Sunday 15 March 2020:

We’re currently living in unprecedented times. Over recent months, coronavirus has spread from China across the world and is now regarded as a pandemic. People have gradually woken up to the realisation that the disease is a threat to both lives and livelihoods… across the entire planet. 

I wrote this post on one of my other blogs after the UK government indicated that “People over 70 will be instructed by the government to stay in strict isolation at home or in care homes for four months, under a ‘wartime-style’ mobilisation effort by the government likely to be enforced within the next 20 days”. The prospect was alarming, as I’m sure you will appreciate… (I won’t bother repeating my thoughts, so please read the post link).

Moira and I discussed things at length, as you might imagine… we accepted that our lives would be drastically changed... but that we’d cope. Routines would change dramatically…not only would we be unable to continue our various weekly activities (ceramics, drawing group etc), but we would also be physically cut off from the rest of our family. Suddenly, meeting up with family and friends would be replaced by Skype/facetime (which I’m famously appalling at using!), telephone calls, text messages, emails (and even letters!).

Not only that, but it also seemed that the UK government had become somewhat overwhelmed by the reality of the disease and ‘timescales for action’ suddenly seemed to severely foreshortened.