3 years ago today……

It was an awfully anxious time. Our first grandchild was only 10 days old and I was worried about her and about my DD who lived over 100 miles away. We felt lucky we saw the baby two days before lockdown started but didn’t know when we would see her again. Thankfully, everyone has survived and even thrived and my DGD is now a beautiful bright 3 year old living a good life.

Mirren

I remember that ,Kate1941.
One of my daughters had told me we were about 2 weeks behind Italy.
I remember stating, confidently, that we would never get into that state !
How stupid was I ?

Italy were begging us to see what was happening to them and to take action. And when the government did do something they gave people several days notice so they could go out and party. Which they did. Matlock Bath eg was rammed the weekend before lockdown one. By that time my family, young and old, were in siege mentality and had been for quite a while. Johnson (and his father) believe in letting people do pretty much as they please.

I remember that ,Kate1941.
One of my daughters had told me we were about 2 weeks behind Italy.
I remember stating, confidently, that we would never get into that state !
How stupid was I ?

Three year's ago yesterday our flight from Australia through Abu Dhabi was cancelled so we ended up staying there another 3 months! An extended holiday

It was scary - everything unknown. I remember the main road near me completely empty of traffic. It was eerie. I remember being labelled "elderly vulnerable" by Waitrose and getting priority for delivery slots. I remember unpacking those early deliveries and wiping/washing every item before putting it away! At that time we had no idea how Covid was transmitted.

My wife of 13 years had recently retired and had bought an apartment on a Small Canary Island. We had both just overwintered there and returned to the UK in February. At the start of March my daughter and SIL went out to the apartment for a long weekend and I looked after the grandchildren in London. They returned and I returned to where I live to be told by my wife that she really didn’t fancy getting locked down in the UK and had decided to bring a flight back to our island abode forwards and was leaving a few hours later. Bags packed she departed.
Lockdown there was shorter but harder and as soon as things opened up life there was back to a sort of normal, sunshine, beaches and fabulous food and wine.
I spent a total of 14 months alone here most of it spent walking on the hills and moors around where I live. We attempted to maintain a relationship via zoom and WhatsApp but it was impossible. I may never forgive her for abandoning me at the first real test of our marriage and the divorce is sadly ongoing.

Luckygirl3

I remember thinking that we would be fine as we are an island and the government will close the borders .... hmmm.
I remember thinking thank goodness my OH is not here ... he would have been frantic with worry.
I remember struggling to cope as OH had died a few weeks before ... I faced the prospect of lonely grieving separated from family and friends. It was hell.

Luckygirl, me too, and I was often to wonder how I would have coped with the Bodach’s dementia. I think I was grateful in a way that I could hide away from the world, without having to appear strong.

My older daughter, who has two children and a partner, had just been diagnosed with breast cancer,
Not only was there the worry of whether she would get prompt and effective treatment, but I could not be on hand to support her in person.
Thankfully, after a mastectomy, chemo, radiotherapy and reconstruction surgery she is doing well, and is just off to the French Alps with the family for some walking, maybe skiing, and just a general good time!

merlotgran A poignant post.
I imagine in hindsight lockdown was a blessing in some respects.
I felt myself and my husband grew closer in lockdown, we had time for each other.

I was staying with mum as she had broken her wrist and I was waiting for my summer job to start. I was thinking by the time she had the cast removed, everything would be back to normal. Duh! It was start of roughly 16 months of watching mum be diagnosed with Alzheimers and then see her go from a mobile, laughing and joking person to a non verbal, bed-ridden mum who no longer recognised her daughter. Covid itself just hung around in the background. We had more imporant things to deal with. Still dealing with the aftermath.

My husband had just been diagnosed with Dementia. Sadly he died last October of Pneumonia and Kidney Failure. I feel we beat Covid and Dementia.

merlotgran, your post is so tender and moving. 3 years ago we were able to enjoy some of lockdown. Two easy / well trained dogs we could walk miles in our moorland area. My husband made bread, I baked, both cooked and spent a lot of time in the garden.
I’m so relieved we made the best of everything. My husband died last year, 6 months from devastating diagnosis. I will be our 40th wedding anniversary tomorrow.
These threads encourage us to enjoy life as much as we can.

Looking back I was enjoying Joe Wick’s work outs, digging the allotment, coffee in the sun and relishing the peace. Saying goodbye to my daughter before haring up the M1 was difficult but she coped really well. We stayed fit and healthy to avoid being a burden to anybody. We have had covid twice now despite being careful 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Like others on here I was spending lockdown with my DH who had declining health so we made it as much fun as possible. We celebrated our wedding anniversary by recreating the meal we had for our first one - the typical sixties menu of prawn cocktail, steak chasseur and black forest gateau. How did we ever think Blue Nun was sophisticated??

Little did I know it would be our last and he would be gone in just under a year.

We lived in a beautiful, isolated area so felt safe although we worried about our family even though they were all fortunate enough to work from home. The sun shone, we gardened, cooked, drank more than we should have done and watched lots of telly.

Today we would have been married 55 years so I am grateful for those precious months of contentment.

I was pregnant and CEV. The nightmare that followed of having a C-section under GA as it was deemed to dangerous for the staff for patients to have local.
No partners.
No visitors.
Babe was 34 week gestation so in NICU initially.
Couldn’t see my elder two for two and a half weeks.
Stuck in a hospital room for two weeks, just me and my babe, curled up together in a dreamy, milky world of our own.

