Our Personal Views (2020-2021):

It’s hard to sum up the last two years of lockdown in words, mostly because half the time even I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

The news would mention that a virus is spreading in China but myself, and just about everyone would think ‘oh, it’s fine it won’t come here’. How very wrong we were… schools went into lockdown, lives changed and the country was sent into panic. I didn’t mind Zoom learning that much, in reality and I found out how interesting my family could be. In a way it was quite nice, I got to see Jude and Ezra grow up and learn new things. Although they did become very antisocial and odd around other people!

I would say the hardest thing for me with Zoom learning were Wi-Fi crashes and little tiny people running all over screaming while I was doing my lesson. The amount of times I would be trying to answer a questions and they would choose the exact time I unmuted my mic to scream at top volume!

Something I find rather amusing is the fact that nearly two years later we are still worried about it and when we see people standing close on TV it looks weird.

Mask up! And sanitise! Are now regular words we use every day, it’s crazy to think that one day people will look back on these years as a momentous period and study them and to me it’s just everyday life now.

I would never have expected COVID to have shaken our world like it did and in February I went with my family to India to see our relatives.

I remember seeing on the news about COVID when I was in the airport and like other news I didn’t think much of it. On the way back from India, the pandemic was starting to spread more and just a month later, we went into lockdown.

I was one of the people who thought that school closing down was a preposterous idea, so I was shocked when the teacher got an urgent letter in our maths class. Even then I didn’t think too much of it and thought we’d be back after Easter, but as you know that was far from the case. Even though I missed my normal life and was over the moon when we could go back to school, I got to spend lots of time with my family and even start my own YouTube channel during lockdown.

I have to keep this short, but I could write an entire page about my thoughts and feelings. Initially, I had told myself, ‘It’s just an illness in China, it’ll never get to the UK’, but really, I was very skeptical.

By February 2020 it was getting all too close to home for all of us. The first case in the UK was recorded in our county, Yorkshire and the NHS, the Government and the public were beginning to really panic .

Moving forward in time, many people in my family and people around me, including my own brother tested positive. It was a very scary time, but we pushed through, with the support of friends and family, of course. We are finally due a holiday in October half term, 2021 and by hell do we deserve one after the past year we’ve had. We all do!

At the start of the pandemic we all thought ‘it will never come to the UK’, or the virus won’t affect me’, but in reality, it affected everyone!

Not necessarily themselves, but everyone will have had family or friends who caught it or even sadly died. Lockdown was a totally new experience to us all; some people coped better than others and some of us gained new skills or new friends from it, so there is always a silver lining to the cloud that loomed over 2020! I think. Boris could have handled the pandemic way better and saved many lives instead of telling us mixed messages!

Coronavirus has been a rollercoaster of a year and the NHS and all the key workers are amazing and we all need a good rest from it all. My family has been quite lucky as all of us, apart from me, have been double vaccinated; nobody has had COVID-19 and dad earned more, as he had to quarantine and test all the time, as he works abroad in Mexico. I feel lucky that all my friends and family are safe and all we need to do now is keep being cautious and we will get through this!

The COVID-19 pandemic was unlike any other experience in my life, though it’s hard to explain my thoughts about the last two years in such a small time, I’ll try.

I was in France skiing when the first case in the UK was discovered, and I later found out that someone very close to our hotel resort got COVID, which was a big deal at the time. When we were told that we were going into lockdown, I thought, like the rest of us, that it would be over in a few months.

Now, looking back, it makes me feel as if I was in WWI, with people saying ‘the war will be over by Christmas’ and ‘we’ll be back at school before the end of the school year’, now these comments sound to me like naïve comments said miles in the past.