This time last year

[dudsville]

This time last year I was still in denial. I simply couldn't understand what was coming. I thought people were overreacting with talk of the possibility of a "lock down". I honestly thought my colleagues were being ott with the handwashing and antibacterial stuff. I thought there was no way I wouldn't get to make the trip we had planned at the end of March.

By the beginning of March, I was still in denial but things were starting to close down, traffic eased, streets were quieter. Mid March I got sent home from work because of a Corona scare re someone I had spent the weekend with. I didn't know what to do. Had to get food so I picked up potatoes, a chicken, a bottle of wine and cigarettes (I gave up smoking when I ran out!). I got home and freaked out. Then the 1st lockdown started a week later. We'd been quarentining so had to learn how to get food. I read dystopian novels and watched the films. Lost the plot a little, remained baffled and confused for months. Several friends have lost parents to covid. When my mum contracted it we sat quietly for a couple of weeks, waiting, she sailed through it!

I haven't been back to work since buying that chicken. I'm scheduled to return soon. Today's news is such a relief. Hard to imagine now how clueless I was about it all just a year ago.

I just wanted to write that out.

I don’t think it was just you. I remember telling people at work in January that this was something big and wasn’t going to be good and I was laughed at and told it’s just like flu. Needless to say the reality hit those people hard and they didn’t know what to do when lockdown happened. People handle things/see things differently and we all have different coping mechanisms. I think for lost though, this has been a total whirlwind of emotions and hopefully we are starting to come out the other side! Take care x

*most

This time last year I was being induced at hospital. There was a very young pregnant girl freaking out on the phone to someone because a “coronavirus” patient had been brought to the hospital. Everyone thought she was barking mad for being so scared. I remember everyone in the room smirking at each other. How did she know? I often wonder how she coped through out this.

I'm not sure i was even aware of coronavirus at this time last year. Maybe I had heard it mentioned a few times on the news.
Looking through my phone pics, in Feb Half term last year I took my daughter to the farm park, to peppa pig World and out to a cafe with friends. She had a birthday party on the 29th Feb and nobody was doing extra hand washing etc then. Glad we got some fun stuff in before lockdown.

This time last year we were really worried about the virus situation. It had gone from an occasional news item to a regular feature in a couple of weeks. We were in a temporary flat at the time, & we were terrified we'd not be able to move to our proper house before the virus came to the UK. We eventually got the carpets fitted about a week before everything completely shut down. (It's a new build so there were none in place, just bare boards & concrete.) There was no internet at the flat, so we had to use my mobile as a hotspot & watch TV on the laptop, it was slow as hell.

I was already well-stocked on bogroll and other long life staples. No panic when the supermarkets emptied a month later.

We were going to go to London for the weekend at half-term. DH was concerned that it was most likely to be the first major spread-point, so we changed to another city with fewer international connections.

Early March I cancelled seeing DM as I had a cold and she'd recently been ill in hospital... where she aquired a nasty chest infection... there wasn't the known cases in the community to be suspicious at thst point but I do wonder...

14th& 15th March were the last two parkruns and I RDed at both. Uncertainty was in the air so I took the juniors' bibs home rather than leaving in the dank store in case we weren't using them again that side of Easter... 11m on, they're still in my house.

Mon 16th I went shopping for DS's birthday presents in case the shops closed. Town was quiet. Good job I went shopping that week. A week later, online shopping went haywire with significant delays and I'd have struggled to get anything deliveŕed to the poor boy on time. Watching everything unravel that week was awful and surreal. When the stay at home order was issued, it was a relief that exercising relatively freely was still possible compared to measures such as Spain's.

I was telling work colleagues it’s just the press scaremongering how wrong I was!

I did an assembly at school on 4th March telling children not to worry about coronavirus. We talked about washing hands. Haha. Ffs. I had a friend stuck in Milan already.

I thought it was going to be more like swine flu had been here.

I was recovering from something that hit me for 6 on the 5-6 February, a date I remember because DH had gone away to a wedding. Was 3 weeks of awfulness with a couple of A&E visits for drips. It wasn't anything like the coughing type of covid but it there's a principally gastric reaction, it could have been. Who knows? Almost the last thing I did before lockdown was get a scan, but nothing untoward showed up.
I'd quit my job but retracted it, reasoning 3 months more to steer an even keel, then search, wouldn't be too bad.
Still in it...not fond of it and would move in an ideal world, but got to be grateful on several levels given the alternatives.

I don’t know what planet I was on this time last year! But it wasn’t until March, when I went to get a Chinese takeout that the owner told me that they were closing until further notice. I came out thinking hmmm that’s a bit over reacting for something that’s happening in China, then a week later the whole country was shut down! And no one will ever be the same again.

