Best laid plans.....

It's finally, predictably, official.

Christmas is cancelled.

Well... not the actual event, but all the plans which have been made for it.

Normally at this time PP and I would be frantically cleaning, shopping, cleaning, making lists, cleaning, writing meal plans, cleaning, making up guest bedrooms, cleaning, wrapping presents, cleaning... 

Ordinarily my daughter would have already arrived for our early Christmas celebrations, then from 23rd onward the rest of the family for several days of carousing.

None of that will be happening this year.  It will just be PP, SD and myself.

We aborted our tentative plans for a restricted Christmas family get-together over a week ago, while our PM was still asserting that we would all be able to enjoy a jolly safe 5-day celebration.  At the time we were in Level 3. 

Of course since then, the 'revelation' that there is a new mutation of the virus, which increases infection transmission exponentially has meant that U-Turn Boris has had to perform yet another in a long line of volte-face moves, and essentially, Christmas is cancelled.

Hastings & Rother, which for most of this year has seen the lowest infection rates in the whole of the UK, has recently seen a huge spike in cases, and as of midnight we've now been moved up to Tier 4, which effectively means that we are currently back in full belt-and-braces lockdown.

It's like Groundhog Day.

Of course, the one ray of positivity in all of this, is that we now have one vaccine approved and in the process of being rolled out, with hopefully others on the near horizon.  Less encouraging is that only about 140,000 doses have already been administered, out of the 800,000 we received a few weeks ago. Progress seems to be painfully slow.... I'd hoped that they would already have powered through the first batch.  At the current rate it will be March/April before our age cohort is in line, which means another 3+ months of self-isolating, and effectively a whole year during which, apart from a few brief breaks during the summer, we were mostly at home, seeing almost no-one from one month's end to the next.

In the meantime we will be staying as safe as we can while spending a quiet festive season together.   

Take care all of you, and I hope you have as Merry a Christmas as possible, with the prospect of a Happier, Healthier New Year.

Sxx