An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague – 3: April 2020

1 APRIL

I have had to cancel a large family get-together in my home county of Northamptonshire planned for 25 April; there seems to be no way that it is going to take place. I suggested to my brother that we might rearrange it for late summer. He said that Christmas might be a better bet – and he was only half-joking, I think. Not only am I close to deconstructing my odyssey, but I am also now wondering if there is any point to this journal. It was started in the hope that it would be a prologue to the story of the journey itself. If I keep going, the prologue will be longer than the story. Or perhaps this is now the story – the odyssey (dictated, appropriately, by forces outside my control, with no indication of how or whether it will end). 

2 APRIL

I have decided to cut down the time I spend reading the news, i.e. reading about the virus. Watching a Trump "press conference" in which he deliberately announced a new war on drugs and a supposed threat from Iran on top of the usual evasions and falsehoods (anything but face the reality of the crisis), I decided I couldn't take too much more of this shocking mess. Things are slightly better here – but not much. One UK government "spokesman" after another has failed to deliver any worthwhile information, inspire any confidence or fully answer questions. For the moment at least, I can't take too much more of these miserable tidings. Instead of checking the news through the day (I suppose in the hope of there being some good news), I'm going to look at it once in the morning and once in the evening.

3 APRIL

Approaching the end of the second week of lockdown. And approaching having to start taking the odyssey down – and then maybe building it back up again. It's another two weeks before I really have to start cancelling and dismantling. Having completed a basic Italian course with Michel Thomas, I'm now well into a Teach Yourself course of Greek. The illustration on my Greek notebook cover is of a little church that sits at the end of my favourite beach on the island of Tinos. As with all the best pictures of Greece, it's a confection of white, blue and more blue. I'm there in my mind and would love to be there in reality. It's one of the stopping-off points on my odyssey, so maybe I'll be there in a few months from now.

4 APRIL

I was up most of the night waiting for an ambulance for my younger daughter (who lives about a mile away from me). She was already in quarantine with a high temperature... and then had rapid heartbeat and breathlessness about midnight. Paramedics finally arrived about 4am (over three hours for an ambulance to arrive! they're quite busy, it seems) and they decided it was a panic attack not coronavirus... which seems to be the case. She's feeling better today... but in all this, I couldn't actually see her or get close to her because she's quarantined... and also I can't afford to pick up anything for fear of passing it on to others close to me. No doubt, we'll laugh about all this one day... On the plus side, the sunshine is hotter here than in Athens and I've put on a pair of shorts for the first time this year.

5 APRIL

The daisies turn their heads throughout the day so that they are always facing the sun. It's amazing to watch...

6 APRIL

The Prime Minister of the UK is hospital with coronavirus. After the cavalier and wrong-footed way in which he approached this mess that we are all in, it may be difficult for some people to summon up much sympathy. Or any sympathy.

7 APRIL

More people have died of coronavirus in New York than died in China, where things seem to be returning to some sort of normality. More people than that may die in the UK, where the lockdown is now in its third week. The lockdown in China lasted three months. Italy, locked down for five weeks, may be starting to come out the other side of this thing. Greece, where there is a serious lockdown, has so far kept deaths down to double figures. I'm waiting for news from the Odyssean Coast of Italy before starting to decommission the odyssey – it can't go ahead but I may be able to postpone bookings rather than cancel and make the journey at the end of this summer. Being able to travel anywhere at the moment seems like a dream rather than a possibility...

8 APRIL

Instead of being a month away from setting off, I'm probably four months away from setting off. Nothing to compare to 10 years stuck outside of Troy with the Ithaca blues... or 10 years being blown around the Mediterranean, thrown back and forth between monsters and nymphomaniacs.

9 APRIL

The sun setting beyond the silhouettes of trees has been wonderful for the past two evenings. This is the same sun that I was bound for Italy and Greece to see. The same sun that I remember seeing going down behind the mountains of Crete in 1977. Why is there this urge to travel, when this constant companion is with us every day of our lives? (OK, well not every day if you live in the UK – that's perhaps got a lot to do with why we travel.)

10 APRIL

It's a month since Italy was locked down – and a month since I started writing this journal. In another month from now, I should have been getting ready to set off on my odyssey. And this journal would have started to get a bit more interesting! Now, not only do I have to decide whether the odyssey is to be cancelled or postponed, I have to decide whether there is any point continuing to write what was supposed to be a prologue to the adventure. The word from Italy is that its lockdown is about to be extended to 3 May and that this Easter weekend will see the authorities crack down even more tightly on anyone who attempts to go out.