This time last year I still had about another two and a half weeks of obliviously thinking it would go the way of the first SARS and swine/bird flu in the past. I remember noting town was very quiet around 5th March and thinking how silly people were to be fall for the media scaremongering. It was only on around the 10th March when a colleague informed me it was actually worse than the press were saying, that the horrible reality hit me like a ton of bricks.

We thought school would close for 2 weeks before Easter, and sent work home. I was making packs just in case at this point. I started a diary on 1st Jan. Its really interesting looking back.

this time last year I had my stockpile ready, made the decision to visit my mum for the last time in a while and was buying an exercise bike for £50 less than they were a month later.

I was planning some work trips, but also feeling a tidal wave coming fast and not knowing what I should do about it.*

*Not plan the work trips for a start...

I thought it was a bit like swine flu too, which I never really understood tbf, I like to be selectively ignorant to the news from time to time as I get depressed too easily. I just stick my head in the sand and toodle through life usually.
My baby was only a couple of weeks old this time last year, seems mad that I had so many visitors in hospital and family and friends regularly coming round our house to see DS, we even got an extra armchair because it always seemed someone was stuck perching on a step or coffee table! I remember being so angry and ready to boycott Asda because their out of stocks on my shopping delivery were ridiculous - how dare they not deliver any hand soap when I've got a newborn to protect! Took me a while to put two and two together, blaming it on the baby brain
Now I'm looking at having DS2 in the next week or so, possibly by myself in hospital and not sure when he'll meet any family. Very weird.

I don't normally take much notice of this sort of thing, but as someone said above, this one caught my notice and I felt very uncomfortable about it from the word go. Then I saw footage of the Chinese building a massive hospital in 10 days and locking down over 50 million people.
Not sure of the chronology here, but I was seriously concerned by Chinese New Year (end of January) and I made an excuse not to go to dinner at someone's house at February half term because they'd just been to a world trade fair in Europe and I didn't want to mix. We happened not to have done our usual skiing trip that week, and I was so glad it worked out that way, as by then things were kicking off in Italy.
But loads of people, in RL and on here, still thought it was all scare-mongering.
All through it, however, my main worry has never been catching it (rightly or wrongly) but the impact on everyday life.
And here we are!

I figured it would come and go like Swine Flu, which had been a big anxiety for me at the time. Then I reassured a friend it would be fine and we made a comment about someone we saw in a shopping centre wearing a mask as OTT. Days later I told her I think it's coming and the people who will be infected in two weeks are catching it now so time to quarantine ourselves, told my parents the same who were a little reluctant at first. My daughter had a temp for 3 days and I didn't send her back to school for the next week which was the week before lockdown.

Thread started on 13/02/2020 below. A clear build up of concern, its quite chilling now how much hope was clung onto. I think a lot of us will need time to heal and process but I think we will quickly move on. It will be crazy to look back on in history as a time we lived through.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/3821799-The-Positive-Mental-Health-Corona-virus-thread?msgid=93901971

Bloody hell. I've just looked back a year in my camera photos. I've aged 10 years since then. I'm actually really shocked at how different I looked then.

This time last year I thought it was something that couldn’t possibly happen to me, and I was right 😉

On the contrary right from day 1 I thought the shit was going to hit the fan in a big way. I remember talking to my boss back last March and saying lots of people don't realise what's coming.

This time last year I was oblivious. I was going to job interviews for a 2nd part time job. I went to a hotel to see my best friend who I hadn't seen for over a year. We never talked covid. I didn't know anything about the spread at the big concerts, football matches, horse racing etc, that would be criticised weeks later.

BJ assured us all it'd be over soon, and here we are a year later, in not much of a better place, other than vaccinations being at least rolled out reasonably well.

I can't wait for the cautious lifting of restrictions. I've had enough of this miserable existence. I think it'll be ok, we'll get used it to it, have annual boosters, hopefully some semblance of normal life.

By this time last year I had cancelled all travel/socialising and had already prepped. We basically did the same last Feb half term as we have been allowed to do this year.

I was screaming at the telly when the government were moving soooo slllooooowwwwllly, it was driving me mad.

I remain really sad we've had so much national trauma and disruption caused by government stupidity. If someone like me could see what was coming, rest assured the government knew and chose to do nothing. They chose to do nothing because they do not care about you or me.

Me too. I remember sitting at a bar with two friends all talking about how silly all of the lockdown stuff was and how we'd "never really lock down", everyone is overreacting etc.

Within a week, I was having a zoom social with the same two friends discussing the exact opposite of the previous conversation.

Those who were in denial at the beginning - I wonder if they feel confident about the phase ahead?