Looking back at 2020, looking forward to 2021 - Memories of a troubled year, hopes for a new dawn

A new year is approaching. How will we look back on 2020 as it slips away? Will it be a memory or one that is best forgotten as an opportunity to start anew presents itself? Indeed, will 2021 actually start with many of the previous year's scars still around to continue causing farther disruption? Let's hope not.

A year ago, there were many dreams and ambitious ideas waiting to be fulfilled over the coming months. There were travel plans to return to areas of China last visited many years previously. I particularly wanted to rediscover Guangzhou for that city was so important at the very start of my China story. The aspiration to photograph more of Guizhou ran strong in my mind. A visit two years previously had really wetted my appetite to record through the lens more of its stunning beauty. However, it was not to be for all plans were suddenly, unexpectedly unachievable. Indeed the events of 2020 showed that how our dreams, no matter how well-conceived and thought out, can suddenly be put into reverse, canceled or put on hold for many months or longer.

After a pleasant few weeks in Beijing immediately after the 2020 New Year, I headed down to Tianjin, happy to return to a city that I had become increasingly familiar with. Yet, in the back of my mind, there was another city on the Yangtze, in Central China, Wuhan, I would periodically be reminded of. There had been reports of a new variant, a possibly mutated COVID-SARS virus. I would recall the problems and uncertainties during an outbreak of SARS that affected China in the spring of 2003. However, settling back into the Tianjin scene I felt relaxed, never for a moment foreseeing what would come next and the tragic implications a sudden viral surge can cause. As I watched the fishermen along the Haihe River, I found it all so tranquil. Then, suddenly everything happened so fast as our plans and ambitions turned upside down!