A COVID Story. London Letter 3
I am writing to wish you all a very happy Christmas. You will be pleased to hear Piers and I arrived back in Australia from London on December 13. We flew into Heathrow on October 31, to be picked up by our favourite cabbie, Kevin, to the news we had flown into an imminent Lockdown. We have now flown out of Heathrow, farewelled by Kevin, with the knowledge a Tier 3/Tier 4 was to descend on London and the rest of the United Kingdom.
Our first response on arrival into London of an imminent November 4 lockdown and Harrods to be closed completely, was to drive straight to Harrods Food Hall on the way to the flat in Kensington, where Piers and I stocked up on Dutch veal, English pork sausages, French pate de fois gras entiere, Dorset crab and Scottish smoked salmon. While limited business meetings were not to be affected by the shutdown, neither was our pantry!
It has been an intense time working, and may I say, successful so far as we can asses, the time spent in our dear Flat 5 with its conservatory and terrace looking over the roofs of Kensington where my children spent much of their travelling childhood, has been a bonding and nurturing experience. Mother and Son were a team and he looked after all the many critical IT needs and I cooked our healthy dinners with lots of French onions to ward off the ‘ baddies’. He took our temperatures every day including blood oxygen levels and dosed us up with vitamin D, zinc and what I call ’' the mosquito tablet”, with 200 surgical masks to complete the picture. Kevin acted as our chauffeur to and from meetings, sometimes late into the night. He picked up no other passengers and spent much of his intervening time reading my memoir and detective novels and listening to the cricket!
We returned home two weeks early as I had come down with a cold which began to develop into asthma, and we could continue the final meetings by Zoom. The long flight home on All Nippon Airways, (which I could not fault) involved a five hour transit stop in Tokyo before arriving at Kingsford Smith after 27 hours. We then waited in a hallway for three hours before the slow processing began. Unfortunately there were two flights ahead of us, one being China Eastern A380 which contained only 30 passengers but took forever to be screened and cleared from the arrivals hall and conveyer belts.
Piers and I were documented for the incredibly wonderful medical facility at Zetland where we spent 3 days before transferring to quarantine for the next stage. Piers is booked to fly home to his family in Hobart on December 28. I cannot commend NSW Health more highly for their management and care and fantastic frontline personnel ….NSW Police and health workers. To be back in warmth and a well-ordered society, to a background of magpies and Christmas cicadas is to know there is only one country we could ever wish to call Home.
It was brought to us doubly so on the journey when we saw and met other Australians trying to do the same……..they are “kangaroo-hopping” from country to country to get here. One family had 12 suitcases, two tiny girls and were on our second-leg ANA flight, when seatbelts were lighted for final approach into Sydney, the little 2 year-old strapped once again to her father……………..and she went ballistic! To her she was on a lifetime sentence and no-one could explain, ’sweetheart this is the final and last ten minutes’. She endeavoured to climb the walls taking her father with her and while she screamed I sat in my isolated seat and tears poured down my face.
