Turning our backs on 2020.
10 January 2021
September and October felt very long, in that we lived with a curfew, no travel beyond 5km from home and one hour for outdoor exercise each day, and yet also very short in that every day felt more or less the same. Suddenly it was almost the end of the year even though it felt like not much had happened.
We walked most of the interesting streets within 5km of home and our social interaction became meeting up with friends (or strangers) in the intersection of our 5km circles to walk our hour of exercise together.
Work continued in the rhythm of managing COVID work at the public hospital and performing limited emergency work in private. Because the surgeons I work with in private do a significant amount of urgent work on secondary referrals, my private work for the year as a whole was only down 20%. I had a few very quiet weeks but generally I was lucky to have enough to keep me enjoyably occupied and out of Jay's way while he was working from home.
Supermarkets remained open and we were lucky to be within 5km of Costco, so our regular shopping was not much disrupted, but the closure of barbers was obvious in the hair of people at work and on the street, and also made it clear on television which programs were recorded locally. Temporarily, Jay returned to having me as his barber. Working from the photos on his regular barber's Instagram, I managed to make a reasonable job of replicating his desired fade.
Though we were restricted to 5km from home, there were certain exemptions. I had a permit to travel further in order to get to and from work, and I was also permitted to provide care for family, which included delivering supplies to my mother and sister in Prahran. Because of the high mortality from COVID in aged care, I was not able to visit my mother face-to-face from March until November. We were also able to travel for emergencies and when a tree blew down across the driveway of my mother's house near the beach, we took the chainsaw down to Sorrento.
We took our food with us and stayed away from the town and any other people, but we did have the treat of seeing the profusion of birds and insects in the national park with no other people present.
By degrees the travel restrictions were relaxed and businesses began to open again. The state had been aiming for a low and controllable rate of coronavirus transmission of fewer than 5 cases a day. As it turned out we got very lucky when the last few chains of transmission died out completely just as businesses started to reopen. We marked the transition back to a more normal life with dinner at Ishizuka and then Minamishima (including fugu).
Our next trip to Sorrento didn't require an emergency and Tats was able to join us for an afternoon at the Peninsula Hot Springs. The gym reopened with new COVID rules and I was also able to start rowing again in a limited fashion on Saturday mornings.
There were still relatively few people at the beach. Given the inaccessibility of anywhere else, the bay beach was the best substitute we had for the Caribbean.
In Melbourne the NGV reopened with the Triennial. Strict limits on the number of people allowed within a building according to its floor area meant that while we had to book timed tickets in advance, we were able to see the exhibition without having to deal with any kind of crowds.
Christmas was very different from what we had originally planned. 2020 was supposed to be the year that we hosted all of Jay's family for Christmas. The weather was excellent but the uncontrolled pandemic in the USA, the prohibition on foreigners entering Australia and the local restrictions on gatherings meant that it was impossible on every level. Nonetheless Christmas was not quite the disappointment that my birthday was. We still had a Christmas lunch which I prepared for Jay and my sister and mother. We had FaceTime celebrations with Jay's family in three separate sessions (our Christmas Day being spread over four time zones). We also visited some of my extended family in the afternoon.
On Christmas night we drove to Sorrento again and stayed for a week. The weather was perfect, the gym there was open and while the town was crowded, we did all our own cooking at the house so the crowds didn't affect us much. We both got plenty of beach time and the house there is now quite comfortable as we have made several improvements over the year. Given that international travel is still going to be impossible for at least some months to come and that even travelling within Australia can be tricky as there have been sudden introductions of two-week quarantine requirements when an outbreak occurs, we will be doing most of our escaping from home by going there for the time being.
We visited the disused fort and quarantine station at Point Nepean during the week at the beach. Now that quarantine is something that friends are dealing with on a frequent basis, I look at the facility there with different eyes. It really seems like quite a pleasant place to complete a short quarantine, provided there was adequate medical care. The extensive cemetery suggested that maybe the real experience in the 19th century was less idyllic.
We returned to Melbourne for a very quiet New Year's Eve. There were no local fireworks because of the risk of transmission in crowds. Our only social event was a party on New Year's Day for which we stayed outdoors and in a setting that was not crowded. For NYE itself we watched the Sydney fireworks on TV and went to bed about 15 minutes after midnight. It was the quietest New Year we have had in a long time and a far cry from the party at the Mayan in LA which we have normally attended every second year.
Our experience of the pandemic and its consequences has been exceptionally fortunate. We were lucky to have completed an overseas vacation at the last minute before the pandemic took off. Neither of us got sick and our work has been busy. We have had the opportunity to travel locally to take a break. The control of the case numbers in Australia has been good. Though there was an outbreak in my mother's nursing home, it was successfully contained without loss of life. We have been able to exercise and maintained contact with friends. My life in 2020 was very different from what I had expected. It was the most difficult year of my life, eclipsing my father's death in 2018. I have made a slow recovery from my psychological distress at the start of the year, with lots of backsliding and mistakes. I finished the year optimistic however. My anxiety attacks are much less frequent and severe, so my mood seems to be in sync with the rest of the world: looking forward to 2021 as a path out of the mess that was 2020.
