For the past months, I’ve been volunteering as a delivery driver for Crossroads Care Richmond and Kingston which supports carers in the community. During the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, the charity expanded its remit temporarily and started looking after other people too – anyone who was shielding and unable to go out and pick up their medication and shopping. 

I’ve started this blog post a couple of times now, but each attempt sounded so worthy that I ended up throwing them into the bin. My contribution has been small really in comparison to the other volunteers in the team. I’ve been doing one or two days a week whereas there are women and men who’ve been delivering food and medicine to people all day, every day for months. Then there are the two incredible women who took many of the hundreds of phone calls that deluged the charity office as the pandemic took hold. They set up filing and computer systems; they got to know every single client by name and by need. It is a strange sign of the times that it was only yesterday that I saw the full face of one of those women because every time I have been in the office she has been so diligently wearing her face mask. 

I have answered phones and listened to people with no one else to talk to, so that the sheer relief of chatting had made them cry. I have delivered food bank parcels and medicine. I have stood outside a block of flats talking to a man suffering from dementia who could not remember how many children he had. When I asked him whether he needed me to guide him back into his flat, he snapped: ‘I’m not that bad!’

There are many other moments that I will carry with me too. Chatting to a couple in their 90s with their arms around each other at their front door; two proposals of marriage from a grumpy old man. Whenever anyone says, ‘you’re so good to be working for a local charity,’ to be honest, I feel a little bit fraudulent – you see, I’m getting far more back than I am putting in.

I have been freelance for many years now, first as a feature writer then as a novel writer and editor of books, but how I have missed people. Through volunteering I have got people back.

Volunteering has given me something entirely unexpected too. Meeting so many people is stimulating in a way that sitting at a desk on my own just isn’t, so now when I do sit down to write, ideas for stories keep dropping into my head.

I had thought I’d only be volunteering during lockdown, but working for Crossroads Care has been so rewarding that I’m not planning to hang up my lanyard any time soon.