Grounded

We were told late Friday afternoon that there is a ban on all non-essential travel. ‘Essential’ is working directly in a humanitarian response to save lives. We do so much travel it feels very odd to be grounded. Half my team is Italian, and they are the ones we would send to an earthquake or similar response. The job requires them to be able to get on a plane at 24 hours notice. Only there are no planes and nobody wants Italians in their countries either. Kenya allows planes from Italy to take Italians out of the country but the crew cannot disembark. Iraq banned British, French and Italians from entry. Brits arriving in Russia have to prove they have a place to self isolate for 14 days and breaching isolation can carry a 5 year jail term.

This morning I suggested to the young Italian woman working with me here, that she could go and be nearer to family and friends and work from home in Italy. By early afternoon that option was gone as flights were cancelled. A new guy in our team, a Brazilian living in France close but currently here in the UK doing kidnap training, just called to ask if he could go home early to join his wife as he didn’t want to get caught up in a lockdown.

And that got me thinking about the boys - I suggested as their lectures are all recorded and online that they come home soon for the Easter break as my ‘mum instinct’ is to have my boys close by, if they got sick far away and I couldn’t be with them, well that would be so hard and stressful. They are happily getting on with life though and seem to think at Easter they’ll be off to London to dine out and go to galleries... I don’t think that’s going to happen. Or am I judging this completely wrong?