Reporting the news in lockdown – homeschooling, home-working, and home-living as a Star reporter

I’m heading out for the weekly shop and, as usual, I can feel a few butterflies of anticipation in my stomach.

Once I’m in the car, I drive straight past the nearby supermarket, which has a queue of people right down the street, and turn a couple of corners to our local shop, which has a smaller selection, but is always quiet.

In a lot of ways, things feel calmer now out and about.

Yes, everyone you meet is togged up in a variety of face garb, and the person on the checkout greets you from behind a glass partition, but there’s less urgency in those walking the aisles than there was in the weeks leading up to lockdown.

I feel strangely reassured today at the sight of the fully-stocked shelves of toilet roll.

When I get home, my daughter Imogen now knows better than to run straight towards me at the door, as she would have done a couple of months ago.

Instead, my five-year-old stands back patiently while I scrub my hands, unpack the shopping, peel off my jumper, scrub my hands again, and then finally I can wrap my arms around her.

It’s been six weeks since the house became a school, an office, a home and our entire source of entertainment.

I don’t think anybody would have believed, had we been told back at Christmas, what our lives would become in 2020. I’ve used the word unprecedented so much, it’s lost all meaning.

We’ve had a few bumps, as we - like everybody else - work to adjust to living every aspect of our lives under one roof, but on the whole, we’re lucky.

My husband and I both still have our jobs, and the three of us are fit and healthy.

Imogen has mixed feelings about the folder full of work that pings into my email each Sunday evening from school.

She misses her friends, and her teachers, and she enjoys the distraction of the work, at times, but she finds the blending roles of mummy and teacher a bit tough to deal with.

To be honest, so do I.

And where, before lockdown, there used to be hours every day alone in my home office, working in peace, there now....isn’t.

There are maths and science workbooks, lesson plans with too many missing ticks, colourful drawings and notes, and brightly coloured pencils with novelty rubbers on them spilled all over my desk.

A pink tablet, a box of Lego, and a half-finished jigsaw litter the floor around my feet, and there are constant complaints of boredom and pleas for TV or devices, interspersed with the guilt-inducing ‘mummy, will you play with me?’

Two rooms away, I can hear a steady stream of calls and video conferences as my husband attempts to run a company from his makeshift office in our spare bedroom.

It’s not the most productive soundtrack. But it could be so much worse.

I’m not sure my job, like so many others, would really have been possible in lockdown 10 or 20 years ago.

Thanks to video calls, I’ve spoken to and interviewed dozens of people from all across the region in the past six weeks, without ever leaving my desk chair.

I’ve chatted face-to-virtual face with incredible people working on the frontline in our hospitals and care homes; inspirational teachers creating hundreds of PPE visors a week in their garages; and volunteers and genuine community heroes whose small actions are making a big difference each day.

I feel privileged to tell these people’s stories - to help create a snapshot of a historic time in all of our lives.

And while I’m glued to the daily PM conference at 5pm, as well as the news app on my phone for national and global updates, I’ve never been more proud of the work my colleagues and I are doing in local news. Telling the local stories, and keeping people - whose families have trusted us for generations - connected to one another, and to what’s happening around them, at a regional level.

One day coronavirus will be relegated to the status of something that we, as a community, as a country, as a species, survived.

And our survival didn’t depend on us heading to battlefields to fight a war, as it did for our grandparents and great-grandparents.

We simply had to stay home, and support those doing battle on our behalf - in hospitals and GPs offices, schools, shops, and care homes across the country.

And we, at The Star, will be by your side every step of the way, helping you - our community - through to the other side, as we have so many times before.

We may be working a little differently these days, but we’re still right here, scattered in improvised home offices across South Yorkshire; just a phone call, an email, a tweet, or a DM away.

Oh, and if you call me, and a five year old answers?

Leave a message. I’ll call you right back.