For almost everyone lockdown has been at best difficult, at worst tragic, but one thing that is also true is that no two people seem to have had the same experience. Our lockdown has been extremely challenging but perhaps not in the way that many people have found it.

Just prior to the Covid pandemic we found ourselves reluctantly beginning the worst kind of house move: The one where you must / are forced to go, the house is sold and people are moving in, but you have nowhere to live. We came very close to finding ourselves truly homeless. Luckily, we had a good Samaritan in the form of kind farmer called Kay, who not only found us a temporary spot in a cottage that she has on her farm, but also allowed us to store an amazing amount of excess stuff in her agricultural outbuildings and supported us with many a kind word and gesture.

Almost the moment that we moved in Covid began to travel around the world, and by the time we had originally intended to be leaving Kay’s we were in full lockdown. We have been luckier than many in that we have been trapped in a beautiful, rural prison, with green space and fresh air – and my heart goes out to those people who have been trapped in flats in city centres.

That said we have experienced some very odd things: Staying in cottage that was not kitted out for permanent residence, lacking many amenities (very little internet, nowhere to dry clothes, a faulty heating system, and limited cooking space), and located in a remote valley where half the properties were holidays lets. Has meant that we have been on many walks in an otherwise empty valley (at one point I worked out the population of the whole valley was 12). We have felt an extreme lack of human contact, seen how the tourist industry collapsed and the worried that it caused, and took on the challenge of working from home without a communications network.

The photographs here highlight some of the challenges faced. There are images of the empty, increasingly overgrown playground, abandoned cottages, and working from home. There are two photographs of the bleak beach at Ynyslas near Borth in north Ceredigion where I found out that my face-to-face teaching was going to have stop and where my wildlife photography student group met for the last time on the 13^th of March 2020, just ten days before the lockdown was announced – the weather seemed to fit the mood.  One image that might need explaining and sticks in my memory is the photograph of the laptop on an empty wooden bedframe. The mattress had been moved into the lounge where we were sleeping because six months into living in the cottage a rat had kindly died in the loft (in an unreachable position) just above the bed. The smell was unbelievable. Once a day I had to venture into the room and work in this position on the floor because this was the only point in the whole house that I could receive a decent 4G signal necessary for the Zoom meetings that I had to attend. The smell did eventually disappear but not before it left me with a conditioned neurological response where now all online conferences smell faintly of dead rat.