A very peculiar departure

Here we are, in Cantebury's New Dover Road motorhome parking spot, tunnel booked for tomorrow at 11am. heading south towards Tuscany, the seventh autumn in a row we've escaped to sunnier climes as soon as the leaves begin to yellow at home.

By our standards it's been an uneventful departure. Usually some minor glitch complicates our leaving plans. Last year's was a case in point when the night before we departed a tin of paint mysteriously leapt off a shelf in the garage and splattered white spots over our e-bikes and panniers. It took all morning to clean up the mess by which point the thundery showers we had planned to avoid arrived with a vengeance and we got soaked to the skin as we packed the van. Another time Gill, on a last minute shopping trip before departure, accidentally hooked the towbar of the car under the bumper of the one behind while trying to squeeze into a small space. That delayed us for a bit. Even when we have managed to dodge the 'gremlins of departure' our earliest trips were preceded by a dash from one end of the country to the other to check on the well-being of our children and assure ourselves that the homecare arrangements for Gill's increasingly frail father were sufficient to support him while we travelled. None of our exits were entirely guilt free, there was always a nagging doubt as to whether we were being selfish. 

Now things are quite different. All of our children are in work and have independent lives. In fact, these days the tables have turned, as sadly we are now the older generation; our children now worry about us, urging us to be very careful and questioning the wisdom of our decision to take a trip to Italy in the midst of a pandemic. Well, I suppose it is not risk free, but after months of being cooped up in Buxton for the sake of our sanity we do need to be somewhere else for a while. 

That being said, no matter what the challenges and misadventures of previous escapes, they pale into insignificance in comparison to the peculiar circumstances of this one. I've had a number of conversations with people about whether so far 2020 has been the oddest time they have ever lived through. No-one has been able to come up with a stranger one. Politicians may speak of a 'new normal' but our everyday existence still feels utterly uncanny, something that you might wake up from and say to your nearest and dearest, 'I had a really weird dream just now.

The effect of everything being odd gives mundane existence greater import, scraps of the familiar to hang onto in an uncertain world. This morning I found myself wandering about the house taking snapshots of the rooms we just decorated,

the patio we re-layed last week,

and the red gladioli that we were going to have to bin while they were in full flower.

I felt reluctant to leave the house, a tad apprehensive; I wanted mementos of home to take with me as I travelled. That is really uncharacteristically sentimental of me, somehow the months of lockdown has eroded my free spirit. Perhaps the next few weeks will be a trip into new territory psychologically as well as geographically. Unsurprising really, we are benighted by the profoundly unfamiliar, our world disrupted, the simplest human interaction deemed dangerous. Of course it's worrying and for some it will have tragic consequences. It is also intriguing, the future more imponderable than ever, in other words a fascinating time to travel.

I am going to experiment with using the Blogger app as the main way of generating content. It has less functionality than the version on my laptop but it does mean I can blog in real time and upload using my mobile rather than needing WiFi. I want to record my impressions as we go rather than post reflective pieces put together over the space of a week or so. Tomorrow, a drive through four countries in one day...