I am breaking.
No.
Broken.

I have 3 massive deadlines to hand in 2 weeks time. Works out to be around 9000 words all told.
Have I been able to do any of the work that leads to those 9000 words.. No.

Why am I still doing this?

We discovered my mother has breast cancer in the middle of this pandemic, with this lockdown now it’s going to be more difficult than ever. No one can go see her when she’s in hospital for a week after her surgery, we must all self isolate before the surgery, I lose the support of physically seeing my best friend which will certainly take a toll on my mental health. I’ll have to learn from home, unlike during the “circuit breaker” lockdown of November, where my one day a week to travel to university was my saving grace. 2021 has only just begun and it feels as awful as last year, if not worse.

Once again, University students have been completely neglected by the Government. There was zero mention of Universities and their students in tonight’s speech, and the only time University students have been mentioned during this pandemic is when we were blamed for the second wave. Why are we not on the agenda for recognition? Do the government believe that we are immune to the pandemic?

Being a third year university student is tough as it is, and the government has failed to provide any coherent support or guidance for us in this difficult time. We are still required to pay rent for a house that we are not legally allowed to live in, we are still being charged the full tuition fee for remote learning, and we are still expected to produce high quality work with no access to campus facilities. and face to face teaching.

Are we a joke to you boris? I am not alone when I say that my mental health has completely deteriorated. I am stuck in my childhood bedroom with no motivation to finish my degree, or to do anything really. I feel numb. We deserve compensation either financially, or the renewal of the non-detriment policy for our submissions. Both would be preferred.

Though I must add that this submission is in no way aimed at my university lecturers- the government are the real culprits. Not us. My lecturers have all been so supportive, and I know that every single one of them tried their hardest to deliver their modules as normal as possible. I was one of the lucky ones because I even managed to get a few hours of face-to-face teaching, but this was not a universal experience for undergrads.

This needs to be the last national lockdown; I don’t know how much I can take anymore. I just want to give my grandparents a hug.

Its been 294 days since I last stepped foot into university. Will I ever sit among my classmates again? It seems I may be a masochist.. I’m paying Thousands for added stress and impossible deadlines and accommodation I am not legally permitted to return to.

Trying to unravel how all of this happened so quickly is perhaps the hardest part. Hindsight is a beautiful thing, and if we knew what we now know back in January or February this year, things could have been very different for the United Kingdom.

January 31st. I remember the date very well as it was the day Britain was due to leave the EU. Or at least enter the ‘transition period’. Boris Johnson’s Conservative party had just won a thumping majority in the General Election the month before and may as well have been walking on water. As I refreshed the home page on BBC News to see what the update was on domestic affairs, a notification appeared at the bottom of my screen: “First case of Covid-19 detected in the UK”, or something along those lines. “Oh, how inconvenient, I’m sure they’ll get on top of it fairly quickly”, I told myself, before reading up on the Brexit shenanigans.

We’d heard about it on the News. The deadly virus in China that had been detected in other countries. But not many of us thought it would radically change our lives for months, or even years to come. After all, we’d lived through SARS, swine flu, and ebola. None of them brought the world to a standstill.

February was fairly normal. The amount of Covid-19 stories began to increase in the news, some students at my university started to wear face masks and there were stories emerging about a big rise in cases across the continent (Italy in particular), but we went about our daily lives: the good, the bad, the exciting and the mundane.

I took myself abroad in February to the canary islands for a week. 25 degrees of heat at that time of year is more than a treat if you are from somewhere as miserable as the UK in winter! A few days after returning to Birmingham, the news was engulfed with stories about a covid outbreak in a Tenerife hotel, that was within walking distance from where I was staying. “Shit!”, I thought to myself. But even then, I wasn’t phased. I sat up and took more attention, as it was close to home for the first time, but off out I went that night for drinks with my friends.

In the following week, some worrying news from Italy began to emerge. Covid had hit the region of Lombardy badly, and local lockdowns began to be imposed. Even then, I did not really think this would become as big as it did. I had a festival booked in Italy later that year funnily enough and the most I thought was probably “It may not go ahead”. If only I knew 90% of my plans for 2020 would not go ahead! Of course, Covid-19 was rapidly spreading across much of the world in January and February 2020, possibly even before. But because testing infrastructure was not yet in place in most countries, the reporting on the true amount of cases was wildly inaccurate. Still, I carried on as normal. I took myself to a rave at the end of February and got w*nkered. That was my last night out at a nightclub.

March was when it suddenly dawned on me, that this was serious. More and more people began wearing masks at the supermarkets, the Prime Minister began to hold daily news conferences. You have to realise, none of us had really experienced anything like this before. It was a unique experience. My University professors did not quite know how to react: “Nothing to worry about”, we were told. “The trip to Amsterdam next week will still be going ahead”, except it was swiftly cancelled soon after. So, me and my friends decided to take ourselves off to the Lake District instead.

March 16th, we departed Birmingham and life was relatively normal. Everywhere was still open, though supermarket shelves were void of essential items like toilet roll, due to panic buying. We stopped off at ASDA and stocked up on food, drinks and whatever else for the week. That week, the world went to shit, and guess what? It was one of the best of my life. As the apocalypse occurred, EastEnders stopped filming and football matches were cancelled, we were blissfully ignorant in the hot tub, sipping champagne with the smell of horse manure in the background. Lovely stuff. But deep down, we knew that when we returned home, life would be radically different.

