September 2019 started with us both being away on separate holidays since Geraldine was in Kent until the 8th, and I set off to go to Essex with Jim on the 4th. I had been invited to take part in a cycle trip to ride down the length of the river Rhine. Jim and his mate, Phil had planned this trip months ago, and when I heard, I cheekily asked if I could tag along too. At first, the answer was no due to accommodation concerns for three people. Then in June, I received an invitation. It seemed that another of Jim’s friends also wanted to come, so with four, the accommodation problem was eased. I’ve written a separate report on this in the ‘Blogs’ section of my website so I won’t write any more here.
I thought that cycling trips and holidays both as a couple and separately with our own friends would become a regular pattern for Geraldine and me now we were both retired but pretty soon other things got in the way. For the first six months, life was a dream. Two weeks cycling down the Rhine, then another few days in St Gervaix with the Wallis Cycles staff, solitary cycle trips to the Yorkshire Dales and Liverpool, eight concerts with Geraldine, several involving overnight stays and some day trips out making good use of our two-together railcard. And all this before Christmas! Geraldine also managed to sneak in a visit to Málaga in October, so life was hectic but fun. In December, we booked trips to go to Rome in January, a city I had long since wanted to return to, and to Malta in February. The Rome trip happened as planned, but then just a week after I returned I was knocked off my bike and broke my collar bone and so I was grounded for several weeks. We still got away to Malta (with my arm in a sling) and saw the Mardi Gras celebrations while there. Knowing what we now know, I feel that we were incredibly lucky with that trip.
Around Christmas time I became aware of a new and serious disease originating in Wuhan in China, but the danger seemed so far removed from us that I didn’t worry. However, by the time we flew out to Malta on 25th February I was very conscious that Europe was taking the outbreak of what was then named Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid19) very seriously indeed. We were rather disconcerted to undergo temperature checks upon arrival in Malta, but thankfully, we were allowed in. I think that was the first time that anyone had ever acknowledged that I’m cool. By then we all knew that Covid19 was potentially a killer and we felt glad that the Maltese were taking suitable precautions. I remember feeling a little uneasy being amongst all the crowds at the Mardi Gras celebrations, but we were outdoors and since no-one knew then how the virus was spreading (I thought it was through physical contact) I ignored any reservations I may have felt.
Of course, at that time (and indeed for another four years), the UK government was inexcusably useless about all kinds of things, including issuing warnings about the upcoming pandemic that most other countries were making serious preparations for. When we returned to UK (with no temperature check on the way through Manchester Airport), it became obvious that at least the media, if no-one else, was getting energised about the possibility of local or even national lock-downs of the type being introduced progressively in Italy from 21st February. It was only on the 23rd March (ten days after ¼ million visitors were crammed together in the stands at the Cheltenham Festival) did our esteemed leader, Mr. Johnson, require that everyone should stay at home to prevent the spread of the virus which had reached UK in January of that year. By the time we returned from abroad on 29th February, the UK was reporting 23 cases which rose to 36 the very next day, including people close to home in Manchester. The government was displaying woeful ignorance about the nature of exponential growth and often ignoring the advice being offered by the scientists.
So then, like everyone else, we embarked on the strangest period when all the usual norms were upended. I had many trips planned for the spring and summer which were all cancelled or postponed over the next few weeks including:
The final trip that we managed to make on 16th March was to a cottage in Staffordshire to celebrate Emily’s birthday. The cottage was remote, so we felt very safe and on the only day we ventured into Leek it was obvious that that most people were taking precautions to avoid contact with each other. I bought some drinks in a café and I remember paying by cash and not collecting the change when it was offered since I feared that the coins may have been contaminated. That is most unlike me!
We went for a meal in the Cavendish Arms on 19th March and we were shocked to see that there was only one other group eating and just two couples drinking on what would normally be a busy Thursday night. The landlady suggested that if they were forced to close, which by then was looking likely, the pub would try to keep going by offering takeaway food. This came to pass the following week as all hospitality venues were closed. Geraldine and I did our bit to keep the pub going by picking up a takeaway meal every week. Rules for the takeaway were established which made it safe (in my eyes). You ordered food and paid online, selected a pick-up time (10-minute slots) and then presented yourself at the door of the pub at the specified time. Your meal was placed on a table just inside the door in foil trays and everyone went away happy. I had no worries about catching anything from Gaz, the chef, since I fully expected him to already have cleanliness high up his priority list. After a few weeks of this, Gaz asked me to bring a container the next time I came since the sell-by date for the beer was approaching and he didn’t want to see it go to waste.
