Early 2020....

This was always going to be a challenging and unpredictable year….. I had scheduled a trip to visit several friends and family spread out across the south of England over the first two weeks of January, but had managed only one hour of the journey south before receiving a request to undertake an urgent locum Consultant Post in Worcester where I’d spent a year training a long time before. I was able to delay the start date for a week in order to fit in a few of my friends before detouring to take up the months contract.

No sooner had that post finished than we set off again, this time for Jordan to explore the Red Sea and the Wadi Rum desert with a couple of days at the ancient site of Petra. This was an amazing trip which we loved every moment of. We managed to combine diving with exploring the interior of this fascinating country.

Just a week later, I was called over to Tanzania by the University of Glasgow to undertake further training for the large NIHR project we were undertaking there. Two weeks there allowed us to complete the preparation and collect a few samples for other studies in the area. I returned on March 11th leaving my colleagues there to supervise the data collection, only to find that the pandemic intervened and they had to abandon the project and follow me back to the UK!