audio stories and 
portraits from 2020

Will: “It will happen to me again. It doesn’t happen to my white colleagues”

Onjali: “We get treated like we’re a little bit dumb because we believe in God”

Kathleen: “For me, the way I entertain my patients is to sing with them”

Jenny: “When I’m on my till I’ve just got a lot of love to give”

Alex: “Just knowing that my loved ones had faith in me, that’s what kept me going”

Natalie: “I name my plants to encourage me to look after them better”

Matilda: “How would you feel managing someone’s life over the phone? No face to face, no verbal clues”

Claire: “Dying is hard. It’s hard work like birth is hard work”

Nina: “Look at that for a bad boy sheepskin. Epic”

Angeline: “Zimbabwean names are very interesting. You have Faith, you have Patience... I guarantee you someone will be named Covid”

Kate: “We need these communal outdoor spaces more and more”

Matt: “You know that bit at the start of disaster movie when there’s someone who knows that the thing is coming...”

Dean: “We seem to be seeing an increase in people who have serious psychotic symptoms”

Michelle: “Rather than clapping every week, we should think about rewarding people properly”

Ben: “I think my favourite sound is probably silence. I really like quiet”

Ric: “Let me just write a verse every day and see how it goes”

Charlene: “Covid may be simple, yes it’s a virus, but there are so many different layers… It’s like a Rubik’s Cube”

Brendan: “Giving a person their voice back is like giving them their personality back”

Helen: “Actually it’s OK not to be OK. We all have days when we’re not OK and that’s fine”

Yunus: “To bury the deceased without the washing and shrouding will later on affect the grieving process”

Grace: “As nurses we will continue. I’m so proud to be one of them”

Bravo: “He calls me Mr Nice Guy, even though I told him my name”

David: “I remember asking her when does this get any easier? And she said it never does and the day it does is when you should stop”

Ollie: “The next 3 years of my life had been completely stopped – just because of an algorithm”

Robana: “They’re on the screen, you’re on the screen trying to beat the baddie and Covid is the baddie”

Avi: “All that I could hear through my open window were the birds and that was so beautiful”

Ellen: “To see nurses crying with marks and sores on their faces, that was really hard”

Geraldine: “They were so generous… we got football jerseys, we got pyjamas… we got 200 biryanis turning up”

Dermot: “We had a workshop full of tools and equipment and right from the start I was thinking, yes, this is our time”

Bev: “This woman nearly fell in the pond to avoid walking past us”

Helen: “It made me think about all those women throughout history who’ve had to do it by themselves”

Francella: “I wasn’t afraid. We need each other and we have to comfort each other and work as a team”

Maha: “I had no reason to tell them, because I did the job as well as anyone else”

Joanna: “Some people who you think are fragile actually are strong. They have coped better than the rest of us”