Nomads 2022

 Our nomadic life so far: two weeks in Potries, Spain. 5 days in Valencia, Spain, one week in West Molesey, England.  

A sudden hiatus in a Holiday Inn in Shepperton, to protect our family members from our positive Covid virus diagnoses, Tim last Tuesday and me on Friday morning.  I was devastated to get Covid, it has been a great fear of mine for the past three years, but the variant I think we have, the new Omicron B Q1.1, attacks the upper respiratory system, not the lower, so although we are both coughing our lungs out at various times, I can still breathe, and so can Tim.  (In honour of Tim losing his sense of taste and smell, however, all the photos are in black and white.)  

We have been going for long walks, believers in making lungs work hard to get them strong and help them fight such things as mean and nasty viruses.  Tim keeps thinking he is taking me on forced marches, but we stop at benches and sit calmly with friendly ghosts.

I wonder if Reginald Arther Mears minds sharing his bench with Jean and Jack Beresford?

A beautiful green space attracted us in between main roads, as there seem to be all over the place in England, the greenest of islands. Every possible surface: stone, wall or pavement is lushly mossy, grassy, ivy-covered, because of all the watery versions of weather here every day - drizzle, fog, showers, storms, mist, rain rain rain!  (This photo looks very metaphorical.  I see metaphors everywhere now.)

Taking candid photos of a swan

Tim looks as though he is contemplating the river here, where we had stopped for a welcome lean on the bridge wall, but in actual fact, because it is a "live" photo, I know he is saying, "Do you want to carry on walking?"

Beauteous trees along the way

Some encountered signs: A very unfriendly one which stopped us, although we both thought later that we should have just walked on through!  (I wonder what the special connection is between this gate and Good Friday?  I also hate elitist signs like this, believing most places like rivers and hills and beaches should be public spaces, just like the people of the Kinder Mass Trespass in 1932, when 600 ordinary men and women took to the moorland of Kinder Scout in the Peak District in England to protest about restrictions on walking in the countryside, which led eventually to the establishment of all the national parks of England.  

And if you look carefully, someone with a subversive soul like mine, has written, GO SWIMMING, on this sign.  

We walked three miles or more today along the lovely and ancient Thames, bloody champions we are!  There was an old English Pointer with a sweet trotting gait who flooded my heart with memories of my beloved dog Sasha because he had the same head as she did, and a pair of blue tits brought my dear cheerful blizzard-defying Massachusetts chickadees to mind, so that my eyes were suddenly weeping, and Tim hugged me and then we said, "Well, fuck this!" like Bill Bryson does after feeling sad in an old graveyard in Vermont that he describes so perfectly in "The Lost Continent".  And walked on.  

And even though we have Covid, we are still happy, even living in a small hotel room, cramped up together, coughing, feverish, slightly miserable, we still are laughing, finding the sun even in these grey and cloudy skies.  We have daughters who bring us lovely packages of food and treats, sons who call and text every day to check in on us.  Lucky nomads.

Blessed.