I found myself travelling into London today to meet the team at the Royal Brompton to do some filming for updated footage for our website and I couldn’t help but notice how different it was. There were a lot less people on the trains, everyone wearing masks, most of the wide array of coffee and sandwich shops were boarded up and the hustle and bustle of inner city stations that you would normally associate with the pulse of London was absent…
And yet, it was still there – just beating differently. Maybe not as colourful or with the same vibrancy as before the pandemic but there. Persistent and undefeated and I couldn’t help but draw parrallels between this new version , the pre- Covid city I have known for the past 18 years and come to love and my charity. I did not know the Blitz era London or experience the post World War 2 London left struggling to cope under rationing but I know that that London did exist at some point … but recovered. The pulse returned and I’m sure that those who experienced pre war and post war London would say how different it was, how changed. But the pulse and the vibrancy and the colour did return – it returned with a wonderful explosion of life so that future generations would only know it as we have known it until the Covid Pandemic left its mark on the city.
So as I made my way around, with these thoughts in my head, I found myself strangely comforted. The pulse of our small but vibrant charity has also changed. It’s still there, persistent and undefeated, and yet there is no denying that the past months have left their mark on us as well. Where there have been sleepless nights worrying about how to continue charity life as before in this new era where it seems everything has been turned on it’s head, I realised that we have, for the time being, just like London, altered our pace, dimmed our joie de vivre and changed how we do things. But like London, we are also not defeated. In time, our pulse will also explode with life, adventure and progress once more and those who have been on the journey with us since the beginning will recognise the changes and remember this time, and those who only come to know us in the future will know that although this Covid era existed, we adapted, survived and came back strong.