In retrospect, and very significantly, now knowing that we all survived safely, these were good times in many ways and writing about it now is making me quite nostalgic. Just in case you were wondering, yes, the pub did keep trading and indeed went from strength to strength after this. It even managed to build a new orangery in their garden during lock-down which doubled the number of covers they could accommodate once things got back to normal. Jen and Gaz are still running the pub today and it is open seven days per week and virtually full every night. Gone are the days when we could just wander across at any time of the week and get our favourite table: booking is essential now.
Laurence had a lucky escape during this period. He was about to change jobs and he had handed in his notice prior to taking on a new role. He planned to leave his current job on 31st March but wasn’t starting in his new role until 13th April. The lockdown restrictions that prevented anyone from going out were introduced three weeks after he had handed in his notice. This clearly prevented him from starting a new job on 13th April. Thankfully, his old employer agreed to re-employ him and put him on furlough, initially until the end of May. This meant that he was able to receive 80% of his salary paid by the government. The furlough was subsequently extended until 13th July when he finally began in his new role, in which he was able to work from home. Phew! We were so glad that he was leaving his old company on good terms since they were under no obligation to re-hire him, even though it cost them nothing.
In the bike shop, I felt uneasy working in a customer-facing role during lockdown. Bike shop employees were considered essential workers (alongside shop workers, bus and train drivers and of course the NHS) and so the shop never closed. Martin made several changes to ensure that there was as little physical contact as possible. For the first week I still worked in the shop but made sure that I never met any customers directly and always wore vinyl gloves when working on the bikes (we still believed that the virus was spreading through physical contact). I remained very uneasy since the government had decided that due to my heart condition, I was part of a vulnerable group. Martin soon established a novel solution, however. He hired a nearby storage unit and between us we converted it into a workshop. I made a bench from some scrap timber, set up a bike stand and arranged all the tools around the walls.
Before long, I was doing repairs in my own ‘workshop’ and we even arranged for new boxed bikes to be delivered to the unit where I could assemble them before delivering them to the shop for sale. My car became a van. I could carry two bikes in the back with a further three on a bike rack. I found that I was constantly driving up and down between the unit, the shop and the wholesaler. The unit was on an anonymous industrial park and we never told anyone where it was and so I never had to confront the germ-ridden public for several months. It was a very busy time, and during May 2020, I worked for 28 out of the 31 days! My bike riding suffered, though. Suddenly, although the roads were empty, I was stuck indoors every day. I was glad to be of some use, however, and very grateful that I was able to keep safe.
In April during the early days of the lock-down, the weather was glorious and I spent a lot of time in my shed restoring and repainting an old engineer’s vice which I’d inherited from my father-in-law. I also restored a garden roller to its former glory. Each time I see these items today, I am transported back to that most extraordinary time in my life.
My birthday was a non-event. Although it fell on a Friday, it was only ten days into the lockdown and neither Geraldine nor I felt like celebrating.
All church services were suspended for five months and it was the first time I’d ever missed attending mass on Easter Sunday. Geraldine turned 60 later in the summer, and any ideas she had of throwing a big party were abandoned. However, by late June the rules allowed a limited number of people to meet outdoors at a safe distance and so we arranged for Laurence’s girlfriend at the time (who was a dance teacher) to give a dance lesson in our garden for a few of Geraldine’s close friends and neighbours. We even had people dialling in through Zoom, so it was a lovely afternoon, and just about within the rules.
Just before my local library closed in March, I was allowed to borrow more books than usual, but these didn’t get returned until October. By then, I’d moved over to using Borrowbox, the library service that allowed me to borrow e-books on library terms. I still use that excellent service now, and so now my regular visits to the library have ended after many decades. So many things changed during those extraordinary weeks that the time pre-Covid really does feel like a different era, and that we have moved away from a life which will never return. So that was the first year of our retired life together. Later in the year, as the restrictions were eased, normal life began to resume, but there would be several more setbacks before we could say that things were back to normal.