False dawn?

As August 2020 crept towards September there were worrying signs that the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel might have been a false dawn, or maybe an approaching train. Suddenly, all the positivity of June and July, the news of retail sales recovering to almost pre COVID levels and things slowly reopening was slipping away. Things were going awry again. There were surges of cases in Manchester, East Lancashire and Yorkshire. Local lockdowns didn’t seem to be working. Plans to reopen more things were put on hold.

We’d stuck to all the rules. We hadn’t seen family or friends. The running club had stuck strictly to the rule of six outside and kept socially distanced. I’d had a couple of short walks with Kim, again, socially distanced. We’d eaten out once, in the Bellemoor, but we’d worn our face masks except when we were eating. When I went to the supermarket I sanitised my hands and wore my mask, even though my glasses steamed up and I kept making interesting accidental purchases because I couldn’t see properly. It felt as if we were doing all we could, at least on a personal level, but still cases were rising. The big issue was that not everyone was being as careful as we were. A little voice inside my head kept telling me the second wave was coming.

It was not all doom and gloom however. Despite the virus, the world kept on turning. Summer was drawing to a close, the seasons were changing, the wasps were buzzing about drowsily and the first of the leaves were falling. Kim had recovered from her brush with COVID and had started running again, even though she said her chest was not quite what it had been.

We couldn’t control what other people were doing. We couldn’t do any more than we were doing to stop the virus spreading. It felt as if it was time to look after ourselves and enjoy life as much as we could while we could, so, on 3 September, Commando and I took a little drive to Beaulieu to look at the river and have a short walk.

We parked up in the deserted motor museum and took a slow wander towards the village. It was a short walk, less than a mile, on a trail beside Hatchet Lane, a winding, leafy B road. We came upon a couple of other walkers going in the opposite direction but our stroll was otherwise peaceful. In a very short time we were looking across Mill Dam, where the river swirls into a small pond to force the water through Beaulieu Mill. A few ducks and gulls were huddled on the water under a heavy grey sky.

Beaulieu village grew up around Beaulieu Abbey, founded in 1204. The land for the abbey was provided by King John for Cistercian monks and those monks dammed the river to create the Mill Dam so the incoming and outgoing tide would power a corn mill. This tide mill, on a bridge over the dam, continued to grind corn until 1942.

A group of donkeys were grazing when we came to cross the road to the village. Often there are ponies here too but I’d rather have donkeys. The ponies can be a trifle too friendly for my liking. We wandered into the village, stopped in a cafe Commando had spotted on a previous visit and had a cream tea in their garden. The wasps stumbled and stuttered around us driven wild by the scent of jam but too dopey to do anything about it. It almost felt normal, but not quite. There was a vague feeling of danger about everything. I couldn’t help wondering if we would ever be able to just pop into a cafe, a bar, or a shop again without a slight frisson of fear, a worry that this would be the day we caught the virus.

Full of scones, cream, jam and coffee, we walked back the way we’d come. A swan with four cygnets, almost adult sized, were congregating on the corner and the donkeys had disappeared. Perhaps all the doom and gloom in the news and the delay to reopening was nothing but a blip, or an overreaction? It may not have been the longest walk in history, but it did feel as if we might be walking towards the light at the end of that long tunnel, ever so slowly.