Two Weeks of Isolation Over, The Relative Freedom of Lock-Down

With only the occasional Paddington-Hard-Stare fired off between us, we reached the end of our 14 day isolation in The Cooler today. There are still motorhome wanderers returning (or trying to return, there’s a hefty backlog at Tanger Med in Morocco), to the UK at the moment, and they might be wondering whether they need to do the same. Our answer: dunno. There doesn’t appear to be any official guidance for those returning from Europe; we opted to self-isolate as it felt like the right thing to do, a decision and process made easier of course by the fact we’ve no kids and no jobs and my sister’s family were taking care of my locked-in parents.

There’s something about time, how it compresses behind us but seems to stretch out ahead? Looking backwards the two weeks passed very quickly, days spent reading, cooking, exercising, sleeping, talking, sorting tech out, jig-sawing and trying to somehow develop a sense of relative scale from the media storm blowing in through our various glowing screens. In the running part of our lives, we brush shoulders with folks pulling off mighty deeds: completing Ironman events, running 100 mile ultras, that kinda momentous stuff, rendering our own smaller challenges all the more reasonable, less extreme. Same goes for this isolation stuff I think: my parents have been locked in for 3 weeks now with no physical contact. I know of several others who will be locked in to their homes for several months. Two weeks is a piece of cake compared with that, I bow down to those of you reading this who are in isolation for the long haul.

In the past few days I’ve built up a few nerves about today. Spain looked very weird as we retreated, the glimpses we got of it in the days before they locked down, as did France, with panicked folks stocking up in supermarkets and with fuel, and streets and motorways rapidly emptying of people and vehicles. The UK looked normal in comparison, with heavy traffic on the motorway journey home, shops and restaurants still open, folks young and old walking the streets close together, lights on in the pubs reflecting off punters inside. Clearly much has changed in two weeks, perhaps the fastest-changing couple of weeks we’re (with any luck) likely to experience in our lives. Yep, I knew what the world outside might look like, but I wasn’t sure how I’d feel when I actually saw it.

In the end, as usual, it was nothing like as bad as my imagination. We’ve used the day to replenish the fridge and cupboards and to head over to my parent’s three miles away and restock them too. Our supplies came from the Sainsburys round the corner. They’re only allowing single people to shop in there, no couples. Ju’s the grub shopper on Planet Buckley, so she headed off, reporting via text message a very long queue of folks outside the shop, all stood 3 or 4m apart, good news. When I got a text a while later to say she was heading to pay I walked over there to help carry the food back. That was an experience in itself, walking down the middle of the street at times to avoid the occasional person on the pavement, the risk of being run-over mitigated by the fact there was only 1/100th the usual level of traffic. All but the hardware shop were shut, many with signs saying they were closed for the foreseeable future, a tough time for all these small businesses. At one point as I walked a couple were dropping off their trolley, at a kind of pinch point in the path. I’d seen I could avoid them by stepping through some bushes, but they didn’t know that and I overheard the chap saying ‘look out’ to his wife as I approached. We’re all walking weapons now.

Saino’s Report From Ju: pretty much everything was available, including eggs, meat, pasta and loo roll. A few lines were missing: most rice, sultanas, flour and condensed milk, but on the whole the shelves were full. Our fresh food had mostly run out a few days ago, another small relief to find fresh fruit and veg was pretty much all present. At the checkout Ju had a quick chat with the operator who, it turned out has a house in Spain and relayed how it had been nuts in there two weeks ago, with some shoppers turning to fighting. Last week she said there was ‘no food’. Seems we timed it right. The operators had no screens or masks, just gloves, and Ju had to tap in her PIN as we’d bought 2 week’s worth of food so exceeded the new £45 contactless limit. Oh, and there were walls of Easter Eggs available too, another odd ‘norm’ in such tumultuous times.

Once we’d unpacked at home, washed hands and spoke with my parents, we got on our trusty old bikes and cycled the 3 miles over to their house. Everything started to feel more ‘normal’ as we went, perhaps as we cycled through the town centre so more people were knocking about, perhaps as we’d expected the town to be completely devoid of life. There was no trouble keeping away from folks with just the occasional need to steer into the centre of the road. As Ju overtook a stationary bus a vehicle overtook her causing a flinch. It was a herse with a coffin in the back. 563 people passed away today with COVID-19. On average 1600 people die each day in the UK (of other causes), so the chances are something other than the dreaded coronavirus caused their demise: life (and death) goes on outside the pandemic. We’re still in the foothills though, it seems. There may be mountains ahead, and still more mountains ahead of them.

