Around the end of March I stopped writing in my diary. I was still working from home, but given all meetings with contacts, up and coming events or court cases had stopped, there didn't seem much point.
While life went on during Covid, birthdays and anniversaries continued to take place, it was a different kind of living for many of us.
Some people tell me they've enjoyed the change of pace, the opportunity to spend more time at home, concentrating on the things that they'd neglected when life was moving at a million miles an hour.
For me I hope this will not be the norm. We are sociable people, we need contact with others, I work better under pressure and the social aspect of my job, the interesting people I get to meet and speak to about their lives is the reason I love being a journalist.
I want to get back out there and meet new and fascinating people, I want to write in my 2021 diary.
For those who do public facing jobs, there wasn't the luxury to work at home in fluffy socks and tracksuits.
The staff in supermarkets and corner shops, often among the lowest paid, literally kept us alive.
With family members self isolating or shielding I was, for those first few weeks, the designated groceries getter.
Many of the staff were young people, who bent over backwards for customers at a time when the risk to that age group was still not fully known.
While most people were grateful, some customers kicked off at having to queue or social distance. Who can forget the fighting over toilet roll?
The hoarders were the worst of us, the people restocking the shelves after them, the best of us.
The hospital workers, the cleaners, the auxiliaries, the porters, the kitchen staff, the ambulance drivers, doctors and nurses - they've allowed people to go home to their families, who would otherwise be no longer with us.
As anyone with a big family can tell you, it can be a bit much as a child, sharing bedrooms, fighting for attention, sibling rivalry.
But as an adult, and an adult living through a global health crisis, all those brothers and sisters suddenly made sense, we need people in a pandemic.
Those people don't have to be related, but as this pandemic has highlighted it really does take a village.
The sporting organisations, the GAA clubs and football clubs, the church groups, the Orange Order, the community organisations, the youth groups, the outreach, the mental health volunteers, who all mobilised like one giant family to deliver food and check on the old and vulnerable.
When I think back on this terrible year, and it really has been terrible for so many reasons, they are the people I'll feel grateful for.
People like Marcus Rashford, who spoke of his own experience of child poverty, lifting the stigma and shame society places on struggling families, embarrassing MPs into an about turn on free school meals for children at home due to Covid. He was the hero the world needed during such a dark and terrible time.
I'll think of all those in Women's Aid and other charities working to make sure women and children at risk had a safe place to flee to at a time when they were locked down with their abuser. Their work is rarely publicised but it goes on 24/7 saving lives and putting broken people back together.
Covid highlighted the inequalities that existed not just locally but globally. It showed up the worst excesses of capitalism and what that means for those working to service the needs of the super rich.
Death from Covid and poverty are linked, poor housing, untreated underlying health problems, poor nutrition and access to proper sanitation were all factors in coronavirus infection and mortality rates.
Closer to home our mandatory coalition system of government proved ineffective in a crisis. It's a system that needs changed but there is no current willingness to tackle it.
If the world is broken, if politics is broken, if the system is broken and needs to be rebuilt, then surely this is the best opportunity we will ever be presented with in our lifetime to build it back and build it back better.
This has been a year like no other, may we never know its like again.
From my family to yours I wish you a happy new year, may it be a better one for us all.
