To all those united in distancing
After two weeks “away” we are back. Our fortnight “in Italy” is over, my father is back to his meetings, I’m desperately trying to reverse the holiday indulgences by getting back on the bike; even the weather, which had been aiding and abetting our make-believe Mediterranean holiday, has dropped 15 degrees and filled the sky with distinctly British drizzle.
This is actually part of a phenomenon that we have noticed in the past, i.e the unerring ability of the British weather to pick up just as we go on holiday and return to normal as we get back. It always happens, but was most noticeable on a trip to Tenerife that saw 13 days of cloud and some flash floods in certain parts of the island, while the forests of England were spontaneously auto-igniting in a two-week heatwave. It seems that this year we have outwitted the law of Murphy itself! I can only apologise to the residents of Florence who I assume have been suffering 14 days of unseasonably British summer.
Part of our Italian holiday vibe has been generated by eating Italian food, mostly different types of shellfish, and I have come to the conclusion that wile clams, crabs and giant prawns taste nice, they are also extremely fiddly and on balance probably not worth the three minute struggle for every morsel. There is one exception, however, as I found out when we took our holiday to the countryside to see my grandmother on her birthday. As a special treat she bought cooked lobsters which are also extremely fiddly and one has to work hard for every morsel, but the meat is so delicious it makes the effort totally worth it. I also managed to make up for the healthy sea food by attacking the Rocky-road and lemon drizzle cake that my sister and I had brought down with us to help celebrate.
The end of the holiday means the end of the championship between my mother and me, on balance I think it worked out as a scoring draw, although only because she avoided being trounced by refusing to play noughts and crosses or the teddy bear train game. I won chess, she took scrabble, we lost count of backgammon but it was roughly even, shut the box was two sets all and 9-men Morris was one a piece.
It seems to be a time for endings, lockdown appears to be lifting, piece by piece, although whether it will stick remains to be seen. Sadly, for many of us it is still impractical to return to life as we knew it: I will be the only radio show still pre-recording for Riverside Radio as I cannot use the studio systems to Zoom in my co-hosts, nor can I resume full training for the postponed London marathon in October or even travel on trains or in taxis without touching about a million surfaces. So for me, and lots of others for many other reasons, the lockdown continues; so does the writing, so does the baking and the optimism… and the beard, it can now support a pair of glasses which has to look pretty cool right?
whether you’re kick starting the economy by going out or staying safe by staying in, I hope you can all find your own ways of maintaining the optimism, and lets all hope that Italian weather comes back some time soon.
Love and best wishes
Richard
Richard Wheatley BSc BPBH
PS
I’ve just found out about this quiz.
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/the-impressionable-quiz/register
I did the physical version last year with a group of friends and I’ll be doing it again this year with my family. Jon Culshaw is sort of one of my comedy heroes, I actually remember doing a Dead Ringers set at school when I was 7 years old, the highlight of which was an impression of Charlotte Green saying “mmm, sexy aren’t I”. I had never actually heard charlotte Green, just the Dead Ringers version. The memory of that early performance left scars so deep that when I had the chance to talk to Jan Ravens in a pub last year, for the first time in my life I got genuinely tongue-tied.