Coronavirus: Why I’m proud to be a citizen of Edinburgh – Alex Cole-Hamilton

I’ve never typed the phrase ‘Please hang in there, we are trying to get help to you’ more than 100 times in one afternoon.

I’ve never felt panic and despair rise and rise all day only to have salvation suddenly appear in the words of a Tory Chancellor.

I’ve never had a constituent (freshly recovered from Covid-19) drop into the constituency office with a bottle of wine, because the lights were on and she felt I needed something to “keep me going”.

I’ve never had any of these things happen. Until Friday.

Friday, was the hardest day of my life. I got into politics to help people, but I only ever thought that would mean a handful of constituents ­raising their problems with me each day, some prosaic, some hard. What I got on Friday, was a tsunami of human pain.

That I should find myself jumping for joy when Rishi Sunak effectively opened the door to the UK Treasury and offered to pay the salary of every employed adult in this country is a reflection of just how on its head this country is right now. I worked long into the evening phoning and ­emailing everyone who’d been in touch. It was like handing out ­Christmas presents and I hope to be able to do the same for self-employed people soon. We need to do much more for them.

These days I swing between two principle emotions: abject terror at the unseen menace that might be crawling over every surface and a sort of determined wartime defiance.

We aren’t in wartime of course. We aren’t facing nightly ­bombardment by the Luftwaffe. There’s no ­suggestion of rationing or conscription, but for the first time in my life I can understand how my grandparents must have felt in 1940. Normal life continuing with a gradual erosion of that normalcy while all the while a sense of threat grows ever larger in the background. Then, suddenly, everything changes and we have to teach our children the meaning of the word ‘lockdown’.

As with the Second World War, our communities are responding to that threat with tremendous unity. We’ve seen a huge surge in community spirit and people desperate to help those less fortunate than them. There have been calls for volunteers, asking ­people to step up and deploy their skills to this massive communal effort and those calls have been answered.

My amazing wife Gill, a primary school teacher, is one such volunteer. From this weekend, and for every weekend hereafter, she will be teaching in one of the key worker childcare hubs so our NHS heroes can focus on saving lives. Within eight hours of the teacher availability survey being launched, 1,000 teachers had signed up.

My mother-in-law is mass ­producing facemasks with her ­sewing machine in Dalkeith and I have just started a cheeky wee job in the evenings as a volunteer hot-food takeaway technician and delivery boy. Whenever I can, and for as long as I’m well, I will be taking free, hot and safely prepared meals from local charities to vulnerable people in self-isolation.

There are the organised ‘Go-For’ community groups, and the simple acts of neighbours putting notes through each others doors offering to go to the shops or look out for each other. ­Lockdown won’t stop any of that.

Friday was the hardest day of my life, but I’m quite certain there are harder days still to come.

But the decency, the selflessness and the bravery I see in those people all around me gives me such a sense of hope that we can get through this time of hardship and be the stronger for it on the other side. Edinburgh, I’m proud to know you.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is the Lib Dem MSP for Edinburgh Western.