I resurrected this blog shortly before the Covid 19 and just in time to participate in the A to Z 2020 Challenge which since I had only discovered on the first day and thus being totally unprepared for in terms of a subject, I wrote about what was going on at the time – Covid 19!
After the rigour of posting once a day, I tailed off rapidly and I see now that it is just over four months since I last posted – enough with the confessional – Lewis Carroll, a prolific letter writer opined that one should never spend more than a page and a half apologising for not writing sooner…
So what now? Well, Covid 19 still dominates the headlines as well as the smaller column inches of the media and truly it has impacted all our lives. In my own case, my partner and I have just taken ourselves away from the UK and off to Crete to sit out the shit storm which continues to be the UK government’s handling of the pandemic. I realize that sentence needs many qualifications but more of that later.
My partner’s sister lives in Crete with her Greek partner and suggested we might be both safer and happier wintering with them since the effect of isolation on mental well-being is, for many of us lucky enough not to catch the virus, by far the worst aspect of the crisis. Those of us who are in later life especially so since the virus is mainly milder for younger people so we must be more careful than they, more isolated. We had, of course, to brave the perils of flying, weighing up the risk of catching against the risk of escaping the virus. Since the entire covid 19 record of Greece amounts to about one day of the UK history – it was not too hard a choice.
So here we are on our second day, a fierce sun has just shot up, as it does here and we are planning to stay for at least three months since the next looming crisis is the end of the Brexit Transition Period on 31st December 2020. Will it force us to return or can we afford to stay longer? Time will tell…
So I don’t wish to make this new trenche of posts to be all about the virus because we have all had enough of that – even if we can’t help looking at the news, the science articles and the noise and nonsense of social media. So I will leave you today with a picture of a different plague – not of locusts but of millipedes. We travelled on Friday just gone, to the news that Crete was suffering an unseasonal downpour of rain and this was the signal for these little critters to emerge from whatever damp place they call home, and climb the walls – literally. Whether climbing the walls is an understandable response to being locked down underground during the long hot summer or some other compulsion such as breeding – I cannot say! they were, however, everywhere – not just outside, but clinging to ceilings and walls inside having squeezed under locked doors – it’s life Jim – but not as we know it…
