Boris has been vocally insistent that despite persistently high case counts, the UK has no plans to re-impose COVID restrictions. Which is pretty much what he was saying last year before abruptly canceling Christmas.
So as you can imagine, we’re all aquiver with antici….
London is looking more and more “normal” – where normal means something not quite 2019, but more like 2019 than 2020. I took the tube to London Bridge and met a former colleague for a burger and beers the other night, and Dawnise got rush tickets to a show.
Aside from a communication snafu owing to the pub being a very efficient Faraday cage, which caused Dawnise to spend the first half of her show wondering if some evil had befallen me, it was a shockingly “pre-pandemic” evening.
We’re starting to make plans for around the holidays – including inviting folks to ours for Thanksgiving, and hopefully including a Christmas market trip to Belgium that was aborted by a French Rail strike last time.
Closer to Christmas we’ve got a booking for anniversary Beef Wellington at the Goring, which was canceled last year by the “we’re not going to cancel Christmas” lock down. And a smattering of friends from the States are planning to be in London over the next few months.
We’re even starting to think about a trip back to Seattle early next year.
In the mean time, I finally got my UK driving license. It took a year from the time I registered to sit the written exam – but it’s done. So we can hire a car and go somewhere we can’t easily get on a train. Which sounds great, assuming we can sort out cat care.
And speaking of the diabetic cat… He was back at the vet for a checkup the other day and he’s doing pretty well. He’s steadily lost a bunch of weight, which the vet’s very happy about. It turns out when you can’t help your self to snacks, sticking to a diet and losing weight is a piece of cake. Oh, wait, he can’t have cake. Ahem. We’ve lowered his insulin dose after measuring his blood sugar and finding it was too low a couple hours after eating. We’ll check him again in a couple weeks.
We’ve been in the “new flat” for a year, so I guess it’s not “new” anymore – and I’m happy to report that on the occasional days of heavy rain, the water stayed outside, just like it’s supposed to. We occasionally reflect on how fortunate we were to find this place when we needed it.
Further bulletins as events warrant.