Celtic Rover
A week ago I was in Buenos Aries in the last days of my six month trip around South America. Life has changed a lot for me in just a week, as it has for the majority of people in the world, thanks to the Corona virus. I am now in our cottage near Aberdeen so that we can be close to Lee’s mum, normally Lees sister Dot is the key support person for her mum, but she has symptoms after a trip to the USA so she is isolating, specially from her mum, for the next two weeks and we have stepped in to help with shopping and support for this next week or two.
We need to be careful as a society not to flock to rural areas and overload local shops and most importantly limited medical support services, thankfully here we are close to a main centre in Aberdeen, where lees mum is located, we brought our food and if we feel at all unwell we will cut contact with her and get back to Edinburgh but so far we are both well and minimising contact carefully to do our bit to kill the transmission network of the virus.
So that leaves me with some time on my hands, which coincidently was actually in line with my personal plan, so I am one of the most fortunate people in the country as my plans are not really disrupted in some ways it is the kick I needed to do some of the more boring admin of photos etc and focus down on the writing I had planned to do. I am grateful for this circumstance and my thoughts go out to all who have been really negatively impacted by the shutdown and the steps society has to take to try to beat the spread of this virus.
So for now I have a lovely spot to hole up this is my view out of the window of the cottage
It is a lovely spot in the woods and it allows Lee to visit her Mum to support her as she is quite vulnerable and frail, in turn I can support lee and here we are quite isolated so our chance of staying virus free and hence keeping our usefulness in support is high here.
The house is slowly warming up from its winter hibernation and we have a good deal of sorting out, gardening and cleaning to do when we are not remote working or working on writing and stories. We can go for quiet walks or runs nearby without meeting people which is great for health and mental well being (although I was amazed to see how busy the car park was at a local walking point yesterday)
One of my projects will be to get this little writing hut set up for remote working, it was installed at the end of the summer but has not yet been furnished so we will move things into it to make it comfortable and to give lee an ‘office’ to work in without distraction and away from the dogs when we are here together.
So my plan now is to build up a bit of an “isolation timetable” for my days here, some running, some working on my trip photos and blogs, learning a bit of Spanish, sorting out the cottage and walking the dogs…. in reality not a bad way to spend a few months. The great thing about modern technology is that I was on the video chat to my Mum for mothers day today, regularly chat with my kids and even had a “virtual coffee” on Saturday with my three running chums for an hour so, every hour I am in touch with one or other friend so I think we will manage fine with the isolation.
So time to get those photos sorted and start writing that book ….
