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February 29th: Remember The Last One?
A post this morning by Lynette at In the net! was our prompt for these thoughts today… Where were you last time we had a 29th day of February? Cast your mind back. The news channels were by now full of stories emanating from a city called Wuhan, which most of us had never heard of before, about a killer virus, with all sorts of side issues including city lockdowns and the consumption of live bats, to name just two. Yet really, even then, on “Leap Year Day” 2020, we had no idea of how radically the world’s entire landscape was to change in the next three weeks. On this…
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Pandemic Perspective
It’s hard to get through a day at the minute without hearing somebody somewhere say “it is what it is” in one situation or another. Whilst we don’t particularly like hackneyed phrases such as that one, we concur with the philosophy that if you can’t change something then there’s no point dwelling on it. We would hope that one thing which comes over on our blog is that we are both of a positive disposition; neither of us, thankfully, are prone to depression or similar, and neither of us are even what you would call worriers. So for the most part we have managed to stay upbeat over the 17…
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Cold Snap
Is it just me, or is anyone else irritated by the fact that, in the context of COVID, the world is referring freely to the “British variant” or even more geographically specific, the “Kent variant”, when ex President Trump was consistently vilified for referring to the pandemic as the “Chinese disease”? It’s called “COVID” because phrases like “Asian flu” and “Spanish flu” have been outlawed by the WHO as racially divisive, so how come the “British variant” is acceptable? Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, just as we sit here confined to quarters unable to travel, we get a little bit of the world – indeed a little bit of the…
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Dry January And Wet Walks
Well, it came about like this. When we returned from our 9-week tour of Turkey towards the end of November, we had spent 14 of the preceding 18 weeks out of the UK, bathed in sunshine and lapping up wonderful places, enjoying great food and partaking in the odd sunset beer or two. Put simply, we’d gained a few pounds – not a lot, but enough to make us feel like we wanted to shed them and get a bit fitter, and so for the first 28 days back in the country we ate healthily and abstained from all alcohol. This kind of gave us the incentive to try “dry…
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COVID: Living In The Heart Of The Beast
Kent, England, December 22nd, 2020, and a COVID drama is unfolding right on our doorstep. In the last 48 hours over 40 countries have suspended all flights to and from the UK and our nearer neighbours in Europe have closed all other UK transport routes, following discovery of a new variant of COVID here in England. The source of this new variant, which evidently spreads considerably more rapidly than the parent version, is the county of Kent, which is precisely where we live. Not so long ago, the UK Government decreed that any country with an infection rate of over 20 per 100,000 population was a “dangerous” country: now, districts…
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COVID: How Quickly Things Change
All of a sudden our Turkish adventure is coming to an end and we are now travelling back to England on Monday. As we headed off to Alanya this week, news was breaking that the Turkish Government were about to announce increased COVID restrictions, although at that stage all of the talk surrounded weekend closures. When the announcement came, the measures were much more far reaching, with an indefinite closure of all bars and restaurants and heavily restricted opening times for all other outlets including food shops. At the same time an 8pm curfew comes in and, although the curfew, rather counter intuitively, doesn’t apply to tourists, it’s clear that…
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Escaping COVID: Our Next Move
Our regular readers will know that we retired at the end of 2019 to pursue our long held dream of full time travel. Unfortunately the obvious intervened and we were forced to abandon our trip after just 7 weeks of what should have been endless exploration. UK lockdown followed. As the slight easing of restrictions started, we took full advantage of the so called travel corridors and have just returned from 5 weeks touring Croatia, which was more than fabulous. We’re now nearing the end of the 14-day quarantine which was imposed just a few days before our return from that trip. These 14 days have naturally felt pretty dull…