11 APRIL

The sun shines again and I've been reading about the assassination of Cicero at his villa in Formia – one of the places on my odyssey itinerary, although I didn't know about this truly historic connection. It's had me looking longingly once more at maps of Italy. 

12 APRIL

After this crisis is over, I fear the powers will only want to turn the clock back rather than forward. But wouldn't that be a tremendous failure to learn a lesson? Many of us, deep down, know that we need a fundamental change of course in the way we take care of ourselves and each other. In a way it's quite bizarre that at a time when people are all keeping their distance from each other, they are potentially closer together than ever before?

13 APRIL

Time to bite the bullet. I have accommodation booked on the island of Ithaca – home of Odysseus – for the beginning of June. If I'm going to cancel it, I have to do it by the end of this week. It is truly amazing to see how much the leaves grow on the trees in the space of 24 hours. Every morning there is so much more green dancing in the sunlight.

14 APRIL

The sky is blue and clear and the light seems sharper. There is good news and bad news from Greece... The British Airways flight that I bought as an insurance policy to get me to Athens has just been officially cancelled. No refund. So now I have to apply for a voucher – which I can spend on a flight some time in the next year. The good news is that, unlike the UK and the US, Greece appears to have performed a minor miracle with its hardline lockdown. It's kept deaths below 100 so far – compared with 10,000-plus in the UK and 20,000-plus in Italy. However, while the UK managed with a non-Easter, in Greece Easter is this coming weekend and is much more about deep-rooted religion than bingeing on chocolate. In a country where some Orthodox clergy argued that their services and the giving of Communion were not covered by a secular lockdown, this weekend will be a serious test of whether Greece can hold its hard line.

15 APRIL

Some shops and business in Italy are to be allowed to reopen as long as they arrange "security measures”. But it looks like it's still going to be a while before Italy and Greece are properly opened up to travellers. With a heavy heart, I've just cancelled my accommodation for staying three nights on Ithaca in June.

16 APRIL

I've been reading Ulysses... the James Joyce one... another odyssey... and maybe we don't need to travel very far to be on our odysseys. Why do I need to be trying to get to Greece or Italy, when the sun is shining here and I have everything that I actually need? Is it because we want the very things that we don't need? Is uncertainty far more appealing than basic securities? Voyages tend to be voyages of discovery on all sorts of levels. Can one stay at home and still make discoveries?

17 APRIL

A friend tells me that the Tarot features the World and the Moon – the World representing the outer place to be explored, and the Moon representing the inner place to be discovered. I don't know anything about the Tarot or whether that's correct, but that information came just after I'd been musing on whether it was possible to embark on an odyssey without really going anywhere. Perhaps that's what we're all doing now – whether we know it or not. Back in the World world, I've just cancelled nine accommodation bookings in Greece and Italy... leaving just four more to do. It's a bit sad... but there is now no choice. The only dilemma is whether to rearrange things for later in the year. 

18 APRIL

The hell with it... A friend just pointed out that Odysseus didn't make too many advance bookings – he just set off and kept going (when he wasn't being forced to have sex with assorted temptresses). So I'm going to (semi-Odysseus-like) recklessly reckon that I'm heading into the blue in late August. That's four months now... and if things haven't improved and relaxed by then, then we might as well all give up on this life. Yes, an internal odyssey is possible and perhaps sensible and has perhaps already begun, but life for me (at least up to now) only seems like life when I'm on the way, on the road, going somewhere... travelling rather than arriving. But then again, as the Buddha of country, Willie Nelson, once observed: "Still is still moving to me."

19 APRIL

Greece hopes to open up again in May but more likely June at the earliest. This hint of optimism made me wonder if I should try to get there in June/July but, no, I'm going to stick to the more safely reckless August/September.

A fifth of Greek workers are employed in tourism, so the country is being hit really hard. One forecast suggests that over 60 per cent of hotels there could go out of business. Things may have to change in a post-plague world, but there must be many Greeks who are praying for a return to business as something like usual.

20 APRIL

It's my younger daughter's birthday today and she's locked down a hundred miles away. We'll have an online link-up later. All three of my children seem strong, talented, intelligent and decent – and I never cease to be impressed by them. Their generation has had to go through so much – but then perhaps all generations do. I'm glad that my mother died last year (messily, at 93 years' old, at the hands of a failing health and social care system) and did not have to go through her final months in an even more awful situation of quarantine, no visitors and an even more lonely death. Strangely, just after I'd written these words, I had a call from a musician friend whose mother is nearing the end of her life and stuck in a nursing home. Thankfully, he is able to visit her but he says she is terribly depressed, and that he is finding it all difficult. As David Lynn Jones – more country music – observed: "There ain't no easy way out." 

