serial connection to Arduino

[Jack9]

It's hard to tell when we don't see the code and the full traceback, but I guess your own file is also named serial.py. Is that the case? Or do you have another file with that name? If yes, rename that file to something different.
In future always post the full traceback you get, in error tags

Thank you for your response. The file wasn't called serial.py. I did a search and did find junk left over from something called pyCharm which left some junk after I thought I had removed it. One of the files was serial something html
However today the problem seems to have resolved itself after I did some pip uninstall and pip install of serial and pyserial.