ISOLATION DIARIES PART 74: MISSING PEOPLE

I listened to the radio as the news came through. More than 100,000 gone in the UK now. It's a grim milestone, and one that seems just so  absurd given where we were a year ago.

And it was only a year ago - reports that it was spreading through China, that Wuhan was in lockdown, that the Chinese State machine was bulldozing people's houses to build more hospitals. The virus had yet to make it to Europe, and it was still a distant rumble in Washington.

I'm starting to greatly miss my family. Last week, my eldest sister had a big birthday, and instead of the usual hilarity and hijinks of a family get together, I had to push a feeble card through her letterbox. It felt so wrong.

Then two days ago, my Mum had to go to her friend's funeral - a lady who hadn't died from COVID but had had complications from a different problem. It would have been so nice to have been able to drive her to the crematorium, or perhaps better yet, just put an arm around her to let her know that everything's going to be okay. I miss her.

But there's missing people, and then there are missing people: folks who aren't coming back to normal life with us; people who were taken before their time, by this hellish virus. And in this country, there are now more of those than could pack into Wembley Stadium.

Being stuck here, writing about classification of URLs and message management and release notes hasn't exactly given me the feeling that I'm helping very much. At best, my greatest contribution to the battle is simply to stay at home - though I wish I could do more.

Do you remember when 20,000 was a 'worst case scenario'? It seems so long ago, that first wave.

But let's be positive. As it stands, nearly seven million people have been vaccinated in the UK. That's great; forget Wembley, that's the whole of London.

And the more that number goes up, the closer we get to winning this war. The beach might seem full of stranded starfish, but it matters that we make a start. That's a lot of people, and someone somewhere has done a phenomenal job to get that many people protected.

I miss my people. I miss the niblings and my sisters; I miss my mum and my dad, and I miss all the people who light up my world like sunlamps. These are my missing people, but my desperate hope, and I'm so aware how sad this might be if you've lost someone in that terrible hundred thousand, is that they won't be missing forever.