Yesterday evening Boris announced his much hyped 'road map' which purportedly will take us out of lockdown.
From a traveller's point of view the good news is it seems we will no longer be required to 'stay at home' after March 29th, though staying overnight will not be allowed. Still, it will be a relief to be able to venture beyond our immediate locality. By mid April a limited opportunity for overnight stays is on the cards, though the actual wording of the regulations seem somewhat ambiguous so far as camp-sites go:
Overnight stays away from home in this country will be permitted and self-contained
accommodation - those that do not require shared use of bathing, entry/exit, catering
or sleeping facilities - can also reopen, though must only be used by members of the
same household.
Clearly a moho with a bathroom is 'self contained', but what about campsites? Maybe they will open but only for motorhomes and and caravans with on-board facilities. It's a bit ambiguous at the moment.
Some time after May 17th international travel should be possible. We are due a trip to Brittany. It was the first place abroad we visited as a couple in 1976, then over the next fifteen years or so returned regularly on bucket and spade holidays with our kids. We have re-visited these old haunts a few times since then but never by motorhome. It is a tempting a option for early summer.
What has been clear for months is the crossing from Portsmouth to Santander we booked for March 25th was a non-starter. We have already moved it once from January as soon as international travel was banned. We decided to wait until after the 'PM's road map' announcement before moving it again. This time we have changed it for a crossing from Santander to Portsmouth in mid-October. Our plan - to head south in mid-August for a couple of months, maybe down to Meze then across to the Costa Brava, then inland through Catalonia to Zaragoza. The latter area will be new territory, always pleasing. Then after a few days in Cantabria and Asturias we'll take the long sea crossing from Santander to get home.
Mid October is going to have to become the new end date for all of future our autumn travels if we plan to make a lengthy trip in the early months of the following year. The Schengen visa rules demand that three month break, it's annoying.
Speaking of minor annoyances, Google photos has joined Facebook in bombarding my phone with 'on this day' images from the last ten years. Andalucía, Sicily, Malta, New Zealand, Alentejo, Shanghai, Singapore all have made impromptu appearances to remind us during interminable weeks of staying local of the delights of a wandering life.
Today's was fairly innocuous, parked in Camping Bungalow Zumaia exactly a year ago on the way home, blissfully unaware of the chaos that was about to engulf the globe. The sun was shining, the sky blue; re-reading the blog post from that day the only thing on my mind was the prospect of chilly weather:
A week today we will be back in England. We have no plans to visit anywhere in particular in France. There comes a point where getting home becomes the priority, especially as the warm sunny spell we have enjoyed continues as far as Bordeaux, further north it looks gloomy and cold. - not a great prospect.
It's what happens. I am fed a random 'on this day' photo, then immediately scrabble about to track down the blog post from that time. Occasionally when we have been travelling I have questioned if keeping a blog is worth the effort. Why not simply live moment to moment, why feel obligated to write stuff down? These past few months have made me glad that I persevered, if nothing else because it reminds me that the engaged, reflective author of the blog shares the same cranium as me, even though they seem quite different right now.
Alain de Botton in 'The Art of Travel' cast doubt on the notion of wandering as a form of escapism, noting that the one person you cannot avoid, no matter how far you go, is yourself. Hovever, this does not really reflect my experience of travel and anyway it presupposes you have some 'true self' stashed away somewhere to begin with. Neuroscience is beginning find physical evidence for for the theory first proposed in the 1990s by Hubert Hermans of a
'Dialogical Self'. Hubert had the idea that instead of there being a firm distinction between our inner self and society at large, in fact the former is a loose communion of different selves and the latter a 'society of minds' with dialogues constantly happening within and between each. In my case a more positive version of me travels, is curious about things, enjoys the snippets of human absurdity that assail you from place to place, whereas stuck at home a different me predominates, more 'Mr Grumpy', prone to gloomy ruminations, haunted by a sense of worthlessness and faced with something beautiful prone to assert that horror and delight are equally delusional.
Under normal circumstances we are rarely at home for more than a couple of months. By the time we have finished sorting out the house and garden it is time to prepare for the next trip. Planning keeps Mr. Grumpy at bay, reduced to a shadow self who intervenes occasionally to prophesy some impending catastrophe. It's 120 days now since we got back from Italy (I know these things), so plenty of time for Mr. Grumpy to boss my head; Happy Wanderer me is now the shadow-self that intervenes to keep me sane by clicking through old blog posts, wondering if writing about travel is as much a prop to sanity as the journey itself.
