New Old Journeys- Oxford
One of the very few and small consolations of the first lockdown of March 2020 was the exploration of local areas that, in normal times, one wouldn’t explore because of the pull of more celebrated cultural or recreational attractions. This was in the course of the permitted “household walk” of no more than hour (although that limit turned out to guidance rather than law).
We’ll Mostly Make Up Our Own Minds
March 2020. It all seemed very strange. We were in Spain, leaving a couple of days before the lockdown that had just been announced there.
Given two days’ notice, the second homeowners of Madrid and other metropolises busted out in refugee numbers, fleeing to the Costas. At the time, it seemed that the Spanish authorities had badly bungled. This year, a similarly signalled lockdown in France was deliberately timed to allow people in Paris to escape to second homes… thus it goes. Nothing short of police state tactics is going to prevent the well-off from arranging their lockdown lives away from the cities, if they so choose, in spite of the hollow guidance of governments everywhere.
On the Eve of the Second Lockdown
Lord Byron wrote a long, quasi-autobiographical poem in the early C19 – Child Harold. It made him famous, and gave us that staple of the Romantic imagination – the Byronic Hero, a melancholy, rootless, but noble and passionate figure.
Child Harold was written in four Cantos, or books, with a break in between the first and later two. In that gap occurred the final spasm of the Napoleonic Wars: the battle of Waterloo in June 1815.
