To a New Dawn: Letters of Solidarity Anthology

LIAM SKILLEN, 22 Dear Reader, I don’t know how to start this letter. I was not prepared for a worldwide pandemic, and I am no more prepared to write this letter. Many talk about lockdown or the virus as if it’s in the past tense, but for many others – myself included – it is still very much the present. I don’t think I will ever live my life completely in the sun again. It will always be overshadowed by coronavirus. It will always be shaded by a dark cloud, mockingly hanging over my wrinkled 2020 diary.

“A worldwide pandemic, how exciting!” I thought, as we closed down the cinema I work at, and we all took goodie bags of food home (and ridiculously large bags of pick and mix). All the wonderful things I’d do! I had never had this much free time since the school summer holidays. I always wasted them watching TV reruns and playing on my Nintendo DS. Maybe I’d terrorise a frog in the garden pond for an afternoon before returning to my adolescent cave.

But, unlike that simpler time, I planned to actually do something this time around. The pottery and print-making class I signed up for may have been cancelled, but I could create at home. I could bake all the sweet treats I wanted (pre-flour shortages of course).

In truth, it was never likely I would achieve everything 67