There’s no question that everyone was looking forward to turning their back on 2020 and looking forward to the new in 2021. The news of the COVID-19 vaccine being approved and starting to be administered in the UK before Christmas was a definite light at the end of a very dark, long tunnel, even if it does feel like it could be a lengthy wait until the program is fully rolled out to all.

However, 2021 has had different ideas and with the steadily increasing numbers of positive cases in the UK and the discovery of a new highly infectious variant of COVID-19, my suspicions that another lockdown was just around the corner have rapidly come true. One week in and we find ourselves more or less back where we were last March, with G and M home-schooling, me back to full-time working from home and this time the big difference of Mike being able to continue to work.

With COVID-19 dominating the picture worldwide, it was difficult to imagine that anything else could top the news headlines and yet Mike and I sat watching the news last night with growing disbelief of what we were seeing unfold in the US. The US has had a turbulent year with COVID-19, the BLM riots and movement and the presidential elections, but nothing prepared us for the storming of the Capitol building yesterday in protest of the electoral results. The news footage coming out of Washington was, quite frankly, terrifying to watch and actually quite hard to believe as it played more like scenes from a dystopian story than anything I could have imagined would actually happen.

I don’t know what the rest of 2021 will bring, although I hope for a more positive end to the year than the beginning has been so far. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I hope that it is a peaceful year for you and that the turbulent waters we currently find ourselves in soon settle down.