France immediately turned into a a ‘police state’. You had to have a paper ‘attestation’ to go anywhere (work, local exercise etc.) and the gendarmes would stop and check. So you felt like you were essentially evading the police.
First few days were ‘work’ running between chalets, cleaning and organising supplies. We had loads … frozen, fridge and store room stuff from 7 chalets that wouldn’t last until next winter. So we weren’t short of food.
After the hard slog of Chalet Hosting we now had loads of spare time and our apartment was fantastic … one of 12 and only 2 occupied – and literally up a mountain (about 100m above Morzine) so ‘isolation’ and ‘social distancing’ was the norm.
The routine quickly became Jenga, jigsaws, yoga(!), 1 hour walks (either up the hill & down through some woods or down to town and back again), DVDs (24/House/films) and lots of sleep.
Lola had a meltdown trying to get home from Thailand and it
was tough being away from the family but … well, it was pretty much perfect apart from that! We had isolated birthday celebrations, Mother’s day by Skype and kept in touch with friends … just like everyone else on the planet!
Excitement came in the form of getting stopped by the police (twice!), receiving deliveries (binoculars, bike bits, beer, music bits) and slow-cooking – we had no oven so got creative with the slow cooker (pizza, scones, brownies, tartiflette, curry, flapjack … and best of all … bread!).
Worked on a few songs (writing/recording) with friends Dave, Mark, Bob, Allan and JJ and re-developed my fund program thing.
We watched the weather turn from end of winter into Spring – beautifully sunny and our 1 walk became 2 walks (one up and one down the hill … no one around so who’s to know?). Yet, ironically we became extremely scathing of cyclists (it was banned!), groups of people out walking and the weekend visitor that turned up at the other occupied apartment. We turned into proper curtain-twitchers!
After 55 days of enforced relaxation the lockdown ended. Lot’s of people had it tough .. but for us it was largely fabulous – we were very lucky.