I've just been taking photographs of the grounds surrounding my flat. I had decided to put it up for sale in June, on my return from the odyssey – but now maybe that will have to wait. If I have to sell later in the year, I thought it would be handy to have pictures showing how beautiful the trees are here in the spring. In fact, the photos make it look so beautiful that it made me think for an instant about staying here – but really I have to make a move some time soon. I've been in London a fraction too long. That old stuff about if you're tired of London, then you're tried of life doesn't really hold up. I'm just tired of London life... and want a better-quality (last part of) life.

21 APRIL

Italy is at least talking about starting to open up again. And in Milan they are talking about not going back to automotive normal, ie some street space is going to be for cyclists and pedestrians only, rather than back to cars – and their pollution. Milan has in the past been one of the worst polluted cities – and the lockdown has shown that it doesn't have to be like this. Just as New York has begun talking about a "reimagined" future, so is Milan. One can only hope that London might follow suit in some way. In the area around my home in south London, I have never seen the air so clear, the light so sharp, and the leaves and the grass so green. Spring sunlight helps of course... but there are far fewer cars, particularly at night, and the every-five-minutes planes on their way to Heathrow have stopped. The latter are certainly normally the source of day-long noise pollution and most likely a major cause of air pollution – and hence ill health and reduced resistance to disease.

22 APRIL

One of the pluses of the lockdown has been that Bob Dylan, for whom I have infinite respect as a songwriter (make that THE songwriter), has been moved to put out not one but two new songs, after going for eight years without releasing any new original material. Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature four years ago (almost 50 years late) and the present circumstances reminded me that he referenced The Odyssey (along with Moby-Dick and All Quiet on the Western Front) as one of the three books that had been major influences.

He says of Odysseus' journey: "There’s two roads to take, and they’re both bad. Both hazardous. On one you could drown and on the other you could starve... Goddesses and gods protect him, but some others want to kill him. He changes identities... Drugs have been dropped into his wine. It’s been a hard road to travel... Some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back... When he gets back home, things aren’t any better. Scoundrels have moved in and are taking advantage of his wife’s hospitality. And there’s too many of ‘em. And though he’s greater than them all and the best at everything... his courage won’t save him, but his trickery will... And when it’s all said and done, when he’s home at last, he sits with his wife, and he tells her the stories."

23 APRIL

Nothing changes... well, at least nothing much for the better. People are beginning to talk about the lockdown (currently in its fifth week) lasting for several months. The family-get-together originally due to take place on 25 April that I cancelled at the beginning of this month... I was hoping to rearrange for July or August. But one of my cousins suggests that that could be too soon. She is, she says, fairly happy being locked down and doesn't want to emerge until it's safe to do so. (The opposite of some of the good folk in the Southern states of the US, who are determined to reopen shops etc from tomorrow. God Help America!) My brother and I have decided to pencil in the family meetup for August – with October as the backup. His earlier joke about arranging it for Christmas has definitely ceased to be funny.

24 APRIL

Greece is extending its lockdown by a further week to 4 May. The government there says that “transition to the new normality" will be slow and will "unfold progressively" in May and June. This sounds like grounds for a little optimism. I wrote to Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie magazine, to warn him that the odyssey piece he had commissioned from me was likely to be coming a few months late. His understanding reply ended, typically: "I wonder what Odysseus would have done – probably stayed in the ruins of Troy!" Well, maybe that's where we all are now – in the ruins of Troy. Our "civilisation" has been brought low not by a wooden horse but by a Trojan virus.

25 APRIL

I guess we are all looking ever-increasingly into mortality... Everything in nature – the light, the trees, the flowers, the birds etc – is seen more sharply now. And with that comes the inescapable fact that the leaves "reappearing" on the trees have, in fact, never been here before. They will be here this year and then gone. Like the leaves, like the virus, every one of us is just passing through... living and dying. And that leads, for me, into the question what actually am I? And the answer to that may be: nothing... or an hallucination... The other thing clearly taught by this crisis is that we can only count on being here today... And we may only have today to answer the questions that gnaw away at us...

26 APRIL

It's being reported in Italy that a four-week period of easing of restrictions there will begin soon. More than 25,000 have been killed by the virus there; the UK is well on the way to catching up with that total – if not with definite plans of how to deal with the crisis. Greece is also looking at the possibility of opening up – and opening up to visitors from July. But there is talk of temperature checks and pre-flight blood tests; presumably, quarantines are also likely to remain part of the picture for some time. So do I continue with plans to get there in August? BA tells me it has switched my insurance-policy flight from May to August but I'm still waiting confirmation of that several days on.

