Empty restaurant

We took the red funnel ferry back from the Isle of Wight. We have been spending PY’s birthday on the island with friends and family. It’s been a strange experience: lovely and a lot of fun but with the looming threat of COVID-19. This morning we were told that we are working from home - it had originally been suggested that working from home would start on Wednesday with a phased roll-in and a suggestion to come in an unpack after the move today and tomorrow. It seems that moved on over the weekend and now the message is stay home if you can work from home.  As I am not in the office it doesn’t impact me but it does mean that I will not be going into the office to see my new desk. Fortunately, we had been encouraged to bring our laptops home because of the office move so I have everything I need to start working from home tomorrow.  PY is not in the same situation as they can’t work from home.

In the meantime we decided to grab some lunch at a tapas restaurant near the ferry terminal.  I think we may have been a little bit isolated for the past few days because this place is strangely deserted and it’s lunch time.  There’s some hand sanitiser here which we’re been using whenever food is delivered to the table. I hadn’t been feeling too concerned about the virus threat and we had been joking that it would not be the worst thing to be told to stay at home if we were in the holiday place on the island. After all, it had a hot tub and we could easily have spent a few days enjoying that.

Obviously, I do not know how many people would have been in the restaurant at lunchtime today. It may, generally, be empty on a Monday. But it felt very strange.