Heart and Crossbones

Hello! I’m blogging again on my new blog, Heart and Crossbones, after a break since early last year. I didn’t blog for many reasons, but I thought about blogging and what I wanted to capture. The pandemic years, and 2022 is the third one now, have been like a choppy sea – periods of calm but always waiting for what ever is next; waves of Covid cases followed by a trepidatious return to “normality”, which is really a new normal now and won’t be like the old normal again. But you know what they say, the only constant in life is change itself so in that spirit, on we go!

Where I last left off, April 2021, Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinborough, had died. Mum accompanied me and George back to Canberra to spend some time with us and to hang out with George for the remainder of the school holidays while I worked at the Catholic Education Office. We were able to watch the Duke’s funeral together, with a well-chosen entree of the Downton Abbey episode where the King & Queen come to visit.

Here are a few pics from late Autumn 2021…

After Mum left, Term 2 began and my friend Nadia (who lives in Sydney) and I, began planning one of our regular school holiday getaways with our respective kids. We were going to do a driving holiday around the Snowy Mountains – but it wasn’t to be.

My sister Senorita Margarita had recently said re Covid, “… I want to be careful, now that this guy in Bondi has it”. Yes, I’m talking about “The Limo driver” – The unvaccinated airport limo driver who was the first reported Delta case (as in the Delta strain of Covid) in Australia (via Australia’s gateway, Sydney of course) in May or June 2021. cases in Sydney went from 5 cases, to 5 cases a day, to hundreds a day in weeks.

At the end of June 2021, the NSW Premier at the time, Gladys Berejiklian, called a lockdown of four of the most affected Local Government Areas (LGAs). My friend Nadia (like many of my friends and family) was in one of the four locked down LGAs.

Nadia texted me while I was shopping with George at the Canberra Centre… our little holiday would be delayed at the very least. Once home, I rang Nadia, and we remained optimistic… oh well, maybe the lockdowns will lift after a week and we can still go away. “Or you could still go” said Nadia (since I wasn’t from Covid-crusted Sydney). But I decided not to. The regions didn’t want visitors, from Sydney or anywhere else. We were able to cancel our accommodation in Tumut easily, I even got a text from the motel encouraging fee-free cancellation before I made the call.

The term ended and I watched on helplessly as my Sydney friends and family endured another lockdown, longer and harder than the nationwide one in Autumn 2020. I had finished a contract at the Catholic Education Office in May, and had told my next contract employer at the Australian Electoral Commission that I couldn’t start until after the July school holidays. So George and I spent a strange, low-key school holidays in Canberra, after cancelling our trip, with no Sydney friends or family coming to visit.

At the same time as this, the ACT Government had declared a mask mandate for at least the next two weeks – masks were to be worn everywhere, even outside. But at least we were not locked down like Sydney. We could go out and about and even travel. But we didn’t because of what the regional councils had requested.

Back then, I didn’t realise that the paper surgical masks actually offered better protection. I thought if we must wear masks, at least lets get some cool handmade ones and support local Canberra businesses. Also, I wanted to get some that fit George properly, as the non-handmade ones always hung a bit loose on his still-developing adolescent jawline.

I looked online and found a maker at Wanniassa Markets, so we headed there and ordered our handmade masks which we were told would be ready in a few days – the maker was swamped with orders! Afterwards, we picked up lunch at Oporto and went to a park to eat it. It was a beautiful sunny Winter day. Even though they were open, we didn’t want to sit in food courts.

So that was our first outing of the July 2021 school holidays. And while we did cancel our Snowy Mountains road trip, George and I decided to head to Corin Forest for a day of Tobogganing, appreciating the fact we could drive more than 5km away, unlike our Sydney friends.

We also went to a theatrical production of George’s favourite movies “Fantastic Mr. Fox” based on the book by Roald Dahl. We both liked the movie better than the theatre show – which was really aimed at younger children.

We were wearing masks everywhere indoors, but there was still fun to be had and much of it was outside. We appreciated our relative freedoms in Winter 2021, but for just how long could Canberra remain Coronavirus-free? As a friend said, surely “it’s only a matter of time before a truck driver brings it down from Sydney”.

To be continued…