Quarantine

“In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you’ve had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul”.

I’ll skip over the 6 months of filling in visa applications etc. and go straight to the departure for New Zealand on June 17th.

The flight was pretty uneventful but I must mention the fetching uniforms worn by the Singapore Airline stewardesses. Clearly inspired by the film “In the Mood for Love”.

But with masks on, sadly.

On arrival I was efficiently processed and then shuttled off for “Managed Isolation and Quarantine” for the next 14 days. Ideally I would portray this with a Rocky style montage to compress the time (not that I did more than a token amount of exercise) but even if this blog-site has the capability, I lack the skills. So I’ve gone for a flip-chart theme instead.

1. In the Cooler

Naumi Airport Hotel (Trip Advisor: 86%). A double room with fridge and bath. Somewhat higher standard than I would allow myself on a typical holiday.

2. Preventing spread of communicable diseases

Informative posters:

I was swabbed on days zero, 2 and 12 (more thorough than any swabbing I’ve had in the UK) and after the first negative result I was awarded a blue wristband, conferring the following privileges:

a. right to visit the exercise area (hotel carpark)

b. visit the smoking/vaping area, according to the assigned smoking schedule.

c. order drinks from the bar (maximum 1 bottle of wine OR 6 beers a day)

3. Addictions

There are some consumables I just can’t live without. The food wasn’t bad, but when the only pepper they had to offer was ready-ground in little sachets I protested: “we’re not animals after all!” The next day my lunch arrived with this:

Which after some thumping became this:

Chili sauce and pistachios they did not stock however so I ordered these in and got my first shock at the prices in NZ:

4. “If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…”

I filled the minutes with a variety of distractions, and I would like to thank all those friends and family who helped keep me relatively sane.

What follows is not my typical quarantine day, but my ideal quarantine day. I came close to this a few of times though:

6:30am wake and start drinking coffee.

7am play computer/board-games with friends in England for whom it is currently 8pm

9:30am games finish due to England friends’ bedtime. Now breakfast followed by gentle exercise

then bath, lunch, read, exercise, bath, Rick and Morty (1 episode a day)

also chess, scrabble, boggle… etc.

And repeat.

Wait! I’m forgotten the Maths (for shame). This ream has been sitting on my bookshelf since A-levels (21 years ago…)

There will be those amongst you who do not share my fondness for mathematics. Who are, perhaps, lukewarm about numbers. Well please read the following question anyway, if only to see how charmingly it’s written:

5. “As he was a bachelor, and in nobody’s debt, nobody troubled his head any more about him.” The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Thanks for taking an interest and reading this far. In 2 more days I’ll be release and will go for a test drive of this campervan:

It comes with a free kayak, has almost 250,000 miles on the clock, and Harry (cousin who recently bought a converted transit van) thinks it’s too low.

Tune in next time to find out whether I bought it, and if so what I’m doing with it.