When all is said and done, we are united by this shared experience.

At Tesco on Friday I queued up at two-metre intervals outside the door. A 20-minute shop became a two-hour expedition – not unlike Christmas, but with less stress and more goodwill; more nods and smiles, a greater recognition perhaps of the things we have incommon in this moment of crisis.
Sheffield's Millennium Gallery is currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemicSheffield's Millennium Gallery is currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic
Sheffield's Millennium Gallery is currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic

Nobody was panic buying; everyone was thoughtfully following the new rules and taking time to thank the workers stocking the shelves, collecting the trollies, working the tills – some of the many people who are keeping us safe and fed, who are rising to the challenge that we currently face.

It’s already a cliché, but what a crazy few weeks this has been.

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After five adrenaline-fuelled days of preparing for and carrying out the closure of the museums, embracing home working and virtually keeping the show on the road, the move to complete lockdown meant we’ve had to ramp up a gear, then power down in quick succession.

In rethinking what we define as essential, we’ve had to change priorities and focus on what matters.

We’ve thought about our families, friends and neighbours, about what we can do to help keep people safe.

At the back of our minds is a nagging worry for the people we love who are most vulnerable, and for the people we love who are charged with caring for them.

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There’s also a palpable collective empathy for the people we don’t really know but feel connected to and want to support.

In some ways it’s a lonely time, but it’s also a time where we are coming together in new ways – even with two metres between us we feel more interdependent than ever.

When all is said and done, we are united by this shared experience.

Like many people I’m adapting to working at home.

I’m missing my colleagues, but like lots of people I’ve fumbled my way through a range of free online conference-call apps and suddenly, I feel like an expert.

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I normally grumble about the volume of meetings, but the joy of meeting colleagues online, of seeing peoples’ faces is getting me through.

In an effort to avoid complete chaos, we’re nodding to protocol; someone takes the lead, we’re listening

attentively and only speaking when there is something worth saying.

It’s a revelation how something that never quite seemed to function as well as we’d like can be so much more effective when there is a real need to make it work.

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As a bonus, I love the little glimpses inside peoples’ homes – the bookshelves, the record collections, the family photos.

It’s like Through the Keyhole, but without the competition or the house envy; it’s more intimate somehow, and more interesting.

I live on a main road on route to the Northern General Hospital and the noise of the traffic and the car wash are often overwhelming.

Most mornings, I wake up just as the road is getting busy, people heading off early to beat the traffic.

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Over the past week the road has gradually become quieter and this morning I woke up to the dawn chorus in full pelt – the blackbirds, robins and thrushes singing loud and clear with a hopeful start to the day.

A daily dose of hope, wherever you find it, is a vital tonic.

When this crisis is over and 2020 is consigned to history, what will we remember?

I hope we’ll remember how we adapted and made the best of it, how people came together to support each other through the crisis and how we emerged stronger and with a new sense of perspective.

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I hope too that we’ll remember that moment when we learned not to take people for granted and understood that what we needed most was to be kind to each other.

We’ll also remember the people we’ve loved and lost, the people who gave us their friendship and the many, many people who worked so hard to keep us well.

The city’s collections hold archives, photographs and objects that tell the story of similar moments in our history – the walking stick used to rescue people from the flood waters in 1864; the logbooks that record the hundreds of children who were absent from school in summer 1918 because of the influenza pandemic; or the photos of women who ran the soup kitchens and prepared food parcels throughout during the miner’s strike.

They might seem unconnected, yet they’re things that have been kept as a reminder of human courage and strength.

They speak of how, no matter how bad things can be, people prevail.

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