How lucky I had hung onto my 2020 New Year’s email! I cannot believe that only two months ago we had been planning a coach trip, having family meals together and going out to meetings, the cinema and meeting up with friends. Little did we know then about the massive changes and daily impacts that were ahead.

All along l had anticipated, like others, a wonderful New Year. 2020 sounded like a great landmark: Two thousand centuries, a couple of decades, a leap year followed by the Olympics! Surely it was going to be a great year!

Never count your chickens - You don’t know what’s round the corner! These are some of the proverbs that come to mind. Doubtless the reader will add their own to these. The term Tsunami comes to mind, preceded by ‘Global’. China is a huge country on the other side of the world. Whoever had heard of Wuhan?

Here in England we were contemplating the meaning of ‘BREXIT’ with all its dubious implications. Depending on which side of the fence allegiances fell, there were mixed feelings ranging from elation to depression. As we watched with sympathetic concern, people were ordered to withdraw from the streets and stay home. They hung out of apartment windows to keep contact. A few masked figures went scurrying past armoured police vehicles.

Fast forward a week or two: there it was, already in Europe, in Northern Italy, in what seemed to be the speed of lightening. Except it wasn’t light at all. Miraculously, my daughter-in-law and grandson, who had been on a family visit to the north of Venice, managed to make it back safely to Leeds.

Across Europe, a growing darkness spread as news bulletins raced to keep pace with a seemingly invading, invisible spectre that appeared to take lives, as if a hungry hunter. We listened, watched and read with dismay the unfolding terror that inwardly we’d dreaded, slowly unfold. The strip of water that had acted as a shield and protected us decades before, was now powerless.