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.