I am standing in a shopping centre in January, 2020, a week after an operation on my shoulder. Just two British people had died of Covid but I was still alive and it amused me to think that the wings might symbolize how close the end could have been. Six weeks later the world had pretty well shut down and the wings began to beat with a sharper resonance. A year later it seemed the obvious nucleus to my response to the pandemic. After that, meaning followed form. The material I had as a base had floral patterns. I could have avoided them but I liked the look of them. The red thread echoes the thread that runs through my daughter’s art work and my wife’s tapestry, always connecting us.I was an English teacher and it seemed like fun to subvert the textile task to produce a literary conceit. So much safer to have your literary devices delivered to your door. The analysis around the image is, like much of the information we have been given b throughout the pandemic, unreliable, irrelevant or made up to fit as it developed. The only true thing is the scarlet thread.