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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

Yesterday afternoon I received a permission form to sign for my disabled brother, for whom I am a legal guardian, to receive the Covid vaccine. He has been sequestered in his care home residence since last March, seeing no family except on Zoom (every week) during all that time. Six hours after I'd had the good news about the vaccine, with me opening our weekly call from Perth in Scotland and chatting to my aunt in Virgina, while we waited for my brother to join the call from Philadelphia, the phone rang - it was one of the nurses at his residence telling us that he had just tested positive for coronavirus. NINE MONTHS of heartrending caution, the good news about the vaccine, and then - hours later - the news that he'd tested positive. Honestly, this indifferent impersonal web diary is no medium to convey the level of irony - my brother's terrible head injury in a car accident over forty years ago, his inability to move or communicate except by pointing at letters on a board, his intact sense of humour and his memory of life before the accident, his six-month battle with pneumonia two years ago, our weekly skype and zoom calls over the past five years despite the 3500 miles between us, and now this? He is asymptomatic at the moment. Discouraged and afraid, I went flying with my husband in a Cessna 172 this evening. He and I are both licensed private pilots. The small airport where we hire planes shut down at 5 p.m. this evening for Christmas, and will remain closed for the hard lockdown beginning on 26 December 2020 in the UK, and when it opens again it will be after Brexit, when our European licenses will no longer be valid because there is no plan in place for pilots' licensing. Our flight was the last of the day, of the year, of an era. I nearly didn't want to come - but I am so glad I did. It was SO BEAUTIFUL! The sky was clear but wreathed with wisps of cloud; the sun went down in flaming reds; the lights came on in our own beautiful city as we came home. We flew from Perth to Dundee, crossed the Kingdom of Fife at St. Andrew's, crossed the Firth of Forth and flew over Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, and then back across the Forth where the three beautiful bridges of three centuries come together. And so back to Perth. And it was impossible to feel anything other than lucky, fortunate, blessed, to be able to see this beauty in a time of crisis and sadness, to have the gift of flight at my fingertips. This is what you get, I tell myself. Be glad for what you get. You are so much more fortunate than so many others. My poor brother. I am daring to hope for good news, but waiting for a blow. [The photo is of the Tay, looking west from Dundee, at 3.41 p.m. on 22 December 2020.]