I suppose if you have an optimistic, positive attitude to life, it’s probably best not to read the blog of a pessimistic, glass half-empty clinical depressive, but here it is anyway.
COVID-19 decided to pour a bucket of shit over me this week, a few days after I had one of my usual mental meltdowns (I’ll elaborate in due course), by forcing easyJet to cancel our flights to Spain later next month. It was more a family visit with a few days in the sun tacked on, so the cancellation is all the more disappointing and distressing. As I have known throughout my life, having close relatives living in a different country is right up there with the very worst things in life.
Ironically, on the very day easyJet cancelled our flights, Spain decided to announce British people were more than welcome to visit the bingo halls and traditional English pubs on the Costas. Getting there is rather more tricky.
Spain has taken a different line to Germany, which is to ban all UK travellers from Sunday, not because they hate us but because they would rather not import the far more transmissible Indian variant Boris Johnson did so much to import by dithering on when to stop flights arriving from India, where things are hopelessly out of control. It’s entirely possible the reason for countries reacting differently is as simple as the fact that Spain needs a flood of British tourists to stay solvent this summer and Germany doesn’t, but who knows?
Either way, I fear this Indian variant has the potential to bugger up everyone’s summer holidays. France’s numbers are still grim, as are those in Greece, Italy’s aren’t great and Turkey’s are disastrous. Even a government as reckless as Johnson’s is being very cagey as to whether we can travel abroad this year.
So, maybe it will be a year of taking holidays in the UK, if we can find and then afford any, or like last year staycations, which may I remind you – YET AGAIN! – means not having overnight stays.
My big fear is not so much when I will next see my distant and not so distant relations, it’s if.
