It was a long March, perhaps the longest any of us can remember. And yet April is on course to be if not the cruellest month, then unexpectedly the shortest. Strictly speaking, none of that makes sense. There were 31 days in March, as always, and there will be 30 in April, as always. And yet, coronavirus has not just upended space, reshaping the landscape around us so that once-crammed city centres now lie empty and deserted – it has also messed with time. Tell people that Monday will mark the start of week six of lockdown and they stare back in disbelief. Really? How did that happen? “The weeks seem to pass surprisingly quickly,” texts one friend. “Yet the days seem to last an eternity.” Strange things are happening with time, and stranger things could happen still. When Boris Johnson announced the lockdown on 23 March, the talk – the hopeful assumption – was that it would last three weeks. A review was scheduled. But the date for that came and went, and people began to adjust to the idea that maybe this would stretch deep into the summer. And then on Wednesday, the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, warned that “highly disruptive” social distancing measures were likely to be in place until 2021. That is a very different prospect, and it requires us to adjust our clocks. The sober, uber-rational health correspondent of the New York Times, Donald McNeil, suggests an easing by the end of the year is optimistic, given how long it will take to produce either a vaccine or effective treatment for Covid-19. He spoke of how he is expecting a grandchild in June – and is coming to terms with the possibility that he might not meet that child until he or she is two years old. For everyone, this is a challenge of a different order. A sustained, long-run lockdown means that a vast stretch of undifferentiated time is unfurling ahead of us, stripped bare of the usual divisions and markers. We are facing a form of confinement that will not be brief. Tentatively, I called up Erwin James, who served 20 years of a life sentence for murder and for several years wrote a column for the Guardian called A Life Inside. I say tentatively because I wasn’t sure a former prisoner would have much patience for comparisons between the kind of lockdown we are enduring – in our own homes, sometimes with a garden, often with family, permitted to go to the shops or the park – and the incarceration that he experienced. And yet, if anyone knows about the tricks restriction can play with time, it’s a former inmate. It turns out I needn’t have hesitated. “There are so many resonances with prison,” James tells me. So much so that the letters page of the paper he edits for prisoners and detainees – called, fittingly enough, Inside Time – has been filled with little else. Any inmate would identify with the unnerving paradox my friend had spoken about, James says. “The days drag and then you wake up and a month has passed and you think, ‘Where the hell has that gone?’” At the heart of the matter is the Groundhog Day sameness. When one day is no different from the next, time becomes thick and amorphous, hard to keep hold of. “It’s like walking through treacle, in slow motion,” says James. In the words of Victor Serge, the serially jailed Russian revolutionary, “There are swift hours and very long seconds.” To break up the monotony, prisoners hunger for milestones, especially seasonal ones. They longed, James recalls, for the sight of pied wagtails by the cell window or greenery on the trees, proof that spring had come. They looked forward to the Boat Race or the Grand National or the May bank holiday or Wimbledon, anything that might separate one period of time from another. James remembers how his fellow prisoners would go wild on New Year’s Eve – banging bean cans, tins, fists, even heads against the doors in celebration – only for there to be a lull a half-hour later, as those inside realised that although one year had gone, another stretched ahead, that there was “another mountain to climb”. Again, lockdown is not the same as prison or even house arrest. But James insists that “it has given people a flavour of what it’s like to have your choices limited”. That need for milestones, for example. Those currently missing the football are not only craving the delight of watching 22 men kick a ball about. It’s also the delineation of the week that a fixture list can provide. Right now our lives resemble an unpunctuated sentence, shapeless and confusing. “No wonder people worldwide have immediately conceived a new communal ritual, the ovations for health workers,” writes the FT’s Simon Kuper. “We probably do this more for ourselves than for them.” The religious calendar can help, for those who find it meaningful. Muslims will find the coming weeks distinguished from the rest by Ramadan, just as Passover ensured eight days in April were unlike the rest for Jews. Others find themselves noticing nature in a way they did not before. After Whitty’s warning, I wondered about a winter lockdown – whether that would be much harder to bear than days that can be spent at least partially outside. Not at all, says James: “Time is easier in winter, because the days are shorter. Winter is much quicker than summer.” We can understand why those in prison would feel like that: wishing the days away, desperate to strike weeks off the calendar until the moment they are free and time becomes their own once more. Maybe some of us are already feeling that way about lockdown. But it comes with a great feeling of loss. We want to feel time is precious; we don’t want to write it off. We don’t want to lose a summer that we’ll never get back. We don’t want to do time; we don’t want to be inside. We want to live. • Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist