Lockdown

All our children and grandchildren live in England. As of 18h this evening it is illegal for us to leave the City of Edinburgh boundary let alone scale Hadrian’s Wall and do a long distance runner to the far south! We have not seen our sons and Wiltshire grandchildren since Christmas 2019. We have not been in our Gloucestershire daughter’s family home since February.

When I was a grandchild my maternal grandparents lived in Aberdeen. We only saw them in August in the Granite City and at Christmas in our Home Counties homes. In between we had occasional monosyllabic conversations on the telephone and more frequent handwritten correspondence.

Our long distance relationship with our grandparents was undimmed by distance and their company forged lifelong memories. As we are catapulted by Covid back into a socially long distanced separation from our family I reflect on how it was for them. They must have felt much further away from us than my sisters and I did from them. Now I really know what it was like for them.

We are not alone. Hundreds of thousands are separated unwillingly by this virus.