Today 04-MAR Office 2019 Update taking forever, failing, repeat

Today Office 2019 shows "Updates available". Click to update, and process starts. ("You can carry on working" etc etc - I never do, I wait for the update to complete.) Today the progress bar (while, it's not a progress bar, it's a slider equivalent of a rotating eggtimer) runs and runs way beyond the usual 20-40 seconds. When it stops, the message remails: "Updates available". Repeat.
Desperately hoping (unkindly) that others are similarly situated, and it's not just my system, perfect till today.
Edition Windows 10 Pro
Version 20H2
Installed on ‎04/‎10/‎2020
OS build 19042.844
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.551.0

I assume that your Office 2019 is showing "Product Activated"?

My 2019 updates for last month took about 20 minutes total. I just checked now, and it's been on this for the past five minutes at least.

Thanks to both. Yes, the product is activated(*).
Yes, it was the time taken that was throwing me. No idea why the process halted after 10 or more minutes and returned to "Updates available" and that this repeated several times. Eventually(**) it progressed to completion, but after at least 20 minutes (cf. the usual short download and installation of an Office update).
(*) I had considered un-installing Office and re-installing it. But I am very nervy and anxious about the non-CD non-DVD over-the-air licensed single-user single-machine installation of Office 2019. Because one only does it once, there is no learning opportunity for "how, and where, do I tell Microsoft that I have bought and paid for this product?". And its single-user single-machine licence (what a fool I was not to go for Office 365 terms) just adds to the anxiety. Will it let me re-install? And what if this machine breaks, and I want to re-install on a replacement machine? How do I tell MS the existing machine has broken and I'll still be a licensed user on approved terms on a new one? God knows. It is all so worrying and anxiety-inducing.
(**) Actually, what I did was this. Every so often (say, monthly, if I remember, or more often) I take an image of the entire system drive (boot into Linux, use partimage Save) as a safety net. Every once in a while a whole day just goes entirely wrong, leaving one wishing for yesterday's perfect platform. In such cases one can recover the Saved image (maybe not actually "yesterday's", maybe "last month's" or "last week's") almost identically (boot into Linux, use partimage Restore). In my case the recovered image was only about 3 days old, fortunately, and there was nothing lost; and trivially little that had to be preserved at the end of the bad day before reverting to the earlier perfect state.

Mine took another 20 minutes to complete again. It was downloading for about 19, and then installed for a minute. You can uninstall and reinstall on the same hardware as many times as you want. The product key will recognize the same hardware, and automatically activate it. I've done it at least four times myself. I don't have physical media for it either. I just use the download link I received from Microsoft when I bought it. You can also transfer it to another machine if you get a new one. You can activate it on two separate machines without conflict. Any after that you'll need to contact Microsoft to remove/reset old machines to install and activate on new ones.