Covid 19, A Rural Diary - Travel in the time of Covid - France

20th October 2020

The constant clear blue skies and 30 degrees of Kos filled our hearts and minds with hope. Even with Covid restrictions in force, masks to wear, hands to sanitise, forms to fill in etc, it was worth every aspect of hassle to travel - and to travel safely, within the new rules and regulations. Owing to its geography and population, Greece has maintained low levels of Covid infection, even after the main summer holiday season. You can still hop on a plane and get there now and enjoy 23 degrees and sunshine and no quarantine restrictions on your return. Tempting, I have to say, as the Autumn winds start to bite over here...

France, of course, is a very different story. Quarantine rules are still strictly in place on your return and infection rates are rising again there like many other parts of Europe - no surprise after the holiday season and the ease with which people from bordering countries and different regions and cities of France can move around to enjoy mountains and coastal holidays. A large influx of Germans, Dutch, Belgians and Brits did nothing to help the Covid situation - even if it did buoy up the economy during the summer months with a healthy (no pun intended) holiday season.

Where we go, on the south west coast, had very low incidence of cases, even in the height of the pandemic. It is very rural with larger influxes of people primarily in July and August. However, unlike the south of France which suffered quite a lot during the summer months due to the sheer numbers of people there, the south-west Atlantic coast has kilometre after kilometre of wide and wild sandy beaches. Density of holidaymakers is simply not a problem like it is in the small coves and beaches of the Mediterranean coast of France. So, inevitably, there was a significant increase in cases there, but relatively few where we were.

Shortly before departure, quarantine was imposed for our return to the UK. Given that N can work from home (and has been daily since March), we were lucky that it did not pose a significant problem for us. The girls, however, wanted to be free from quarantine by the end of August so that they could see all their friends before everyone scattered to the four corners of the country again for university or jobs. So this effectively meant that E couldn’t get out there at all, as she had some other stuff going on in August which she did not want to miss, and G and L only came out for 10 days. So, for the first time since we bought the place, N and I were ‘home alone’. I can’t tell you how sad we were to drop them at the airport and drive back to the house with an empty car for the first time since 2005....

Yet somehow we bumbled along without them! Let’s face it, we spent 10 years together alone before the first child came along so it’s not like we’ve never done it before. So while the house felt a little empty that first night, we soon got into the swing of it and started (with unseemly haste!) to enjoy our freedoms and our ability to choose what we wanted to do with the day without being pulled in lots of different directions by other people’s needs and desires. And so a gentle rhythm evolved of pleasing ourselves, meeting up with our friends, making spur of the moment decisions to eat out, or eat in, to watch the sunset, or go home to watch a film, to go to the local market, or to do boring jobs around the house, to do some gardening or go to the beach. Such freedoms have so long not been ours, and it was not without some joy that we rediscovered them and realised that we were still ok together, even without the glue of the girls.

As N retires in just a few months, it was reassuring to learn that our future together may just still work...! We shall always love having the girls with us, together with their friends and, hopefully, future families - but we shall also enjoy pottering around together in the ways that we always used to: eating, drinking, travelling, skiing, sailing, spending more time with our friends and, quite simply, living our lives to the full while we still can.

I will leave you with some pictorial memories of our four weeks in France before we headed back up the motorway with Lily to start our enforced quarantine at home here in the Peaks. We decided to approach it positively, so the first thing we did was start a new eating regime (diet?!) to try and work off those many excess pounds of Lockdown Life! But that’s another story....