The Great Escape

We woke up this morning to rumours that Boris was possibly going to ban travel for anyone in London and the South East. And whilst we assumed it would be those areas that went into Tier 3 on Thursday, we didn’t want to take any chances and decided to leave before his announcement at 4pm.

We had so much to do as we weren’t due to leave until Monday, so hadn’t even sorted what clothes we were taking, and the case was still in the loft. We had a Click & Collect slot at Sainsbury’s booked for 11.30am with all the Christmas food and by 10am I’d packed, cleaned out Sherbie and arranged to drop her at Charlotte’s a couple of days early. We went to Pets at Home for dog food, picked up the food and filled the car with diesel.

When we got home we unloaded the shopping into the garage so I could sort out what was coming and what was staying. The next problem was what we were going to do with it all as mum only has a small fridge, but fortunately Rach said we could drop it off at hers and she’d put it in there fridge.

Alan did a great job packing the car, he was worried we wouldn’t get everything in, but he managed - just! And we set off just before 4pm, and were on our way before Boris’ announcement that London, Kent, parts of East Sussex along with some other Southern counties were moving into Tier 4 which is basically a complete lockdown. The other news was that the 5 days of Christmas were to be reduced to just Christmas Day.

Soon after, I received a message from Julie who owns the Welsh house, that they’d just returned from Wales having been to get the house ready for us, and the Welsh Prime Minister announced he was bringing the lockdown forward from 28th to midnight tonight. We were gutted and didn’t know whether to carry on to mums or to turnaround and head home.

We decided to continue because we’re worried that between now and Christmas there might be tighter restrictions in place. We got to Rachel’s at 9.30pm, handed over the shopping, and then set off for mums, arriving just before 11pm. We were both very tired but couldn’t go straight to bed, we needed to relax so we opened a bottle of Malbec.