Loss and Change

My job moved onto MSTeams. I worried about the people I was supporting. My own family got Covid and there was time spent in hospital. Black hole. Not recovered from it yet.

Developed excema on my hands from scrubbing and hand gel was everywhere. At the start of the pandemic we all thought it was transferred by touch

Although I was lucky many around me were not. This is the SOS button that it seems to me we all needed so we can help and look out for each other.

Hi - I have put these images in for all the categories as they show how we quickly managed to adapt to the changes. At work and at home I was aware of things like discarded masks and all the signs - my grandchildren and the little ones I work with growing up in this strange new world of social distance and hand cleaning!

Noticing all the other photographs on here of the signs I thought I would add mine. For me this is one of the single biggest changes we saw during the pandemic with all the signs that were put up in shops and public places. It has made me think about young children and teenagers who are growing up being frightened of other people. I have seen it make a difference to the young people I work with with mental health becoming so much of a bigger problem

Masks are the most obvious memorable item from the lockdown. I remember when only a few people wore them and as the lockdown went on for longer and longer more and more people started to wear them. Of course then they became mandatory and everyone was wearing them

Loss and Change (shopping photo)

Going shopping for essentials was a fairly regular task on my work lunchbreaks before the pandemic. Shortly before the first lockdown in the supermarket near my office I found scenes in virtually every aisle of empty shelves – only a punnet of tomatoes was available in the ‘bulk buy’ section. I’ve been mainly working from home ever since.

Early into lockdown my wonderful Mother-in-Law (Pamela) and I availed of online meditation meetings to stay connected, and to contribute to sending a collective sense of belonging out into the world for others at a time when we needed to be more physically apart. I would see her pop up in the message box to wish everyone good morning. I would smile to know she was there with me, that we couldn’t be, in those moments, kept apart. We particularly enjoyed and benefitted from the Tea Meditations on a Friday morning hosted by the Tara Centre in Lancaster (https://www.taracentrelancaster.org.uk/ ) and the most wonderful Buddhist Monk Jitei. We both loved tea, time to think, calm and peace. Those 33 weeks of connecting experiences continue to ground my sense of belonging and my connection to her now that she has had to leave this physical world behind. Whilst people often describe the offline as real and the online as somehow not so real – each one of those experiences and interactions were completely real, close and in no way did we feel apart.

This image belongs in Loss and Change. the image shows a No Entry sign which seems to sum up a lot of what happened in the first part of the Coronavirus and has kept on happening. No entry to work, relationships and sometimes no entry to our own lives

Home shopping goes in the loss and change theme because our shopping habits changed completely. Competition for shopping slots was very tough especially in the first part of the Covid wave. I stayed with delivery slots for a long time even after we could go back in the shops but the extra expense got the better of me in the end.

Loss and change

My perception of the world in which I believed I lived and had lived for 40+ years was shattered. The narratives from the government about keeping safe, a mandatory vaccine and numerous instructions that seemed to fly in the face of science and logic left me floundering. My belief in the media’s portrayal withered because it was so biased and I watched astonished that care workers could be permitted to lose their jobs for not taking an experimental vaccine and that it nearly applied to NHS staff. Somehow it never hit social workers, but that worried me – what about students on placement who like me had chosen to trust their immune systems? What if they lost their place, what if I was the next person on the list to lose my job, because I hadn’t complied? I have never felt so discriminated against or hidden as ‘the unvaccinated’. It was taboo to talk about my choice. I have become stronger in trusting myself and more confident in making different choices to most.