I belong to a sort of social media site where you can post 1 photo per day and write a journal entry as as well so I know exactly how I felt: depressed as we'd just been told we shouldn't drive to our place of exercise.
I still believed that the lockdown wouldn't last more than a few weeks, more fool me!
I didn't cope well with the pandemic, getting more depressed as time went on. Every day for the first 500 days I posted a picture and wrote a journal entry.

I was in hospital recovering from open heart surgery. I live in Ireland and was in the Mater Private hospital in Dublin. I had previously been admitted to the Mater Public hospital and got as far as being in surgical gown but ICU was full so came home. I was therefore extremely surprised on the first Monday of lockdown here in Ireland to get a phone call at 9am asking me to get to the Mater private by 2pm. We are at least one and a half hours from Dublin and I had a bag to pack. I was greeted at the hospital door by a large security chap Who ticked me off his list and then put an atm out to stop my husband from entering. There followed eleven days without seeing a soul except nursing staff, cleaners, catering and doctors. Whilst I was very grateful to get the op done it was truly surreal not to have any visitors. When my husband came to pick me up I got the biggest but gentle hug and then cried for the first half hour of the journey home.

I checked back in my journal and on 28 March 2020, we had a FaceTime session with elder son, partner and our granddaughter. Elder son was working in the Cabinet Office, Downing Street in the midst of all the covid shenanigans. That evening, OH, younger son and I watched the film, Contagion. Very apt! I went shopping in the village and we all had to keep our distance. There were arrows on the floor. It wasn’t long before we arranged Waitrose deliveries.

I retired on April 1, and kept a diary of everything I did for the first few days. We were cleaning up the garden in the house that we just purchased, and my husband was not feeling well. I now assume it was covid.

I remember feeling claustrophobic because of being confined to home, even though I was able to spend most of the day in the garden. Mr GO became obsessive about having news channels on all day, so lack of escape, apart from to the garden was torture. At least I used the time to learn to crochet and a different style of lacemaking. I remember being out in my small front garden the first week of lockdown, cutting the lawn, and getting the stink eye from one couple walking by, who clearly thought I shouldn't be out there, even though they were, and not on their own premises at that! I also remember trying to pass the time one day by reading, and throwing the book across the garden in despair at the prospect of indefinite house arrest, and one rainy day, after the 'mandatory' daily walk round grey dismal streets, feeling that if I didn't wake up again the next morning, that would be a relief. I also remember being laughed at by supermarket staff for mask wearing before it became mandatory.
On the upside, the weather was wonderful, I enjoyed the company of a fox and her litter of cubs who were living under our shed, and I had a guilty sense of relief that my Mum was no longer with us, as she would not have understood or been able to exist without our family rota of visits to care for her.
Does anyone remember some scientific chap interviewed on the TV the Xmas before lockdown about the possible threat from covid, and who said it was nothing to worry about? Wonder what became of him?

I keep a journal. Apart from domestic matters (I made Raymond Blanc's scone recipe). I wrote: "My world has shrunk". I also recorded the Spectator summary and analysis for the day. We were all expecting the restrictions to be lifted in a very few weeks. Here's what the Spectator said:

"*When will this end?*

It's the second week of the coronavirus lockdown, and understandably people are starting to look for an end point. Ministers and their advisers are also understandably refusing to put a date on when restrictions could start to lift, but today at the Downing Street press conference, we were given more of a sense of when the peak of cases might come. During a presentation on the number of people suffering from the virus and the way in which the public has changed its behaviour since the lockdown was announced, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said:

'What I've said recently is that we expect this to get worse over the next couple of weeks because there is a lag phase between getting the disease and people turning up in hospital. So we would expect to see a continuation of this over the next two or three weeks then a stabilisation and a gradual decrease thereafter. The number of hospital admissions - to repeat - has gone up roughly the same amount each day, suggesting that we are not on a fast acceleration at the moment.'"

My sister and myself had started clearing mums flat after her death in January.

Because of the covid rules, we never spent time together, but did shifts - morning or afternoon so that we didn’t break the rules.

Oh goodness it’s hard to imagine now that it actually happened! I remember the month before saying to my daughter that the news about the virus in China was a bit worrying and her saying to me ‘it won’t be anything’ ! It was all sort of unreal…..I was so scared of going to the supermarket, it was always me that went I felt at least sort of I knew what to do and that my dh might have not paid enough attention. Imagine now washing all that shopping every week, bread bags and everything 😩 It was a very strange time - I would wake up each day wondering what day it was and not believing we were in the middle of it. I kept thinking I had it and didn’t and then when I did get it a year later I couldn’t believe I had it ! Crazy. I said to my dh the other day if our parents were alive and we told them we had made the picture on the wall during lockdown they would wonder what we were talking about .

Three years ago (yesterday), my mother passed away in a nursing home. She had been disabled for a long time, but she did not die from COVID. It was the best timing for her because she would not have survived a lockdown and not being able to see her loved ones. I was her primary caregiver for many years. So, I was grieving three years ago, as her death also in some ways was a relief, but also a trigger for much sadness on other levels. During the first year of lockdown, my granddaughter was born, and it was difficult to not be able to see and hold her until she was a year old, and the lockdown was lifted. I live in the U.S., and my son and DIL, and granddaughter live in the UK. Life has returned to some normalcy now.

One of my sons was emigrating to Canada in June of 2020, to be with his now wife. She is Canadian & all her family are there. He wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to go, but yes he was, me & DH was able to take him to the airport, no hugging goodbye or getting close too. In the car traveling he was adamant he stayed right in the back of car, windows open, at that time it was only temperature testing at the airport, he didn’t want to not be able to fly. It broke my heart not at least being able to hug him, really not knowing when I would physically see him again, but after 2 years he came home to visit and we went to Canada for his wedding.