Resolution

I'm glad to have reached the end of today! The limbo of yesterday has been replaced by certainty, a resolution of our own dilemma over the holiday we should have been off on tomorrow. We began after breakfast with a phone call to HF, our travel company, to be told that the trip was still going ahead. A little more desultory packing followed; I visited friends along the road who were also booked to go on holiday on the same day; I texted our Canadian friends who were supposed to be coming with us; I realised they were even more stressed than I was because one of them texted me right back - at 3am Canadian time! 

By lunchtime we still thought we were going. I was just about to take poached eggs out of the pan when my phone rang. The holiday was cancelled; we would be given a full refund; just give my card number and the money would be paid into the account. The administration in Southern Cyprus had decided to impose a 14-day quarantine period on visitors - our holiday was only 7 days long.

Neither of us could bear to unpack our cases. We abandoned them in the hall and eventually - there were flights to cancel - we went out, down to Loch Striven, where we were passed by three cars and saw one man, outside the fuel base. There were daffodils on the verge, left from long-demolished houses; herons flapped hugely along the shoreline and screeched in the trees. We were sheltered from the wind, there was a little sun before it set behind the hills. We didn't get back to the car till 6.30pm. 

Our larder is very bare - going to have to shop tomorrow - but there were prawns and there was pasta, and some suitable vegetables. And while I chopped the veg there was a whisky, a wonderful, 54% proof whisky which glowed under the application of just a little water. That's my blip for today. 

A final reflection: the news seemed somehow less personal now that we're just doing the sensible thing, the ordinary thing. Relative isolation is too easy here; I'm not sure how sensible we're going to be but there are few demands for a while. And we can fret instead over whether we're the elderly or the herd ...