Ours has been quite a year – Saturday 28th November 2020

Quite a year

Well it’s been quite a year. Rather than do a flashback yesterday I thought I’d do it today so you can see how our year started. We are today ‘celebrating’ being isolated from the world for pretty much a whole year. Yes, I know lockdown only began in March, but that was not where things began for us. If you ever read fantasy fiction you will understand why Mum wonders whether the sliding door at the Ibis hotel in Chalons-en-Champagne might just be a portal into a parallel universe. She has wondered for a while if we should try going back through it the other way.

Everything was normal until

Everything was normal, our sort of normal at least, until 6am on 28^th November 2019. We were half way to seeing dad in Switzerland, just Mum and me in the car. We were staying in the middle of nowhere with another 350 miles or more to drive. Mum got up to take me for a walk first thing in the morning and until we left the hotel nothing was out of the ordinary. Then as we walked away from the hotel Mum went over onto the side of her ankle. Seeing that she was falling over, I pulled away from her so she didn’t land on me. As I was on the end of a lead, that pulled her up a steep kerb and through a bush. The damage was done before I added to it. I only caused the bruising the mud and the twigs in her hair. She broke her ankle all on her own.

Driving on a broken ankle

Now, to be fair, Mum did not know her ankle was broken, not at that stage. She knew it was swelling fast and very painful. Having dragged me back to the car and removed the twigs from her hair, she decided to get to Switzerland before taking her boots off. That may sound an odd thing to do, but she was thinking of me. She couldn’t exactly go to hospital in the middle of France and just leave me at the hotel. It was an odd journey, with Mum discovering that if you do it carefully, you can manage with just second and sixth gears in the car. She’d rung Dad and told him we had a problem, but he didn’t really believe her until we got there and she took off her boot.

Why a year of going nowhere?

To cut a long story short the broken ankle meant eight weeks of not really going anywhere. By that time, Alfie was terminally ill and needed 24 hour care. He died a few days before lockdown began and that’s pretty much been the shape of it ever since.

Happy lockdown anniversary everyone. Have a lovely day.

Love

Wilma