A WHOLE YEAR (how was it for you?)

These are some of my photos taken on a trip to Angles-sur-L'Anglin in the middle of August last year.

Unbelievably, it is now exactly one year, come Monday, that we have been very much in the grip of the pandemic.  On the Monday 16th March last year we were advised not to go to the pub or to mix with anyone much, but the pubs, shops and schools stayed open.  Nobody took a lot of notice and people carried on more or less as before.

No. 15, the salon de thé in Angles, is one of the few places where you can get tea and cake in the middle of the afternoon.

With horrifying images from Italy on our TVs every day, we had a sense of both disbelief and impending doom.  Boris Johnson visited a hospital where patients with the virus were being treated and shook hands with everyone he met.  This, presumably to prove that if he had nothing to fear from the disease then nobody else should be concerned either.  

A pair of iconic old French cars.

Come Monday 23rd March in the evening, the true seriousness of the situation was spelled out to the nation and we immediately went into real lockdown.  It was a week too late.

The brocante shops were all open for business.

Following the lead (i.e pinching the idea) of one of my favourite blogs, how was it for you?  After a whole year of ups and downs, hopes and fears, joy and disappointments, how have you fared?

We enjoyed a walk along the river with Hugo.  Rain clouds were gathering.

We are, I think, much calmer and accepting than we were this time last year.  The first lockdown of last year came just as we would normally be packing up to go to France for the spring and summer.  We felt a huge sense of loss.

Although we have visited Angles many, many times, we had never done this walk by the river before.  We were probably too busy taking tea and cake!

We were like cats on hot bricks all spring on summer, feeling very cheated, anxious and as if it was all a bad dream.   Covid-19 was sweeping through the country at a terrifying rate and as we queued outside the supermarket with our trolley we were very unsettled.

The château has the perfect spot overlooking the village and the river.

Who would have thought, when our prime minister told us it would all be over in twelve weeks, that we would, twelve months later, still be in lockdown and with several weeks to go - if it all goes to plan.  It could be longer.

Angles is a very photogenic place.  There are great pictures to be taken at every corner.

This time last year you could not buy a toilet roll, bag of flour, packet of pasta, bar of soap or tin of tomatoes because the hoarders had got there before you.  This year we are in a better position.  For a while anyway, until the trading problems arising from Brexit kick in.

We passed this on our way home from Angles.  I can't remember where it was because we took the pretty route home and meandered around a bit.

We spent spring and early summer mostly in our garden.  The weather was unusually good.  Gradually the restrictions were lifted and in late July we made it to France, staying for eight whole weeks.  What precious weeks they were.  Normally we are there for 26 weeks of the year but as the situation worsened again in September we cut short our stay, packed up early and came home.  We have now been back in the UK for exactly six months.  

Last year we got to France after being away for seven months but this year it looks like being nine, or even ten.  Even when all we had was the little house in the village where we just spent our holidays, until 2020 we had never been away from the place for more than five months.  (I dread that in 2021 it could actually be as much as a whole year.)

We also passed several late crops of sunflowers on the way home.

We spent much of last year trying to get my dad into his sheltered housing accommodation and, in the end, in desperation, we resorted to getting our local MP involved.  That did the trick.  I have a suspicion that this particular Conservative MP wanted to show that not all of his ilk were completely heartless when it comes to caring for our elderly citizens.  Thousands of care home residents had already lost their lives to the virus because infected patients were discharged from the hospitals to the care homes to free up hospital beds.

More of these seem to appear with every year.

So, one year and 127,000 UK deaths further on, we are still in lockdown.  Things are looking hopeful as the vaccination programme takes effect.  Numbers are still going in the right direction.  They go up and down a bit in different areas but on the whole there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel.  Well, on this side of the channel tunnel anyway.

I have begun to hear people say that they could live like this forever if need be.  I couldn't.  Well, I could if I had to but I wouldn't want to.  I would never be content living like this, but I accept that there is no point hankering after what we can't have and we now keep a note of interesting places we could go and visit in the UK that we have never been before.  This is a back up plan if we are allowed to travel freely here but the European borders remain closed.  That's something we thought we would only do once we had finally hung up our travelling shoes and returned properly to the UK.  Not yet, not now.