“I’ve been furloughed from work and the colleges are closed, so the three of us are at home. My son works weekends plus some overtime, various days here and there, so at least he gets out of the house a little bit. 

My daughter accesses services for support with her disability and mental health, but the services aren’t open as usual and the people I normally speak to aren’t there. If anything were to happen, we’d be in an even worse position than if we were in crisis under normal circumstances. 

I’m bored more than anything. I’d rather be one of the people who are working, but I can’t be a carer – more power to the people that do it, don’t get me wrong, but that’s not something I can help with. I’ve applied for jobs in transport and call centres.

Knowing I don’t have a job now frustrates me, I quite enjoyed my job! I liked it there, I liked my team, and there were so many opportunities to move around the company. Now the company has a freeze on recruitment, so my temporary position wasn’t extended.

There’s only so much you can do indoors. Thankfully I’m no longer in a flat – if I compared my life to a year ago; what would Corona have looked like? It would’ve been much more difficult; that’s one way of staying sane about it and not getting down about it.

I’m doing my gardening, which is nice when the weather’s alright. Except when the local cats came and dug up my garden! There’s not much good being stuck in your premises all the time. One benefit I’ve had is when I go shopping, I haven’t had to queue. Standing for hours for some toilet roll – thankfully I haven’t had any of that. I haven’t not been able to get stuff.

People say when we come out of this everything will look different. I doubt the difference will remain forever. We’ll go back to the same, no one will care, no one will care about the homeless, everyone will be looking up to materialistic celebrities, nothing will change.”

Anonymous, mother