When the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, Duncan knew he had to protect himself. Two weeks before the rest of the country was asked to stay at home, he received a call from his team of nurses recommending that he shield. “I’d completed treatment for lymphoma a year earlier and it left me with a compromised immune system,” he says. “I was living with my parents in Cumbria, so we stayed in together.” By October, he had started a university course online and was venturing out for long walks in his spare time, but still being cautious. “I love bird-watching. I took lots of pictures and sometimes sent them to friends,” he says. One of his friends was sharing a student flat in Lancaster with a girl named Molly. “She suggested I send the pictures to Molly as she might like them. I jokingly asked if she was single and discovered she was.”
Around a week later, Duncan and Molly connected on Instagram. “I’d been told about him by my flatmate. I think she was secretly trying to set us up,” says Molly. They bonded over a shared love of David Attenborough documentaries and nature. A week later, they set up a short phone call and instantly hit it off. “I found him really interesting and easy to talk to,” she says. Meeting up was difficult as they lived so far apart, and there was no Covid testing available at the time.
