What have you all done this past year

While the world was shut up tight?

Did you descend into fear and worry

Or remain hopeful and bright?

Did your world shrink down inside

The four walls of your home?

Did the fears you’d never see another

Leave you bereft and all alone?

Did you miss a pint with good friends?

The chance to chat and laugh and joke.

Did you start to think it was a bad dream

From which you simply hadn’t woke?

Or, could you hear among the silence,

When traffic abruptly died away,

The songs of thrush and larks and robins

As the birds came out to play?

Did you stand in line for loo-rolls,

Wait in socially distanced queues?

Perhaps you piled your trolley up with

Far more than you could use?

Did the kitchen become your office?

The front room your meeting place?

Have many times did you set off

Without a mask upon your face?

Did your hands get sore and painful

From washing umpteen times each day?

Did you, at first, tune in at 5pm

To hear what that BJ had to say?

Did you take your kitchen scissors,

Grab loved ones unaware, 

Then, with a snip and a cut and an eager trim,

Attend to unruly hair?

Perhaps you mastered a foreign language?

Took up a hobby long since planned?

Learnt to bake? Or sew? Or brick lay?

Something new to turn your hand.

Maybe you transformed your tired old backyard?

Or, you piled on a little too much weight?

Did you take your permitted daily stroll

Outside, beyond your garden gate?

Have you binge watched all those box-sets

That you stored up online?

Have you seen each and every episode

From seasons one to ninety-nine?

Have you had your jab yet?

Googled your closest vaccination place?

Did you memorise those snappy mantras

Such as “Hands. Face. And space.”