As we left Cumbria, and arrived back in Birmingham on March 20th, the streets were almost empty. Boris Johnson announced the closure of the pubs that day and the following Monday, we were notified about the national lockdown.

I’ve hated the whole thing. I’ve had some good moments, don’t get me wrong, but 2020 looked set to be a great year. Instead of spending my 21st in New York as planned, I spent it at home, with much more subdued celebrations. My graduation was cancelled as were the summer holidays. Alas, it’s not been all bad. I graduated from university with a 2:1 and have gone on to study for a master’s degree and I have visited some amazing places in the UK, and will absolutely holiday more in this country, in future. I am also aware that some people have had it much worse than me. Some of my friends have had Covid and I lost two family members to it. The raving community in Birmingham also lost one of our most notable promoters and DJ’s, as he tragically took his life. Whilst I can not profess to know the reasons behind this, I would hazard a guess that the harshness of lockdowns and the impact they have had on nightlife, amongst other things have had an unprecedented effect on people’s mental health.

I would also be lying if I said I have followed the rules dogmatically. At first, I was very strict, but around the summer, I have taken more risks. I am sure some people will accuse me of being selfish and history may judge such actions harshly. But I am not the only one. We are human beings and are social creatures. It would be impossible to have followed such rules religiously for almost an entire year. They go against everything we know. So, I did eat out to help out. I have seen some friends. I haven’t locked myself in my room since March.

All the same, I realise the seriousness of Covid and have found myself in arguments with ludicrous conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers alike. It’s December 2020 as I write this and recently, I have been a bit more mindful of the rise in cases and the mutated strain that has caused a huge second wave. Christmas this year will be tough and January is looking bleak.

But there is hope. A vaccine has been approved and has already been administered to 500,000 people in the UK. Another vaccine is scheduled to be approved next week. Hopefully, by Easter enough vulnerable people will have been vaccinated to take the pressure off the NHS and we can start to return to a bit of normality. God knows, we need it.

I suppose if this year has taught me anything, it’s to not take things for granted.

Foregrounding the following – I am a healthy 20 year old studying at Bangor with a dissertation focused on covid stories – We forced to self isolate after my housemate tested positive for Covid 19.

After I got the phone call to self isolate, I did not feel scared or a sense of dread – well only to phone into work and tell them I could not work for two weeks. I knew that I would be fine, I knew that my housemates would be fine, none of us (Luckily) do not fall into the vulnerable category.
These two weeks were boring but it was the little victories for me, the Tesco shop coming, the Zoom calls with my friends on the outside world and the occasionally drop off of ‘urgent’ supplies from those who lived near me. I was very lucky to have very mild symptoms of Covid 19 and knowing people who had more aggressive symptoms are my true heroes.

There are some aspects of my life that have changed post isolation, I now enjoy Adam Sandler films (I really was bored for entertainment), I now try to walk around my small city taking in the fresh air.
Finally I took some time and realised how lucky I am to have my health and friends that took time to Zoom me and drop off little treats like grapes .

I do not see these two weeks as lost but a needed break from work to catch up on Uni work and to well just be me.

I find it extremely hard to write about Covid. On the eve before the outbreak of Covid-19 I found myself unemployed after quitting a job. In hindsight, it was a very dangerous and risky move as the news about the virus was still coming in. However Covid inadvertently presented an opportunity. Strangely enough Covid was what was able to allow me to break into a job that I am not sure I would have been able to get otherwise. As the financial services sector rushed to move everything to work from home I already had all the equipment required and thus I was able to leverage this to obtain a job I never would have considered in the past.

That is not to say that the Covid pandemic has been all good. The biggest impact that it has had has been the utter decimation of my social life. As an introvert, my social life was something that I found very hard to develop and took years to cultivate. As the pandemic continued to drag on, things began to slow. Friends who I had known for years suddenly became harder to talk to as we couldn’t see each other. Messaging each other, which was something to do on the side of things, became a regular occurrence as the restrictions tightened. Conversation topics slowly began to exhaust as we talked to each other day after day trying to figure out ways to entertain each other, and it became a chore rather than something to do for fun.

However, what was truly shocking has been its affect on mental health, something that is often overlooked. I have seen parts of my family that I would never have considered as being susceptible to issues of a mental nature stumble. It is truly a humanising moment, when somebody you can sometimes view as invincible, buckles under the pressure and is struggling to work through the crisis.

Covid will likely define the coming decade as the damage will leave both seen and unseen scars on the world. In a post-pandemic world I would hope that we hold much of the initial attitudes that were brought out in the earliest days of the pandemic. That we are all in this together. That we need to support each other and extend help to those who need it. The cynical part of me believes that will not happen and that we’ll all want to pretend this never happened. That we’ll cover up the cracks that Covid has exposed instead of taking positive steps to fix them. I realise that the pandemic is but a fleeting moment in history and that nothing lasts forever, I also realise people who it has effected will last far beyond Covid’s brief span. There has been no talk as to how to help people in the long term past Covid and this worries me.

If we could capture the attitudes which we met the outbreak with, of empathy, willingness to help and co-operation then we really can build a post pandemic future to look forward to.