THE YEAR That Was

On the morning of 1 January 2020, I woke up alone in my friend’s London apartment. She’d taken off to Paris for a romantic trip with her partner. Homeless after a traumatic break-up, I had spent the night of New Year’s Eve on her couch by myself with a delivery pizza. I purposely went to sleep at 10pm, worried about how sad and isolated I would feel knowing all over the city people were dancing, kissing, and celebrating the turn of the new decade together. As I dragged my belongings across the city to another sublease — the fifth time I’d moved house in five weeks — a distressed woman told me she needed my last £20 for a train. She might’ve been telling the truth, but the frustration I felt at myself afterwards, compounded with how alone I felt, made me start to cry. It was 8am on the first day of the year, and within weeks I’d realise how lucky I was that a stupid £20 note and residual heartbreak were my biggest worries thus far.

At the time, word of the coronavirus was spreading, but I, like most others, didn’t pay it much attention. Wuhan, China felt a world away, and the very notion of a global pandemic that would shut the entire world down, cause the deaths of more than one million people, and set off an economic crisis didn’t even seem feasible.