One of the things Lockdown robbed me of was the opportunity to celebrate our thirty-second wedding anniversary by going away somewhere nice and taking the time to focus on each other. 

It’s made me restless.

So I’m trying to calm my restlessness by going back to the memories of previous wedding anniversary trips.

I found a post from 2011 when I’d just started thiss blog. The post is called “Eat, Play, Love: 5 Days in Tuscany’.  We took a train from Montreux to Florence and then drove down to Lucca. The pictures below are from that trip.

I tried to use this memory and others like it to hold on to the idea that what we’re going through at the moment will pass.

It didn’t work. 

I found myself thinking that these moments, when travel was easy, when borders where open, when the future seemed filled with opportunities to find new places, are the moments that have passed.  That what we’re going through now isn’t a temporary interruption of normality but a fundamental change. 

COVID-19 will pass. The right-wing authoritarian populism that is its political analogue, will burn through us and be gone. But what comes next, espacially in the face of climate change that we are already too late to prevent, will not be a return to normal. The future isn’t what it used to be.

So I will cherish these memories, give thanks that, whatever the future brings, my wife and I will face it together, and be on the look out for opportunities for us to create other pockets of happiness in our lives.