Sparkling Water

Today has been a beautiful day. It started off with the cloud low over Loch Broom in the morning, but it rose until there were just wisps of cloud around the top of the mountains. The blue sky came through and it got warmer and warmer. I went for a swim in the leisure centre in the morning and sat outside on the bench for most of the afternoon while James cut down another gorse bush; they’re nearly all gone now and the garden looks so much better, more open to the view. The rowan trees are covered with bright red berries and the grass looked very green in the sunshine, with the blue loch sparkling beyond. Beautiful. 

Jamie has now finished his job in Dunedin, with his new job in Wellington to start at the end of the month. He decided to go for a four day walk by himself on a wilderness trail near the Routeburn trail, and then planned to meet up with friends to go skiing near Queenstown. However when he arrived back at his car after his hike he found that someone had left a note on his windscreen to tell him that New Zealand had gone into National Lockdown! This is because there have been some new cases of Covid. So instead of going on his ski holiday, he had to drive to Picton via Christchurch and take the ferry to Wellington, where he is now. New Zealand has very much isolated itself for the last 18 months, which has been very successful, but their vaccination programme is not very far on, so when occasional cases of Covid do get through (this time it was from someone who developed it after their quarantine period) the government tends to panic. But the trouble is, their expectations are to have almost no deaths from Covid - I think they have only had 27 deaths in the last 18 months - but if they stop isolating the country from the rest of the world, there will be more cases of Covid and therefore some deaths, and I think that the New Zealanders are not psychologically prepared for that. So how are they going to move forward? It seems that there is no ideal solution to dealing with Covid.