What a strange Winter it's been, biding time and tuning in to the various Coronavirus dashboards each day watching the numbers soaring and declining and reflecting on what it means for oneself and the wider world.  Sue and I have weathered it better than most I reckon, blessed by relative financial security and through our travels a degree of resilience to hardship and uncertainty.  Routine has helped, every other day I go for a run - this is the Queen's Scone and Devon Park on a wintry February, usually the home of Newark Parkrun, now suspended for more than a year. Sue's two allotments have given her much needed space and as well as working on these she's turned the house into an impromptu greenhouse.  Here her cucumber plants are slowly taking over.  Fortunately they've now been relocated to the poly tunnel on the nearby allotment at Fleming Drive.  Actually I was quite sad to see them go. On the days I don't run I take Poppy for her morning constitutional an...

One of the good things about having a dog in lockdown is that you get out and meet people.  Poppy has made lots of friends on our regular walks around town and this is Charlie, one of her favourites.  Charlie comes to the riverside walk on our side of Newark most mornings on his mobility scooter.  He exercises his dodgy knee and feeds the birds (and the rats).  Poppy is always pleased to see him and he her.  Over the months we've passed the time of day together I've learned that he used to be in the Pioneer Corps and that he buys and sells antiques.  He also knows a lot about the town and its inhabitants.  Sometimes he gets to know one of the transient rough sleepers who turn up on the benches on the riverside walk from time to time and he has been known to bring them sandwiches. Then there's Ruby, a lovely black poodley looking dog who has similar energy levels and who she loves to wrestle.  Ruby's owner Judy lives with her partner in a house ove...

Early this month we got the very sad news from our friend Bernie that his wife Anne had died, following her second liver transplant just before Christmas.  Anne was a fellow public sector accountant and I'd known her since the mid-nineties.  Bernie and Anne came out to see us when La Fulica was in Catania harbour in Sicily in August 2003, when we were in the middle of that fantastic hot summer cruising the Italian coast and islands.  They did us the great and very generous favour of paying for us to jojn them in the Villa Politi, a beautiful hotel with pool in Syracusa.  Later they came to visit us in Puglia.  Anne's liver failed catastrophically and without warning about ten years ago and she showed enormous courage and determination over her first transplant, which gave her another decade of active life.  She was such a force in life it's hard to comprehend she's no longer here and I'm sad we didn't see her more often in recent years. Last week my ex-wife...

November and December rolled on in much the same way as the rest of 2020, with our lives narrowed and simplified by Coronavirus.  I took this photo on one of my morning walks with Poppy, the weather bright and misty for a change, instead of grey and damp.  Sometimes I really miss those bright dry winter days in Puglia, where despite the cold wind if you can find a sheltered spot the sun starts to warm your bones. Every day I check out the infection and deaths data on the UK Covid dashboard and the international one maintained by the New York Times.  As the number of cases climbed relentlessly from early December it seemed inevitable there would be a new lockdown and Sue and I cancelled already tentative plans to spend Christmas in Devon with her sister Julie.  In the end we stayed home and had a Christmas not unlike the last one, gorging on duck, Netflix and Quality Street. Poppy has been oblivious to it all and such an enormous psychological asset over the last few ...

Through the first lockdown and then the easing of restrictions the allotments were a lifeline for Sue, and I also came to value the steady stream of fresh veggies they produced, such as tomatoes, fava beans and tons of green salad stuff.  One of my favourites was radicchio di Treviso, the long, dark red and bitter tasting endive that is almost impossible to find in the UK, but is highly prized in Italy and is fantastic oven roasted in olive oil as an accompaniment to a big juicy rare steak. By the time our birthdays in July we were actually able to have a birthday meal in a local pub and also begin to meet our friend Beryl again for our monthly lunchtime get togethers.  For Sue's birthday I gave her the money to buy a second shed for her allotment at nearby Fleming Drive, which we built together in September. In October, increasingly desperate for a break from our narrow existence in Newark we booked an airbnb in Bridlington, for the price that we would usually have paid for a...

Writing this from the perspective of January 2021 it's already hard to remember the speed with which the Covid 19 story went from being an unsettling footnote to the daily news, to the shock of the UK lockdown at the end of March.  On the Friday before the lockdown I was conducting a funeral where I was in a tiny funeral director's "chapel" with a dozen or so mourners, cheek by jowl with the coffin.  Later we went on to the Tithe Green natural burial ground where we were joined by more mourners, one of whom was presciently warning everyone to take great care. Also writing this after the event I'm now suddenly aware how the pandemic has imposed a common narrative on humankind.  In that first lockdown we were allowed out for exercise just once per day and I remember that strange sense of threat I felt just walking around all to familiar places.  In fact Sue and I adapted quickly, agreeing that we would take our exercise separately, with one of us walking Poppy on al...

In early December Sue got news that her friend Annisha, who was one of the feisty group of teachers she mentored in Sarawak, was coming to the UK for a holiday with her daughter and her cousin Leeza and her family.  We decided to meet them all in London and to take them out for lunch as a way of repaying a tiny fraction of the hospitality Annisha gave to us during our stay in Saratok in 2011-13.  We met them all at the V&A and then had the tricky task of finding somewhere to take seven people who only eat halal in Knightsbridge a few days before Christmas.  As luck would have it we found a Lebanese restaurant with an enterprising Russian manager who organised a fixed price lunch for us around a big back-room table.  We had a really convivial meal and Sue and Annisha's bond, was instantly renewed, as it had been when we met for that wonderful barbecue by the South China Sea in February 2018.  We had another quiet Christmas, away from the stresses of a big fam...