A few years ago when I was sorting through old files on my desktop PC I came across a copy of the emails we sent to our Matthew and Sarah as travelled around Japan and Australia in the summer of 2011. I wanted to keep them, so created a private blog called 'Moho Free Days' illustrating the emails with photographs we took at the time. Then, when we got back from our long-haul trip to the Far East and New Zealand in 2016 it seemed to make sense to use this blog, adding Gill's notes and some screen-shots of our Facebook posts to a small selection of images chosen from the thousands of photos we took. Then I began to plump-out the thing with reminiscences and anecdotes of the trip, and what started out as something simple became more complicated and time consuming. So I shelved it.
With time on my hands in recent months as a defence against Mr Grumpy whispering sweet nihilisms in my ear I returned to the stalled project. The immediate prospect seemed bleak so I spent days re-imagining. our journey through New Zealand's primordial landscapes and South Asia's 'future now'. I am making slow progress, within two posts of flying home. What will I do then to stave off Mr Grumpy's catastrophic predictions?
In fact compared to the numberless days of house arrest since Christmas the last week has been comparatively action packed. The nearest place we could get our Covid vaccinations was at a community pharmacy 12 miles away in Macclesfield. I am am not sure what was a more exciting prospect, being able to visit Cheshire legally or getting vaccinated.
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| Foreign travel - Cheshire |
The vaccination centre was all very organised, a slick operation that had had us booked-in , jabbed and out in less than 10 minutes, though we did have to sit in the car for 15 minutes afterwards to make sure neither of us suffered an extreme allergic reaction.
We finished our 'grand day out' with a visit to Tesco's, since the demise of Buxton M&S there's nowhere in town where you can basic items of clothing like socks and knickers. By recent standards it was an exciting interlude. There followed two days of 'mild side effects'. Mild maybe, but unpleasant nonetheless.
Every couple of weeks we check the moho at the storage place. After the recent spell of torrential rain followed by an arctic blast, 10 days of sub zero temperatures and occasional blizzards, we found some water trickling across floor, from the corner of the sink unit to the bathroom door. It had caused some swelling at the foot of the bathroom door jamb. So much for much celebrated German build quality. Why design a bathroom with MDF detailing, a material that attracts moisture like a sponge? Where was the water coming from, we wondered. Most likely the recent storms had blown rain through the fridge vents we decided. Mr. Grumpy disagreed explaining in some detail how the ineptitude of the owners meant that the water system had not been drained properly. Of course the frozen pipes would have burst and more than likely the Truma boiler was a write-off too. Of course it would only cost a few thousand pounds to repair the damage, unless there was hidden wet rot behind the units, in which case the entire vehicle might have to be scrapped.
We decided that we needed to take the van for a trip out and investigate the problem further by refilling the water tank and testing the plumbing and heating. Of course the thing started first time and when we parked it outside the house and filled the water tank there was no evidence whatsoever of a burst pipe. We cannot do routine maintenance on the van at home. Our drive is steep and the road so narrow we have to park the vehicle at an angle, half on the pavement. We drove to Grin Low Country Park on the edge of town, a quiet spot with level parking bays. We tested the water system, turned on the gas, fired up the Truma. Of course everything worked just fine.
Gill set to removing patches of condensation mould from interior surfaces. I stuck some squares of velcro onto the exterior fridge vent frames. You can buy covers on-line, but none of them seemed to fit our vents, the Dometic fridge/freezer/oven comes as a single integrated unit. It's not so common. If we needed fridge vent covers it would have to be a DIY solution. It's ok I think.
Even Mr. Grumpy might concede reluctantly that things are looking more positive. So far as the pandemic is concerned it is slowly receding and after months of achieving a world beating performance in terms cases and deaths unusually the UK finds itself leading the world more positively, rolling out a mass vaccination programme efficiently and at pace.
Today felt Spring-like, the days becoming longer, crocuses opening and the magnolias in the park beginning to bud. We left the heating running in the van to dry it out and took a short stroll up to 'Solomon's Temple', a folly that overlooks the town. After the recent snow and rain the path across the field was too muddy, still it was nice to see a horizon. Buxton lies in a valley, it makes being trapped here for months extra claustrophobic.
Though it is still over a month before we can travel freely, and twice that time before we can go abroad I can see how I might occupy myself. My spring project is to re-lay the old concrete flagstones behind the garage, re-designing them around new raised beds to grow summer vegetables and soft fruit. It's a plan, by the time the work is finished we should be able to wander about once more and I will be happier. Perhaps I might be able to leave Mr Grumpy at home, not that he is much help, far too curmudgeonly to cut the lawn or do anything useful like water the lettuces while we are away.
