How do we spend the day here in this north-western London suburb? How did we get to be here anyway? We returned to Heathrow from our curtailed holiday in Sri Lanka and were meant to fly to Italy on the 31st of March. Since March 24th however, Italy has been under lockdown. So any return to our place in Longoio will be out of the question until at least May (if that!). Luckily we have a place to stay in London. My mother-in-law sadly died last year but at least she was spared the pandemic. Meanwhile, there is much to do in sorting out her house.
This is an area of London near Wembley stadium and we can see the famous arch from one of our bedroom window.
Like so many parts of London, it’s a very ethnically mixed area with a large proportion of people from the former Raj and with many from Eastern Europe. It’s also quite a green area with extensive open spaces like Gladstone and Fryent parks. For olde worlde charm there’s nothing to beat the place where Churchill and Byron went to be educated: nearby Harrow and its famous school.
There are several well-stocked corner shops near where we are staying. They are useful in that they avoid supermarket queues and their prices are quite reasonable too.
(Queueing by our local Supermarket)
We often combine our shopping trips with a daily exercise walk or ‘constitutional’ where we are attempting to clock up ten thousand steps, or five miles daily.
The area is not lacking in varieties of plants including wild borage:
Currently it’s cherry blossom time and the suburban streets display a charming spectacle. If not Japan then at least the London borough of Brent.
Yesterday we discovered a considerable expanse of open space encircled by the back gardens of semi-detached house. It seemed almost as if when the area was being developed in the nineteen thirties the builders ran out of money and this area of former meadowland was saved for recreation.
We walked around the green and appreciated the three copses planted on it. What we appreciated less was a group of about eight men armed with beer cans congregated in a corner of the open space. Clearly they’d found a spot where the police would apparently be unlikely to find them. I initially thought of taking a photo to demonstrate the problem that most of the UK has in containing and separating current illegal congregations of people. After all, the same rules of social distancing occur throughout the infected world and are there to safeguard the spread of the virus and to reduce the various health services load (or overload…). I noticed the men had some dogs of the aggressive species grouped around them and so, upon the advice of my wife, desisted from photographing them.
How long the majority of decent-minded people will endure the present lockdown is anybody’s guess. Even in London there is a limit to the local walks one can take. We just hope that the notorious ‘curve’ will soon bend in the correct manner so we may be spared any significant civil disobedience or mob rule. This country will anyway have enough on its plate after December 31st this year…
The distancing on our shopping trip was 4 metres it was disheartening long and winding at least one hour luckily we were spotted by a guard and unbeknown to us were privileged to march to the head of the queue clearly one bonus for our age and what a relief! The open spaces tha we are finding are truly a bonus feels somewhat like being in the countryside! Those guys seem to congregate daily.without masks and with Rottweilers they seem quite threatening and we steered a very wide berth from them. A kind neighbour did offer to do shopping for us but we can manage and do wear our masks for our own protection too. We try our temperature daily since lockdown in Kandy and it is well below 39! The difficult now is to know when all this lockdown will be safe to end and the chaos that will ensue. It was really cold again yesterday despite the sunny day and eerily quite quite surreal!