27 APRIL

In a month's time restaurants, bars and cafés in Greece will start to reopen – gradually. And Italy has confirmed it has plans to ease the strict lockdown it began seven weeks ago – when I started this journal. Parks will also reopen, but Greek children will not go back to school until September.

28 APRIL

Vivid dreams seem to be a feature of lockdown. And in the past week I've had dreams about five people I know who are dead: my father (twice), my mother, two good friends and one enemy. All of the dreams and encounters were sharp and clear and mostly not at all disturbing; one in particular was joyful. What does all this mean? Perhaps nothing apart from the fact that death is increasingly on my mind.

29 APRIL

Greece has confirmed that it plans to open for (tourism) business this summer. But there will have to be social distancing and strict hygiene rules. Precautions being considered also include health "passports", and restrictions for countries with high virus infection and death rates (presumably that means the UK). This is how Odysseus must have felt – hemmed in and diverted at every turn. Am I ever going to get to Greece?

BA is making thousands of workers redundant but has still reserved a place for me on my insurance-policy flight to Athens at the end of August (with the proviso that it could be cancelled). Meanwhile many of the major airlines are starting to implement new policies that will see masks given to travellers who don't have them, a sort of social-distancing seating and, of course, lots of cleaning. Was cleaning not important anywhere before all this? We are being told that the buses and tubes are now being cleaned thoroughly. Why weren't they before? And will they continue to be cleaned properly after this crisis comes to an end? 

30 APRIL

There appear to be differences of opinion in Italy as to what is going to reopen when. The central government is about to crack down on Calabria for saying bars and restaurants with outside tables can start serving customers again – because national policy is that they shouldn't reopen until June, and then only for takeaways. It seems to be a mirror of the chaos in the US where there is a national lockdown but every state is evolving its own reopening strategy (or in some cases not really bothering with a strategy but just opening stuff up). My friend in Latina, on the Odyssean Coast, near Rome, reckons a major trauma for Italians will be returning to some sort of normality – but not being able to kiss each other.

An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague – 2: March 2020

10 MARCH 2020

Italy is closed. The coronavirus Covid-19 – or, rather, the fear of it – has beaten a whole country into submission. In two months' time, I am due to embark on an odyssey, parts of which will see me travel the length of Italy, from north to south and from south to north – with a long sweep through Greece and its islands slotted in between. Thanks to Greta Thunberg, I decided against flying to Athens to start my trip, and instead have booked more environmentally friendly trains from London to Paris, Paris to Milan, and Milan to Bari, then a boat from Bari to Patra in the Peloponnese, from where I will get a bus to the Greek capital.

All that is if Italy re-opens in time. I'm thinking of booking a cheap flight from Luton (alleged to be a London airport, despite the fact that such a description must go a long way to justify using the word ludicrous) to Athens as an insurance policy – and probably cheaper than any travel insurance policy that I could buy now, bearing in mind the prevailing apocalyptic atmosphere. But with airlines facing closure, flights being cancelled, and the Greek Orthodox Church insisting that the power of faith will protect those taking communion from infection, there is no guarantee that Greece, too, won't soon be rather difficult to get into.

While I join the rest of the UK in stocking up on cans of beans and toilet rolls, it seems all I can do is wait. I've spent several hundred pounds on trains and boats for some of the crucial parts of my six-week journey and most of that is probably not refundable.

Italian friends report being confined to home, some with no way to go outdoors for fresh air. Trips to the supermarket or pharmacy are still possible, but any other journey has to be seriously justified or else it can bring down the law on you. Some Italians say that the problem has not been Covid-19 but the way that the authorities have reacted to it: causing chaos, particularly for parents of children who can no longer go to school, and for small businesses that are already going bust.

I seem to have tempted the gods by starting to write. Greece has just announced that all of its schools and universities will shut down for the next two weeks – which is what Italy did before it decided to go all the way.

An odyssey isn't supposed to be easy, of course. Odysseus, who had to spend 10 years laying siege to Troy, then took another 10 years to get home to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope. Gods, giants, monsters and enchantresses played havoc with his return journey. If Homer had been able to imagine microscopic entities that could penetrate a man's lungs and stop him breathing, he might have added them to the list of horrors faced by his hero.

So am I going to Greece and Italy in the wake of Odysseus? Will I stand on the shores of Ithaca and Phaeacia? Will I feel the winds of Aeolus and hear the sound of the Sirens? Will I see the mouth of the Underworld, walk in the land of man-eating giants, and visit the lair of Circe? Like Odysseus, my fate is in the hands of the gods and their 21st-century instrument, a weapon that measures 125 billionths of a metre.

