BLOG: Leaving the islands for the first time felt disorientating

It should have been a place so familiar that I instantly felt at home. But instead, a moment which I had spent months looking forward to, left me with the most disorientating feeling. Last week was my first chance to return to the UK since February. All of my family and friends from my pre-Jersey days live there. In normal times I would visit once a month but this year … well, I don’t need to explain - we all know what’s been happening.

There have been times in the last few months that I have physically ached to be back there, for all this to be a horrible dream and for normality to simply resume. And when I’ve been longing to get back there and see loved ones I’ve often had to force the thoughts from my mind for fear of upsetting myself.

Sitting in the studio each night gives me chance to watch all the reports we broadcast looking at how different people’s lives have been affected by coronavirus. There are couples whose weddings have had to be rearranged, people who had to wait weeks to see loved ones in care homes that are just a short distance from where they live, others who have lost their jobs and worst of all, those who have lost loved ones because of a virus that didn’t even exist this time last year. For me it has been the separation from loved ones that I have struggled most with.

In the days leading up to going back, I’d spent time trying to prepare myself for what it might be like. I remembered the feelings I had here back in March when restrictions were starting. The times I would get out of my car door and wonder if there were virus particles near me in the air. The feeling of whether just brushing against a wall accidentally could contaminate me. Those early days where there was a genuine fear of getting too close to another human being.

As soon as I got off the plane at Heathrow those feelings were back, all those same fears which in more recent weeks have faded slightly as the number of cases has fallen here in the Channel Islands. Knowing there are so many more cases there, I felt a genuine fear just being out on the street that the virus was around me.

So what did I learn while I was in the UK?

The biggest thing was how much I feel more people here have been sticking to the rules more carefully (and continue to do so in Jersey where we still have restrictions) than in the UK where I’ve seen for myself people ignoring the rules. Friends tell me this is nothing new. They gather in large groups, they ignore social distancing, they don’t think it’ll happen to them. It shocked me.

Given that this isn't a feeling I've had so strongly here in the Channel Islands I wonder whether people here have responded better to the messages from our respective governments in a way that not everyone has in the UK.

Walking through the underground station in London I was getting more and more angry by the people not even trying to stay one, let alone two metres apart. The number of people who clearly think a face mask only needs to be worn over their mouth, rather than their nose as well, was astounding. And don’t get me started on the people who just wear them round their neck. Oh and the two guys who got on my tube train and clearly thought it was fine to remove their masks and drink cans of Stella instead. Do they not get it? Hello? There’s a pandemic.

But it was the moment I arrived back in Leeds that I found the strangest. It’s the city in which I’ve lived since university before arriving in Jersey nearly two years ago. I’d been preparing myself for the myriad of signs and sanitiser points and one way systems that would make the place look different. I was ready for that. But what I hadn’t really got ready for was the extent to which life has also carried on, without me seeing it.

Somehow I’d had the feeling that coronavirus had brought the world to a grinding halt. But actually not. The train station there has been renovated, a large building outside that used to be surrounded by hoardings is now uncovered with two new glass floors on top that weren’t there before, and even in the house I’ve shared with friends for some eight years, it’s amazing how many things are now in different places.

Coronavirus hasn’t stopped the world turning in the way it may sometimes seem. It’s changed things, but things haven’t stopped.

And in the same way that while I’ve been here I’ve been thinking about the people I’ve been missing in the UK, I also spent time there reflecting on what life has been like for the last few months here in the Channel Islands.

I remembered those days when we were only allowed out for our two hours of limited state-sanctioned exercise and I’d wander to a beach and walk for as long as I could with the waves crashing next to me and the sun in my eyes.

I came to the conclusion that being stranded on a beautiful, sunny rock in the middle of the English Channel isn’t so bad after all. For now, there are fewer cases of coronavirus here which is itself a comfort. And if you have to be in lockdown anywhere, there are far worse places to spend it than somewhere that is warmer and sunnier with beaches and sea all around you.