The eye of the storm…

After a gap of over a month I’m back!! For those of you who followed my daily Christmas blog, thank you – I started this 5 years ago and it was kind of even more important to me to do this again this year we a reminder that there was still something to celebrate!

And then came New Year!! And for me, that brought with it a great release….not the spiritual release you might be expecting but the simple fact that after 27 of keeping a secret I was allowed to tell people that I was in the New Years Honours list as the recipient of an MBE for my contribution to charity!! Yes, you read that right. 27 days of ME being quiet about something!!! It was agony because I desperately wanted to tell but you are quite rightly sworn to secrecy!!

I was asked if I would be prepared to join the Cabinet Office Press Conference and jumped at the chance to highlight the amazing work still being tirelessly done by our amazing volunteers who are still supporting NHS frontline staff 9 months in to this pandemic that has blown apart our industry and brought the country to its knees.

The reason I want to highlight it is simple. Much has been made of the dedication of NHS staff and it is quite right that this is recognised because frankly they are amazing and we SHOULD all be appreciating the truly heroic efforts each individual NHS staff member has made since the beginning of the crisis, however, the ongoing work of our aircrew volunteers has been and continues to be astounding. Many have lost their jobs, even more have been furloughed for 9 months and as many as possible have taken second and even third jobs to make ends meet while they also wonder whether or not they will ever fly again. Some, like me, are peacefully resigned to the fact that we may not and are finding other paths to follow. In the middle of all of this, these incredible humans who have lost so much and continue to face such uncertainty as well as stress caused by the behaviour of some who are supposed to be leading, choose to go every day or every week into a hospital environment to provide a smiling face and a listening ear to medical staff who are exhausted. I think this deserves to be shouted about.

In a previous post I wrote about all being in different boats in the same storm – and for a while there I think some of us thought the storm was starting to abate – just a little. It seems though that this storm is the mother of all cyclones and here’s the thing about a cyclone. It smashes into the land, destroying anything it can as it passes – it is completely indiscriminate – and then at some point, the rain stops, the wind dies down, the sun comes out and the sea is calm. For a while. This is known as the eye of the storm – it’s the quiet bit in the middle of a swirling maelstrom of changing pressure systems, strong winds and torrential rain, and at some point, the moment of calm will give way to another pounding.

This time the damage is worse though. Buildings have already been damaged in the first wave, tree roots are already weakened, rivers are already at capacity, and power lines are already down. It’s the second wave that comes after the eye of the storm that does the damage and this is where we now are.

We are STILL in different boats, and the storm is still the same one, but some of us have jumped ship!! Some who were on cruise liners the first time around have now fallen in and are drowning whilst others who were in canoes the first time have managed to get picked up by a trawler, or if they are lucky, a super yacht.

None of us know how long this will last but we do still know that we will get through much more intact if we lash our craft together than if we try to go it alone. This applies whether you are in a hospital working an 18 hour shift, a paramedic in a 6 hour queue to deliver the patient you have been keeping alive to the designated hospital, the call centre worker who knows they have hundreds of callers waiting for emergency assistance, the teacher who continues to teach children of key workers even though that means you can’t see your elderly parents, the soldier who is deployed from their family to help administer vaccines or the volunteer aircrew who doesn’t know if they will have a job in a years time but proudly puts on their uniform to go and care for others, and everyone else in between.

The destruction in this part of the storm might be worse or might feel worse but the fact remains that we need to stick together. Check on your neighbour, call your friend, take your dad some flowers, and take your mum some biscuits….and be kind to everyone even if they don’t agree with you because we have to tie our craft together.

I hope you are either in a large ship that is stable and able to ride the storm, or firmly tied to someone who is but however this first blog post of this year finds you, keep going. The storm WILL end because it has to.

Next week I will tell you what I’ve been up to recently (the bits that haven’t already been in the newspapers!)