Perhaps one needs to look on the bright side. It seems that more than 3,000 people have just painted themselves blue and dressed as Smurfs to attend a rally in a small commune in Brittany, only a day before a French ban on meetings of more than 1,000 people came into force. News of the mass Smurfing was not well received in Italy. But the commune's mayor, Patrick Leclerc, was reported to have said: "We must not stop living. It was the chance to say that we are alive."

11 MARCH 2020

Not only has Italy been closed down, but the authorities are talking about closing it down even more tightly, particularly in the north. Two friends have suggested – kindly – that maybe I should just cancel the trip. But that certainly hasn't entered my head at this point. However, I am beginning to be seriously tempted by spending £80 on an "insurance policy" – that cheap flight to Athens – which would enable me to do the Greek half of my odyssey and delay my arrival in Italy for 17 days. Flying there in early June, after Greece, rather than in mid-May on the way to Greece by land and sea, could rescue this adventure.REWRITE And if Italy is open again by mid-May, I will only have spent an extra £80 – and will be happy that I still have a chance of waking up on the boat on its way to the Peloponnese and seeing the island of Ithaca – where the original Odyssey started and finished. The only downside to my "insurance" is that Greece could decide to close – and the budget airline WizzAir could hit the deck. There is a cheap flight with Ryanair, but I swore 25 years ago that I would never use Ryanair again (after it ripped off one of my travel pieces for its website, without any credit to me or The Daily Telegraph, which had commissioned and published it, and eventually offered me compensation of two free flights on Ryanair, which was the last thing I wanted). I have a commission to write about this upcoming trip, focusing on the Odyssean sites of Sicily and southern Italy (of which there are many). I may well also have a commission for part of the Greek half of the journey. These are part of the reason for not wanting to give up – along with my general stubbornness.

Interested to know whether WizzAir might be in trouble of any sort, I took a quick look at some news stories and a website I chanced across called http://www.wizzairsucks.com. The latter suggests that they are not so much "in trouble" as just plain "trouble". I have a feeling that I've flown with them once before and it was ok. I'm reminding myself that no airline can be as bad as Ryanair.

12 MARCH 2020

Now Trump, in a stroke of very stable genius, has banned travel between Europe and the US, one of the knock-on effects, presumably, will be to make life extremely difficult for airlines (let alone their passengers). WizzAir will probably keep wizzing for the time being. What about British Airways? I'd been thinking it was perhaps a safer bet for a back-up flight to Athens – and am still thinking that at the moment. A red-eye to Greece isn't too expensive, and it would give me a day and night in Athens before heading for the islands: Andros, Tinos, Syros, Kefalonia and Ithaca.

These Cycladic and Ionian islands are free of coronavirus at the moment, but there seems to have been a case on a ferry, relatively far away, at Limnos, in the northern Aegean. If the Greek ferries are put out of action, then my odyssey would have to be abandoned – unless I follow Odysseus and build myself a raft. Coronavirus may yet do what Calypso, Circe and Polyphemus the Cyclops failed to...

Meantime, the Greeks are going ahead today and lighting the flame at Olympia which, in theory, will travel all the way to Tokyo for the 2020 Olympic Games. Is that a sign of optimism or stupidity? One could ask the same question about my starting to write this journal. I suppose the answer to both questions is that there is no choice but to press on as if things are going to work out. I have fond memories of a visit to Olympia (in Greece, not Kensington) in the 1980s and running (as one does) the length of the ancient track there. Probably not my most impressive running feat in Greece… but perhaps more on that subject if/when I get to Athens.

13 MARCH 2020

Tutto andrá bene is the slogan adopted by Italians in the midst of their lockdown and now appearing on posters and windows. I'm adopting it, too. The news globally, and particularly from Italy, may be awful, but optimism seems the only way forward. A neighbour told me this morning how she had been to an exhibition at the Royal Academy and there was hardly anyone there – "It was wonderful," she said. "It's usually so crowded that you can't see things properly." Similar delight has been expressed by people in Florence and Venice, where the streets are close to empty and the beauty of the cities can be fully appreciated by the few who are there. 

