Well this is a first - I am sat here writing this one straight off on the day of publication; the fog is still hanging around clearly!

While I was driving to work this morning it struck me how surreal the whole Covid-19 situation is: tens of thousands of people in the UK are self-isolating, the world is looking inwards, borders are closing, the Australian Prime Minister is telling off his population for hording, and a Conservative Government is throwing billions of pounds at the problem. You couldn’t make it up.

I was thinking about how I would react over the coming weeks, to whatever travel or life restrictions get placed on us, and I realised that, in actual fact, very little would change. As a bereaved parent, I’m pretty much already socially-isolated. Our address book is a shadow of its former self. We often cancelled events or going out because the pain of Evie’s death was too much to carry in public at that moment in time. We live in the moment, unable to plan or shop more than a couple of days in advance. As a bereaved parent community we have lived with the equivalent of the effects of Covid-19 since our child died, we just didn’t call it that; we called it grief.

Now take that thought a step further. Evie died 2 years, 2 months and 7 days ago. I’m still here. I’m functioning, albeit in a restricted way, and we deal with whatever emotional or practical problems that the loss throws at us. When you stop and think about it, as a bereaved parent, we have all clearly demonstrated the skills needed to ride the storm of the virus because we do it every day anyway. We have developed a resilience in coping with adversity. While half the world goes into meltdown and fills their garage with toilet rolls (Silly me, I hadn’t realised that diarrhoea was a symptom of the virus - oh no. wait - it isn’t!) we just carry on. But every day we get up, adjust our mask and face the world. We are equipped better than most to work through the impact of coronavirus simply because we live it every day.

So if you are worried about the virus and how it might affect you, don’t, because you already have the skills to deal with it. And you know what, if I catch it and it takes me, then I can give Evie a massive hug a bit sooner than I expected, and that is just fine.