EVEN before I sent the photograph and the accompanying text message, I knew I'd regret it. But I simply had to.
"How's lockdown?" the text read, alongside me raising a glass of craft beer from my tasting paddle last Sunday.
The recipients of my cheeky jibe were my Sydney-based brother and father, who have been lockdowned since late June and growing restless. I knew it would particularly rile my little brother - not just because he's easier to trigger than a hungry Rottweiler - but because he usually spends most weekends frequenting inner-west Sydney breweries.
Of course, come Wednesday, the joke turned on me when my brother rang to say, "I hear you guys are in the shit now". Yep literally. Viral fragments of COVID-19 had been detected in sewage at Belmont, Burwood and Shortland treatment centres.
Shit got even more real on Thursday when confirmed cases of the Delta variant began popping up, and snap, the entire Hunter is in a one-week lockdown.
Nobody is surprised. It's fair to say there's been an unsettling sense of dread wafting around the Hunter ever since Delta started popping up in Bondi to deliver a cough and sneeze with your protein smoothie.
Each weekend Novocastrians have been on high alert like a family of meerkats, keeping watch for Sydney day trippers who might be illegally invading our safe haven.
This whole episode has once again exposed the deep-seated tension Novocastrians feel for Sydneysiders. Anyone tried to buy a house in Newcastle lately?
"Build a wall on the M1. Build a ring of steel," you could almost collectively hear us demand, alongside a chant of "New-ca-stle, New-ca-stle."
There's also an Instagram clip doing the rounds of an exploding Mooney Mooney Bridge showing Gladys how "to do her job".
It all started out fine. The Greater Sydney lockdown meant we got several additional NRL games at McDonald Jones Stadium and the promise of our first ever State Of Origin.
Until Origin was shipped north to the Gold Coast before tickets even went on sale. Soon after we lost the Knights, too.
At least we had our mass vaccination hub at Belmont open and delivering up to 20,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine per week. Oh, but hang on. Sorry, says the NSW Government, we need that Pfizer for year 12 students in south-west Sydney.
Naturally it sparked the most Novocastrian rage directed at Sydney since Manly's Mark Carroll knocked out Knights hero Paul Harragon in 1995.
It really couldn't have been more poorly timed. On the same weekend that 5,500 doses of Pfizer were redirected from Belmont, and 40,000 from regional NSW, a beach party was taking place at Blacksmiths.
Once upon a time the worst you could catch from a beach party was sand burn and chlamydia. But not in 2021.
Well, here we are Newcastle, lockdown No.2. Time to fire off another text. "Hey bro, got any Netflix recommendations?"
