I still couldn’t sleep that night. It was taking some time to relax into the new normal as the world changed outside our homely bunker. Awake from 1am, I tried listening to podcasts, coming downstairs for a glass of milk and some old episodes of the OC, but can’t have got more than another hour in.

The workday by checking in with my team, but the tension and pain in my back, neck and shoulders was causing me serious trouble. I would usually take paracetamol and ibuprofen together for back pain, but wanted to conserve paracetamol in case one of us got sick. Hot water bottles and a hot bath helped a bit, but none of it worked 100% and I was exhuasted, so after muddling through for most of the morning I had to call in sick.

I felt guilty as so many of my colleagues have kids, and the announcement the night before that schools would be closing from Friday had put them in real difficulties. My boss was really understanding though, and told me to take some time off, she’d contact me by phone if it was important enough.

By the evening I’d managed to have a nap (Ecca made the bed and tidied the bedroom for me while I was nursing a hot water bottle on the sofa – it felt like a hotel when I got upstairs!) and started to do some light things around the house.

The two of us had lived together until I went off travelling at 18. Having parents in London there was the classic Generation Y yo-yo between rented flats and the family home, but for the last 7 years we’d had the Atlantic Ocean between us most of the time. Since she left, Ecca had got used to living alone in her New York studio, and I’d spent my time learning to live with a BOY, so were were coming from very different starting points.

I took comfort in planning ways to avoid potential tensions – naming the identical Airpods was step number one. No mix ups… yet!

On day one, the only thing I could concentrate on was getting Erica home. She had been living in New York since 2013, and planned to move back permanently on 25th March this year. After Donald Trump issued his first travel ban (which excluded the UK), she decided to leave early, and booked a flight for the following Tuesday night.

The plan had been for her to move back in with my parents, but as the virus and advice escalated, she decided to come straight to mine on the other side of London. Mum & Dad are both around 70, classing them as ‘vulnerable’. My husband is a virologist and key worker, working on the supply of testing (now exclusively for Covid-19).

I had been alone in the house all week as working from home developed from an all-office text on the Monday to the status quo for the foreseeable future. I was desperate for some company and petrified that her flight would be cancelled.

We spoke while she was in the airport – rumours of a lockdown in New York had escalated that afternoon and she had left her apartment early, worried that cabs would stop and she wouldn’t be able to get out. In JFK it was a really odd atmosphere with all of the bars and restaurants closed for sit-ins, people queuing way too close to each other and the odd traveller in a Hazmat suit making it seem like a disturbing film set.

I woke up at 3am on the Wednesday to see that she had taken off, but couldn’t rest again until I knew that she had landed safely.

Once that had happened, it was a short wait for her to be at my door. We didn’t hug as she entered, restricted to a strained smile and a wave as she darted part me and up to the shower.

Slowly, we both began to unwind, a notch on the ratchet releasing with an emotional pop every hour or so. After so long away and such a difficult day, we were both just immensely grateful to be in the house together, her on the sofa eating a prawn sandwich on brown bread (who knew that was so British?) and me attempting to work from home, but struggling to concentrate.

We muddled through – both too tired to focus on work but too wired to sleep, both disorientated from the U-turn in our lives over the past week. A month ago I’d written in my creative writing course about how much I missed her, how hard the last seven years had been with her so far away, and now, here she was, living in my spare room for the foreseeable future.

The world outside was changing by the minute, but oddly I now had the thing that I’d wanted most for the last few years – my little sister, back home, where I knew she was safe. After years of the odd week together in the States and a snatched meetup on one of her whirlwind trips back to London, we were now back on the same timezone, in the same house. We hadn’t lived together without our parents ever, and now we were 35 and 33, living with my husband without any prior planning. This blog is about the highs and lows of a very strange time.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

Well, that’s what the WordPress template tells me. I happen to believe (and hope) that it is true. Here is the story of how we coped when the world turned on a sixpence, throwing all of our plans up in the air.

Writing it all down should help me to make sense of what’s going on, keep a record to satisfy the History student inside me, and make sure we all stay occupied whilst there’s less Eastenders on the telly… Enjoy!