At my parents we spoke from a distance, my Dad stood in the doorway with us a few metres away, wary of being any closer even despite the fact we’ve just self-isolated for two weeks. The tiny bloody virus thing could be anywhere. Had we just picked it up in Sainsburys? Was it on our clothing? No-one knows. Mum left a shopping list on a step and closed the door while we picked it up. It listed stuff like ‘bread’, ‘milk’, ‘meat’ and so on. As we don’t normally shop for our folks, we don’t know their preferences and Ju phoned Mum inside to ask her. Mum’s response was ‘whatever you can get’. As we’d just come from Sainsbury we knew the chances were the Morrisons near to them would be well stocked (it was, and had an equally long queue stretched outside), but Mum didn’t know that and assumed we’d be grabbing whatever we could.

Dad loaned us his car to go to the shops, his pride and joy, shining outside the house with him unable to drive it anywhere. I was loathe to take to the wheel, worried I’d leave the virus inside and he’d catch it just going in to move it on the driveway or fetch something from inside. We chatted about it and Dad said he’d clean the steering wheel and so on if he had to go in. We left with some of their stash of latex gloves and a jigsaw, waving goodbye for a few more days and dropping off small presents at a couple of houses on the street: tokens of appreciation from my folks for help given freely and with great thought in recent days.

Back home, we locked the bikes up and scrubbed up again. Should we wash all the food we just bought? Probably, but we didn’t, it went into the cupboards and fridge and we scrubbed up again. Some younger folks are being killed by the virus now, with no underlying health conditions, so we’ve no ‘comfort’ it won’t happen to us. Other than probability, that is. Also, the death stats don’t reflect the fact it looks like one hell of an effort for some folks to fight the thing off. I’ve never heard of a ventilator before, but I have now and don’t much fancy a ride in one. My fear bounces up and down. Unless I’ve done a big effort (ultra-marathoning) I don’t tend to get ill so my immune system **seems** to be working OK. I’ve dialled down my training a lot in the past 3 weeks, partially so I’m not tiring my body too much. We’re both pretty fit, so our chances are good. Good enough that we couldn’t be bothered to wash all of our shopping anyway. I might/might not live to regret it mind you.

So, that’s it, we’re ‘out’. An ex-fireman in our running club is central to a local community support group with folks volunteering to ‘own’ a street or two of the town, delivering letters with their phone number on so those isolating can get the support they need. They’ve got financial support from the borough and local councils and are doing a fantastic job. We’ve got our street and the one next to it, and will get the pre-printed letters later today, fill ’em in and deliver them. With friends, neighbours and family helping each other so much at the moment, we don’t know how much we’re needed, but we’ll do what we can. We also get the chance to go outside once a day for exercise now, which opens up the chance to run again. We’ve already been out once today, but tomorrow I’ll head out for the first run in a wee while, feeling the air rush into my lungs and my heart thumping away.

As well as testing our collective sanity, the pandemic’s testing many people’s financial plan, us included. We have no jobs, so can’t fear losing them. Our income is instead from a combination of renting out three houses, a small shop, shares, bonds, book sales, advertising income on our blog and solar panel feed-in-tariff payments (this free eBook outlines how we ended up here). COVID-19 is (almost) a perfect storm, potentially removing almost all of these at the same time, compounded by large scale unemployment making any option to go back to work much more difficult. We call this our crazy life experiment, and now we are really putting our experiment to the test. As things stand we’re seeing book sales drop off (not entirely, clearly some folks are still thinking about motorhome travel once this is over!), our share funds have dropped in value around 20% (so far, they may well drop much further but we’ve no plan to sell any of them whatever happens) and dividends due in a few days will likely be far lower than usual. Rents *might* stop, we’ll keep a close eye on that one and work out a way to help as needed.

We’ve always been paranoid about *something* big happening to threaten our finances (although we had zero idea a pandemic would be it), so we have relatively little debt (a partial mortgage on our rented-out bungalow) and have kept a fairly large emergency fund in cash and premium bonds, so we can still sleep at night (as well as anyone can sleep in such times). Our costs have also gone down, since we’re hardly doing anything, no diesel fill-ups, tapas and campsites, that’s for sure. Many of the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) bloggers are buying more shares while they’re ‘cheap’, but we’d prefer to keep our emergency fund (our lifeboat) intact in such rough waters.

OK, I’ll leave it there for now, almost Boris o’Clock (or whoever’s standing in for him today while he gets over the virus). Good luck wherever you are folks, and whatever situation you’re in.

Cheers, Jay