Countdown to Lockdown

It has been a strange and difficult time for all of us with our 2020 not exactly panning out as we expected. For me, instead of enjoying a bumper year with full courses and many new tutors I found myself having to cancel everything for the foreseeable future and it was such a shock! It seemed unbelievable, and still seems very unreal sometimes. 

 

Back in the middle of March I should have been getting back on a plane and heading to Darwin to visit my youngest daughter and new baby in Australia. Instead I found myself ringing tutors to see if we could reschedule their courses and then emailing everyone booked in, course by course, to see if they were happy to move their spaces across to 2021. Everything happened so quickly and it was hard to process and I couldn’t take in that I was now having to undo all the work I had spent months preparing for, never mind mourning the fact that I wasn't going to get to see my daughter and grandson. 

 

Everyone else I contacted was also in shock but were happy to do whatever was necessary at the time and we got through the first initial stage of lockdown still reeling from the speed that things were changing and the speed at which the virus was taking hold in our communities. 

 

Now we are trying to come out of lockdown and the uncertainty is even greater. We hope to be able to continue with our Autumn programme but we don’t yet know how much more the rules will be relaxed or even if people will want to attend group gatherings. 

 

Baby steps are needed and whilst we have worked out how to enable social distancing in the studio, and how we might manage meal times we still wait to hear how our students feel…….