14 MARCH 2020

British Airways is talking about grounding planes, sacking staff and fighting for survival because of Covid-19 and travel bans. It's saying that the seriousness of the situation is unprecedented. I've still decided to go for an "insurance policy" with BA, ie a cheap-ish flight that will get me into Athens in the early hours of the day when I hoped to arrive there by bus and/or train from Patras. I'm sorry, Greta – I'll make it up to you. Perhaps a bit of carbon offsetting might help... In the current climate of anxiety and uncertainty, BA is doing the sensible thing and offering customers the chance to cancel flights and re-book or use the money towards another flight any time in the next 12 months. So £94 means I can get to Greece (if it's still open then) and put off by 18 days my arrival in Italy, thus increasing my chances of getting to Italy when it's up and running. And if by some miracle the trains are running through to Milan and Bari, I will still be able to follow my original plan. Disease, ill health and businesses running by the seats of their pants seem to be the monsters that threaten a contemporary Odyssey. I have a friend who lives just south of Rome who said (pre-coronavirus catastrophe) that she looked forward to us sitting on her balcony one evening for the recounting of some traveller's tales. That has become my equivalent of Odysseus making it home to Penelope – and I am determined to be there. Having to pay for the BA flight to Athens may be the lesser of two evils – but then, as Odysseus found, there may be more than two evils yet to come...

15 MARCH 2020

... and there are, of course. France is starting to restrict train journeys (presumably, like the ones I've paid for to Paris and on to Milan). And Greece has just closed all its ancient monuments, including the Acropolis (which doesn't bother me too much – with my been-there-done-that attitude to countless Greek sites – as long as I can get to Athens, as stepping stone to the Greek antiquities that really matter: the Aegean and the islands). Meanwhile, Northern Ireland is talking about closing schools for up to 16 weeks (and presumably wouldn't suggest that if it wasn't in line with what the UK government is contemplating) and Britain is saying it has plans to ask all over-70s to stay at home for up to four months... Four months! The official line is that this is for these "elderly" people's own good. I wonder if the aim would actually be to cover up the shortcomings of a health service that has been so starved of resources that it won't be able to cope with large numbers of ailing oldies. These scenarios that involve 16 weeks/four months don't augur well. I try to stay optimistic on the basis that the British authorities are making it up as they go along, as they don't really know how this is going to pan out. But it's easy to be pessimistic on that very same basis.

16 MARCH 2020

I'm certainly not alone in frustration over travel plans. In fact, most people have them – and these plans are all either being disrupted or torn up. Methinks, we do travel too much? Is that a big part of the problem? In Odysseus's day it would have taken a plague quite a while to cover the whole world, even with the whole "known" world then being more or less the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Mass travel and globalisation means we're definitely in it – whatever mess that comes along – together. People in isolation in Italy are reported to be gathering on their balconies at night for communal singing. A friend of mine in Wales says she hopes that doesn't happen there, as it will all be dreadful rugby songs. I'm due to spend a few days in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire in a couple of weeks... if we haven't been banned from moving about. One health-conscious friend tells me I should stay indoors – even though I've explained that I'm not quite that old yet. But more than one other person I know has railed against any restrictions as "ridiculous" unless you are in an "at risk" category. I tend to agree – otherwise, the whole system is going to explode.

Notwithstanding that, the UK government has now suggested we don't socialise and don't travel; and the follow-on from that is Greece has said that the UK isn't taking the problem seriously enough and anyone flying there from the UK will be subject to two weeks' quarantine. My cunning plan of flying to Athens seems to have been stymied – unless things change between now and 19 May. What could change in two months? Everything, presumably.

17 MARCH 2020

The UK's neither-one-thing-nor-the-other approach to the great plague seems not to be helping very much. Hardly anyone here knows whether they've got it, whether they've had it or whether they are likely to get it. And the rest of the world is very soon going to self-isolate from us. Two weeks' quarantine in Athens is beginning to sound more appealing than week after week of being in limbo in the UK. Switching to a flight two weeks earlier – on 5 May – and holing up in an apartment with a balcony in the Greek capital would make it possible to pick up all my pre-booked travel and accommodation through Rafina, Andros, Tinos, Syros, Patras, Kefalonia and Ithaca... or am I already going more than a little stir crazy? With no factors being predictable, doing nothing at all seems the most sensible thing. But then, doing nothing is the end of life...

Now the UK government is advising for the next 30 days against any non-essential foreign travel – because of the risk of not being able to get back to the UK. That's a risk that I'd be willing to take… if I could just get to Greece and/or Italy.

18 MARCH 2020

Outside, in London, many people seem to be continuing as normal. I was able to swim in the open air at Tooting Bec Lido this morning. The attitude of the regular cold-water swimmers there is that doing this boosts our immune system, makes us healthier, and ensures we are less susceptible to colds and flu. Let's hope the pool stays open. There seems a huge gulf between the wider "real life" and the narrow focus of the media coverage of the plague – each gives a very different view of what is happening. And the only thing that seems certain is that no one really knows what is happening... Glastonbury Festival has just been cancelled – and that was going to be in late June (although its big problem seems to have been the months of preparation necessary between now and then). June seems like another world away from here – either the apocalyptic predictions will have come true, or perhaps I will be in Greece. Who knows? No one.