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We walked most of the interesting streets within 5km of home and our social interaction became meeting up with friends (or strangers) in the intersection of our 5km circles to walk our hour of exercise together.
Work continued in the rhythm of managing COVID work at the public hospital and performing limited emergency work in private. Because the surgeons I work with in private do a significant amount of urgent work on secondary referrals, my private work for the year as a whole was only down 20%. I had a few very quiet weeks but generally I was lucky to have enough to keep me enjoyably occupied and out of Jay's way while he was working from home.
Supermarkets remained open and we were lucky to be within 5km of Costco, so our regular shopping was not much disrupted, but the closure of barbers was obvious in the hair of people at work and on the street, and also made it clear on television which programs were recorded locally. Temporarily, Jay returned to having me as his barber. Working from the photos on his regular barber's Instagram, I managed to make a reasonable job of replicating his desired fade.
Though we were restricted to 5km from home, there were certain exemptions. I had a permit to travel further in order to get to and from work, and I was also permitted to provide care for family, which included delivering supplies to my mother and sister in Prahran. Because of the high mortality from COVID in aged care, I was not able to visit my mother face-to-face from March until November. We were also able to travel for emergencies and when a tree blew down across the driveway of my mother's house near the beach, we took the chainsaw down to Sorrento.
We took our food with us and stayed away from the town and any other people, but we did have the treat of seeing the profusion of birds and insects in the national park with no other people present.
By degrees the travel restrictions were relaxed and businesses began to open again. The state had been aiming for a low and controllable rate of coronavirus transmission of fewer than 5 cases a day. As it turned out we got very lucky when the last few chains of transmission died out completely just as businesses started to reopen. We marked the transition back to a more normal life with dinner at Ishizuka and then Minamishima (including fugu).
Our next trip to Sorrento didn't require an emergency and Tats was able to join us for an afternoon at the Peninsula Hot Springs. The gym reopened with new COVID rules and I was also able to start rowing again in a limited fashion on Saturday mornings.
There were still relatively few people at the beach. Given the inaccessibility of anywhere else, the bay beach was the best substitute we had for the Caribbean.
In Melbourne the NGV reopened with the Triennial. Strict limits on the number of people allowed within a building according to its floor area meant that while we had to book timed tickets in advance, we were able to see the exhibition without having to deal with any kind of crowds.
Christmas was very different from what we had originally planned. 2020 was supposed to be the year that we hosted all of Jay's family for Christmas. The weather was excellent but the uncontrolled pandemic in the USA, the prohibition on foreigners entering Australia and the local restrictions on gatherings meant that it was impossible on every level. Nonetheless Christmas was not quite the disappointment that my birthday was. We still had a Christmas lunch which I prepared for Jay and my sister and mother. We had FaceTime celebrations with Jay's family in three separate sessions (our Christmas Day being spread over four time zones). We also visited some of my extended family in the afternoon.
On Christmas night we drove to Sorrento again and stayed for a week. The weather was perfect, the gym there was open and while the town was crowded, we did all our own cooking at the house so the crowds didn't affect us much. We both got plenty of beach time and the house there is now quite comfortable as we have made several improvements over the year. Given that international travel is still going to be impossible for at least some months to come and that even travelling within Australia can be tricky as there have been sudden introductions of two-week quarantine requirements when an outbreak occurs, we will be doing most of our escaping from home by going there for the time being.
We visited the disused fort and quarantine station at Point Nepean during the week at the beach. Now that quarantine is something that friends are dealing with on a frequent basis, I look at the facility there with different eyes. It really seems like quite a pleasant place to complete a short quarantine, provided there was adequate medical care. The extensive cemetery suggested that maybe the real experience in the 19th century was less idyllic.
We returned to Melbourne for a very quiet New Year's Eve. There were no local fireworks because of the risk of transmission in crowds. Our only social event was a party on New Year's Day for which we stayed outdoors and in a setting that was not crowded. For NYE itself we watched the Sydney fireworks on TV and went to bed about 15 minutes after midnight. It was the quietest New Year we have had in a long time and a far cry from the party at the Mayan in LA which we have normally attended every second year.
Our experience of the pandemic and its consequences has been exceptionally fortunate. We were lucky to have completed an overseas vacation at the last minute before the pandemic took off. Neither of us got sick and our work has been busy. We have had the opportunity to travel locally to take a break. The control of the case numbers in Australia has been good. Though there was an outbreak in my mother's nursing home, it was successfully contained without loss of life. We have been able to exercise and maintained contact with friends. My life in 2020 was very different from what I had expected. It was the most difficult year of my life, eclipsing my father's death in 2018. I have made a slow recovery from my psychological distress at the start of the year, with lots of backsliding and mistakes. I finished the year optimistic however. My anxiety attacks are much less frequent and severe, so my mood seems to be in sync with the rest of the world: looking forward to 2021 as a path out of the mess that was 2020.
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