Europe, the Penultimate Frontier.
These are the continuing voyages of the Flying-Brick ‘Gnome’. Er... it's not actually a real gnome...
Chapter 8: Winter is Here
And so, as I write this, we enter the second week of the second lockdown in France due to this pandemic. On the surface, nothing much appears to have changed. We already had a curfew in place, this was just a further tightening of our freedoms.
This time all appears calmer. The same sense of fear is not there. The roads are less busy than normal, but not empty as in the first lockdown. The supermarkets are quieter, most people seem to use the now more efficient online ordering systems.
However, we no longer can we see our family nor our friends at all, whether local or otherwise. Even seeing our nearby offspring edges up higher on the difficulty ladder.
There are no riots and no obvious police presence. There is a strange atmosphere of general acceptance of a life forced into a new normal.
Below the surface, however, is a different and much more perturbing story. This apparently graceful swan is paddling like shit.
Our local hospital is full. And when I say that it is full, I mean it is FULL. Full of covid sufferers. The staff are falling sick, some with stress and some with covid itself. The curve is forever upwards and it will inevitably get far worse. Many other hospitals in France are also full, so what happens to new cases whether covid or otherwise is anyone's guess.
And most worrying of all, most of these patients are in their 40's or 50's. Read that again.
This infection is only just reaching us older farts. At least two local retirement homes now have cases. This is not good. This was predicted but most of us appear to have stuck our heads in the sand. If us old farts get ill then hospital may no longer be a choice. Now that really is scary.
This wave is set to be far worse than the first wave. This time it is more like a wave goodbye.
Winter may technically be two months away, but I'm sorry, winter is already knocking on the door.
For the two of us wild adventurers, back on our north-bound adventure, (I bet you'd forgotten about that already) this was just an oncoming prospect, a distant worry, oft decried by those on social networks who prefer to spout their hopes in lieu of facts.
We knew this was coming, we just did not realise how soon it was to arrive.
What should we do in our comfortable state of ignorance? Do we give up and return home? How do we balance the risks when the risks are invisible?
As one of our most important goals was to fetch our eldest, and as there would be absolutely no other chance to see our kids in the next several months, we kept on with our original plan. Or was it our second plan? Third maybe?
After five hours of driving, plus an hour of dormant siesta, and a further hour of coffee consumption, we arrived in the Loire Valley, blissfully ignorant of what the future would bring...
The future was to bring chapter 9. Hopefully it will be more lighthearted than this depressing crap. And I haven't even started on the American elections yet. Or Brexit.
Hand me that bottle of wine...
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