Lockdown – I Walk Alone

An Omicron Christmas

Twelve days before Christmas 2021, Kim and I were wrapped up against the cold, up to our ankles in mud and taking photographs of yet another cross country race. Meanwhile, the media were doing their best to whip up a storm about the new COVID variant, Omicron. It was spreading like wildfire, but everyone I knew who’d had it described it as a mild cold. Most only knew they had it at all because they’d taken a routine test. Some had no symptoms other than a positive test result. Even so, there was plenty of hype about cancelling Christmas and locking the country down again.

A modicum of normality

As June 2020 progressed, a modicum of normality began to return to life. The relaxed lockdown rules meant that, on 10 June, Commando’s running club could train together for the first time since March. At least some of them could, the sessions were by appointment only and groups were limited to five, plus a run leader. For me, this meant a nice walk in the Old Cemetery while they trained, after taking a socially distanced photograph of Commando’s group of course.

Not parkrun and difficult decisions

One of the things both Commando and I had been missing since the world closed down was parkrun. Obviously, Commando missed his Saturday morning 5k run, along with all his parkrun friends. Running has never been my thing. I tried it years ago, long before Commando started running actually. I downloaded the couch to 5k app to my phone and I did most of it. What it taught me was that I could run, I just didn’t like it at all. Running made me miss all the interesting things I see when I’m walking. It also made me hot and bothered. Even so, I missed the camaraderie of parkrun, all the people I chatted to before and after the run and the lovely quiet walks I took when the mad people were all running.

Out of the blue

By mid may 2020, the lockdown restrictions were slowly being eased. It had been a strange couple of months. Many people had worked from home, others had been furloughed and were being paid to stay at home. Non essential shops were closed, as were pubs and clubs. Some people had been self isolating and not going out at all and the supermarket suddenly felt like a dangerous place. Despite all this, lots of unsung heroes had been working through it all.

The end is nigh, or is it?

When I set off for a walk on 14 May 2020, I was not in the best frame of mind. A vague feeling of doom hung over me. The news should have been reassuring. Boris Johnson was back on his feet after his brush with the virus, the number of people being hospitalised was falling, the NHS had not been overwhelmed and five Nightingale hospitals had been built. At the end of April Boris had said we were past the peak and on the downhill slope. He even had a conditional plan for slowly lifting the lockdown. Best of all Oxford university had announced a partnership with Astrazeneca to develop a vaccine and researchers from University Hospital Southampton were involved in vaccine trials.

A sign of the times

On 16 April 2020, the news that the lockdown was being extended hardly came as a surprise. The one saving grace was the sunshine. It had been a record breaking April, both sunny and warm. No one would complain if the nice weather continued into May, least of all me. Of course, the continued restrictions meant I’d have to stick to short, mostly boring, walks for a while longer but it seemed a small price to pay. On 22 April, I decided to revisit another of my old walk to work routes, which happened to include two bridges. It also had the advantage of a few spring flowers to make me smile.

Fairies

One of the upsides to the lockdown, at least at first, was that people had time on their hands. For some, this might have been considered a downside but many people were using the time to be creative. Social media was full of people making things, baking bread, sewing, knitting, creating art. In some ways it felt like a reminder of gentler, less frantic days. Apparently, there were also fairy doors springing up along the butterfly walk. It was 15 April, the day before the lockdown restrictions were due to be reviewed, and, still glowing with the success of my two bridge walk, I decided to risk a look.

A plan, sort of

If two abortive attempts to walk along the river had taught me anything, it was that walking along the river during lockdown was a bad idea. For almost a week , my daily exercise had consisted of various different loops of the streets around my house with the odd fraught incursion into the supermarket for necessities. No matter how much I tried to enjoy the new flowers and the blossom in the gardens, it was boring but it was only for a few weeks wasn’t it? The problem was, all the Spanish flu research I’d been doing was swilling around in my head and, even with the miracles of modern science, a few weeks of lockdown seemed a tad optimistic.

Lockdown blues

When the first UK lockdown was announced, on 23 March 2020, the one saving grace was being allowed to walk every day. The long walks I’d been used to were out of the question but I was sure I could live with that. After all, there were some lovely places to walk right on my doorstep. So, two days after the lockdown announcement, feeling quite optimistic, I set out to walk one of my favourite routes, along the River Itchen at Riverside Park.

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