19 MARCH 2020

London awaits lockdown. Panic buying (which is mainly commonsense buying) has emptied many supermarket shelves, although nearby Tooting's amazing shops still seem to be overflowing with fresh vegetables. Coronavirus seems to have generated as many theories as it has deaths. The thing most people agree on is that no one knows the truth. I've just cancelled a trip to south Wales next week – since it increasingly promised to be a pointless outing. Normally, Pembrokeshire is the place in the UK that I love to be the most, but it too has been hit by fear and closures and cancellations, and the prospect of struggling to get out of a locked-down London (and possibly struggling even more to get back in) has put me off trying. I don't feel the same way about my odyssey. There's still a candle burning for that... In perhaps the last post before lockdown, I just got my copy of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad – well, I've read The Odyssey enough times, so I thought it was time to get the other side of the story – and Teach Yourself's Complete Greek course. I recently completed Michel Thomas's Italian course, in preparation for the odyssey, so I thought I'd better also brush up on Greek (of which I have a smattering, from countless trips to the islands, and from a familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet from studying Russian at school and university). Anyway, I need something to keep me busy if we really are locked down.

20 MARCH 2020

The lockdown gets closer, with the UK government finally banning bars, pubs, cafés and restaurants from opening. More livelihoods go to the wall – examples of this are everywhere and some are very close to home. To save thousands of people, most of whom were going to die sooner rather than later, everyone is having their lives disrupted and, in many cases, ruined.

21 MARCH 2020

Ninety per cent of the deaths in Italy are of people with more than one existing health condition; the people who are truly vulnerable are over 50 and have more than one illness already. Applied to the UK, this means about one and a half million people are at risk of dying from the virus. And a reliable source says that the government has information that suggests the large majority of those dying from the virus would have died anyway within the next year. Governments appear to be rushing into panic measures as a response to panic headlines in the media. I could say more but am too angry to even write it down at the moment.

22 MARCH 2020

The government has announced it is writing to one and half million at-risk people to tell them to stay indoors – presumably the same one and a half million that my reliable resource referred to. People's attitudes are changing (including mine). An 80-year-old musician friend, who under two weeks ago was saying "If we die, we die" and was still going to the pub, is now frightened to leave his flat. I took him a load of groceries this morning, but am now back home and intending to stay put. Up until now, I've been blasé about going out (not to the pub) but to do shopping or see friends or family. I am now looking at going ahead with my odyssey, beginning in late August and going through September. I'll mull it over for a day or two, but that looks like probably the only thing to do – apart from give up altogether (which right now is definitely not on the cards).

23 MARCH 2020

Finally, the lockdown of the UK arrives – after a day of wonderful sunshine. It doesn't seem that dramatic, since most people had already got into a sort of lockdown mode.

24 MARCH 2020

The lockdown makes a walk to the corner shop an adventure. The sun shines, the cherry blossom glows, the leaves are appearing on the trees... As I sit outside to read later, a robin comes and settles by me. You would think all was right with the world. And maybe it is – apart from the human problem.

25 MARCH 2020

The good weather continues. A trip to Clapham Junction reveals that supermarkets are pretty much filled with stock again. Everything feels almost normal, apart from there being far less people around. A friend recently arrived in Greece is quarantined for 14 days – he promises to keep me in touch with developments there. My friend with the balcony just south of Rome seems to be coping ok with the lockdown there – and I've asked her, too, to let me know how things are unfolding. The problem remains for everyone, including the experts with their often very different "modelling", and as Sonny Boy Williamson once observed: "There's a lot of people talking, but there's mighty few people know."

26 MARCH 2020

Another day – like several days that have gone before. It must be like this in prison, or in a care home – but of course many, many times worse. The drifting of one day into another, the repetitious nature of the days which leads to not being able to distinguish one day from another. The prisoners in a gaol or in a home for the elderly face this weird ordinariness, or ordinary weirdness, way into the future – some to the end of their days. And how can any of us who are alive really complain when many old people are ending their lives in utterly horrible circumstances, and now even some younger ones too. That feeling that the thing can't touch you does tend to fade a bit with every day – and no doubt will continue to do that, until this thing has passed. Meanwhile, the sun shines and the trees bloom... Life really does go on...

27 MARCH 2020

British Airways seem keen for me to cancel my "insurance policy" flight to Athens and rearrange. I'm nearly at that point but not quite.

