A Year and Worlds Apart

It was another day of wild weather. Lots of showers and strong winds. It occurred to me today that it was exactly a year ago when I was in Gran Canaria with my sons and this was the day I climbed the Valley of the Tears. We were amazingly lucky to have escaped for that holiday. If it had been booked even just a week later it wouldn't have been possible to go. With my fitness falling away, year on year, I doubt I would have got another chance to do this amazing climb.

I'm generally not very good at looking back in life. I prefer to be moving forwards and looking ahead. If I don't manage to write something for my journal on the day, then I very rarely find any desire to go back and fill in the details. With work on the novel rather stuck, waiting on some inspiration, I decided that this anniversary was a good moment to write up a day I really did want to remember. So, I spent some time putting words together and combining them with Roam's photography. It brought back a lot of rich memories. 

So I think it was this day a year ago that I first saw people wearing masks on the island and began to think that this was a whole more serious a deal than we'd been led to believe back at home. We knew so little then. Perhaps the most astonishing thing is that we still really know so little now, especially around transmission and the variation in immunological response in different countries. One of the reasons, of course, is that the virus is so tiny. If all the Coronavirus from around the entire world could be collected together, it would easily fit inside a single jam jar! 

If seeing lots of pictures of me on a bike, in pain, is of any possible interest to anyone, the story can be seen here. The scenery is, at least, quite dramatic!