Hello from quarantine where, as are tens of millions of others, I’m waiting out the next few weeks. Most of us are spending all day at home now, unless we’re one of the few allowed out to go to work.

I’m actually having a lovely time. Books, telly, plenty of work to catch up on, the odd spot of cleaning. What’s not to like?

I’m being flippant, but not much. I have extremely mild intermittent symptoms, so mostly I feel fine. And I am alone in the house, free from worrying about looking after small children or whether I’m infecting other people.

This is a far cry from the last time I was locked down. That was in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, six years ago where I was working with an NGO during one of the many surges of conflict which have riddled the country for the past few years. I was interviewing rape survivors, to gather evidence for the Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict summit hosted by William Hague and Angelina Jolie.

In the grounds of a church where hundreds of displaced people were taking refuge, I was with women and children whose lives – and bodies – had been torn apart. Suddenly, one of the people temporarily living there ran over to us and said “Quick, quick! You have to go! Quick!”

Within three minutes, we had packed up our kit, which included fairly hefty photographic equipment, and we were in the van driving through the gates to go back to our base.

Just in time, it turned out. A couple of minutes later, militants drove along that road shooting indiscriminately and fired into the grounds of the church where we had just been working, killing some of the people we had met. It was the first shot fired into a church facility, in what was to become an even more bloody and grotesque conflict.

The whole city shut down, the government switched off the SMS services so militants couldn’t mobilise, the airport closed, and we were stranded for a few days before we could be evacuated. We were fine. Sadly, while we were not especially clean or comfortable at times, our experience was far more relaxed than that of the thousands of people who found themselves homeless and without refuge in the streets outside. The “white privilege” charge might seem like an annoyingly woke thing to say in Britain; in many parts of the world it is a stark reality.

So, Coronavirus quarantine feels fine.

It’s more boring, in some ways, because I’m on my own. Before, when I’ve been delayed or stranded somewhere (more often than not, our return itineraries were scuppered when travelling back from humanitarian emergency zones), I’ve been with other people. Always with folk who have been similarly trained and well experienced in the vagaries of insecure locations, and I’ve usually laughed more and harder during those lockdowns than at almost any other time.

But the last couple of weeks have been strange, being part of a country going through this instead of watching from afar and then going over to help. Some of my friends found me deeply annoying ten days ago, when I kept arguing that we should cancel things.

It was frustrating to watch when you’ve been trained for major incidents and hostile settings where you just do as you’re told. Immediately.

Now that that stage seems to be mostly over, it’s a bit easier and people are trying to adjust.

The other lesson that hardcore travel assignments teach you is how to jump straight to acceptance in a crisis. When you’re locked down in a strange country, there isn’t time or any benefit from going through the usual stages of questioning and anger. You quickly recognise that you can’t change the situation – there’s no holiday rep to yell at and you can’t persuade the airline to un-cancel the flight. You don’t have the opportunity or power to stop the incoming flood or persuade the dictator to reverse his edicts – so you learn to wait it out.

You choose to trust the person giving you instructions, because you’ve signed up to a protocol ahead of time which tells you who makes which decisions and when. You’re not the plucky movie hero who can see the problems and opportunities no one else can. You’re just you, a very ordinary person, following the steer you agreed to before you set off on the trip.

It sounds infantilising, but it’s incredibly freeing. Avoiding the more frustrating feelings means you rapidly find a state of zen which carries you through and means you can sleep and laugh – essential coping mechanisms.

Sure, you need to process properly later and a good employer is already lining up debrief and psych services for you before you get on the plane home. Some will even offer them by phone or online while you’re still out there, if they can.

I’ve learnt that while lockdown is monotonous, it is better to be bored than dead.

There were just two aspects of it that would make me particularly tense each time. One was the uncertain schedule. It’s very unsettling to wake up each morning wondering whether today is the day to leave, or tomorrow, or next week, or ever….

Which brings me to the second and more difficult realisation. In those situations, you do get used to reconciling yourself to the possibility that this might be the end. Before you left, you made a plan outlining who would tell your mum if you didn’t make it home.

Acceptance of this was never pleasant but it was always important. The taxi to the airport for the trip to northern Iraq when people were coming down from Mt Sinjar; the times I waved off my dear friend when she was posted to Kabul; the rush of fear when in a tiny remote ramshackle airport someone starts waving a gun around. There were many moments when I realised once again that the coffee I had with someone last week might be the last time I would ever see them.

And actually, each time it starts to get easier to accept. “In the midst of life we are in death,” the funeral service says, and in a Western culture where we often do all we possibly can to avoid confronting it, we do well to remind ourselves that it is the only inevitability.

So this lockdown is easier.

We know it’s going to be a few weeks before we can get out to see people, so the tension of wondering whether anything will suddenly change today is dissipated.

It is cleaner and calmer here than in a place where you have to hunker down while the shooting continues outside. And it is nice to do that thing I’ve seen people start to express on social media: imagining the things you’ll do when you’re allowed out again, and promising yourself you’ll always be thankful and never complain about anything again once this is over.

Yes, that’s a lovely feeling. Once it’s over, it will even be true for a while. The joy will be overwhelming for most of us and we will delight in silly little things that we previously took for granted.

And then, after a few days or maybe even a week or two, it will fade and we will return to our usual British grumpy humour. Onwards and upwards…