28 MARCH 2020

Groundhog Day...

29 MARCH 2020

Enjoyed a family get-together for my son's birthday – via video conference. He's locked down in Cornwall, his mother in Gloucestershire, and his sister in London (just down the road from me). Otherwise, an inexplicably gloomy day.

30 MARCH 2020

I checked in with my friend on the island of Syros – one of the stopping places on my odyssey – and she confirms "all of Greece is under house arrest" and "travelling to other places in Greece is possible only with a licence". She thinks I have to change my plans, and warns against even booking travel in September until things become clearer. I will wait to hear further from my friend in Italy before starting to unpick my travel arrangements – the government there has extended the lockdown to 12 April (just over a month before I am/was due to arrive there). My plans took many hours to set up, so at least I know it will occupy me for a lot of lockdown time taking them apart and possibly putting them back together.

31 MARCH 2020

Have dropped off vitamin C capsules to my younger daughter who lives nearby and last night said she had high temperature and breathlessness. Am worried about her of course. But unless symptoms worsen, the emergency services will do nothing apart from advise quarantine – and anyway, the last place one wants to be now is in hospital. A neighbour tells me that his daughter has just recovered from similar symptoms – and gives voice to many people's view: why is it taking so long to start testing people? If this were done, we might know the extent of the problem. As ever, this country ends up almost revelling in amateurish/Dad's Army/Dunkirk-style failure.

An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague – 1: Prologue

I could say it all started with a Greek woman called Helen. Or Eleni... She helped me fall in love with her island, Syros, a few years ago. And then the island of Tinos. And then the idea of travelling from island to island to island...

I'd already visited 25 or so Greek islands over the years, yet there were so many more still to explore...

But of course it goes back much further than that. To another Greek Helen and to a war against Troy. And to a trickster and rogue and hero called Odysseus.

And probably back to Kettering Public Library in the days of my childhood when your local library had what seemed like books unlimited and gateways to worlds way beyond Kettering, Northamptonshire, the Midlands and the UK.

As a little kid, I read about ancient Athens and Sparta; and I read Homer's Iliad and then his Odyssey, and well... the effects of those have never worn off.

Odysseus it was who came up with the idea of the Trojan horse – an idea so ridiculously simple, or simply ridiculous, that they fell for it.

But because he pissed off Poseidon, Odysseus found his journey home to Ithaca took a little longer than he anticipated. After 10 years at Troy, he was to spend another 10 years trying to get home to his wife, Penelope...

The face of Poseidon...

Like so many others down the centuries, I loved the tale of Odysseus and fantasised about one day doing an odyssey of my own. But you need time for these things. Not 10 years necessarily, but certainly a few weeks... a bit longer than your average holiday trip. And certainly longer than any time off that I'd had since I started work as a journalist 48 years ago.

With semi-retirement, came the opportunity to do it... and, although it wasn't planned of course, a global pandemic did quite a good job as a stand-in for the wrath of Poseidon. An odyssey isn't supposed to be easy; and in the year of the Covid-19 plague, every step would prove to be unpredictable.

The monsters, maelstroms and sorceresses that Odysseus had to face and overcome had their places taken by microscopic entities that really didn't care about anything – least of all killing thousands of humans...

In March 2020 it became clear that my plans were not going to go smoothly. So that is when I began writing the journal I'm publishing here to chart the unfolding of An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague... 

...the face of Covid-19

 

My Gap Years

There seems to be a three-year gap to fill in... 

Since 2017, when the blogging stopped, there have been two more Kettstocks – both Kettstock2 and Kettstock3 ran over two nights rather than just one, and were both huge successes. Sadly, we lost a great singer and a great man in Bill Deacon. And sadly, the Russ Payne Band came to an end due to a perfect storm of personal difficulties – but not the traditional "musical differences".

Bassist Bill Keller and I diversified into jazz, in Brighton and London respectively, and were both playing and gigging up until the pandemic hit.

I joined the staff of the excellent magazine The Oldie for a year and a bit, before eventually retiring from the fray. I have continued as a freelance writer and as an editor and contributor to www.Pembrokeshire.Online, the community website for my favourite county.

And I have continued to travel... My latest piece, on following in the wake of Odysseus, will be in the December 2020 issue of The Oldie.

That piece is 1,200 words... but behind that are something like 70,000 words that made up my journal from March to October 2020, An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague.

I'm now editing that journal and will start posting it here very soon...

I've Been Away... I'm Back

© Rowena J Ronson

I've been away from blogging for a while... now I'm thinking of returning to it... but doing something different...