supermarket delivery drivers; the online retailers and their drivers, the binmen, postal workers and all those traders who have gone from bricks-and-mortar retailing to delivery services.

They can’t self-isolate and it puts them and their families at greater risk of contracting Covid-19.

So my question about all those immigrants to the UK who are currently doing one of those key, frontline jobs is: Are they low-skilled cheap labour or are they low-paid key workers?

You decide.