Years from now people will talk about this. This is history happening now and my family and I just about managed to get away before everything changed...
It all started for me when I was watching the news one day in early February. I loathed watching the news because it was always so upsetting. I often had nightmares from seeing desperate mothers who’d lost their children too early, starving babies and lost refugees. There was always so much desperation and suffering. Anyway, I happened to catch a glimpse of the news one day by accident showing somewhere in China where people in full white decontamination gear were barricading residents of a town in their houses. This image really struck me. It looked like something out of history of the past. Some kind of plague had ravaged this family and it was so contagious they had to be sealed into their house: how absolutely awful. In addition to this I saw ladies on Instagram talking about isolating and how everything was getting so scary on the news. I still managed to just listen to it on the radio rather than watch on the TV. It was a general rumbling that something was coming but no one really knew what was going on or how serious it was going to be. Our family heard little more about this until we went on holiday to Dubai in February 2020. Even then it seemed to be hearsay and I didn’t look into it so knew little about it.
About four people on our plane wore masks and we saw no one in Dubai with a mask, gloves or any suggestion that people shouldn’t be out or in contact with others. We went to water parks, visited sights, did the dessert experience and had a truly amazing time. We sat in bustling restaurants, watched fountain shows with thousands of others and even crammed into a lift for the full 124 floors up the Burj Khalifa with about 20 other people. See the photo below taken in the lift...
When we travelled back on our full plane from Dubai my husband sat next to a couple who had had their dream holiday cut short due to this new virus sweeping the world. The couple had just joined our flight from an adjoining flight from Singapore. They had been on a cruise but were unable to dock at various countries in Asia due to the virus. Goodness knows where others on the plane had come from. There were a few more people with facemasks including a family with children. We landed and the boy behind us was sick everywhere; we simply said at least he waited until we had landed! The smell of sick is really not the most pleasant thing for a 9 hour flight! We’d had a fairly bumpy landing so when there was another pile of sick we had to avoid as we disembarked I didn’t really think anything of it! Not until now.
On entry to the UK we were herded into pens, well queues, you know you’re back in England as soon as you join a queue! Only families had to go through the manual passport control. Any single adults were allowed to go through the electric scanners. It made no sense, we had exhausted children crying and hot and bothered parents queuing for a few turnstiles but we made it through and there were no further checks. No temperature checks: nothing. Our return flight was February 21st 2020. By March 19th 2020 all schools in the UK were shut down and we were all in lockdown.