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A bridge too far

As I sit down to blog, another tumultuous shower is lashing my window as the week lives up to its name, at the southern tip of Africa of The Cape of Storms. The embedded pic reveals our attempts of the weekend to hunt for snow, since not one of my family members has truly experienced a sense of snow.

I count myself lucky to have had a home to protect me these past few days, along with not having to venture out into the dark icy Monday morning, as I continue in lockdown, working from home along with my grade 8 son, for whom the shine of ‘home schooling’ has long since rubbed off.

Today we both battled to exit the cocoons of our duvets to meet the assignments of our laptops and to engage our brains in something beyond a novel or the mesmerising flames of the fire we lit at lunchtime.

Last night our Pres. announced something of a concoction of lockdown rulings for our 16th week of the Covid pandemic in SA, with a curfew reappearing along with enforcement of the much flaunted mask wearing rules.

And the immediate rebanning of alcohol sales was almost as sudden as the reintroduction of another unwelcome guest on the SA horizon; electricity load shedding.

Trying to explain this one to my clients of the afternoon in the US, finds me grappling for words at their puzzled expressions. I didn’t even attempt to name the havoc the series of storms has wreaked on those living in low lying areas or seas which are greedily lapping Atlantic seaboard homes.

But for me today was a bridge too far. Pre-Covid I would don my entrepreneurial hat and plan my day according to client work places or coffee shops that were not experiencing load shedding when I was, to ensure as little disruption to my clients’ (and my) schedules as possible. Today as I considered the local Woolworths or my husband’s workplace I knew that both were out of the question. For we are doing our damndest to limit social contact and the number of people at work sites to the bare minimum.

And so with some embarrassment I postponed the US and reverted to sitting with my Grade 8 ‘s summary of an Afrikaans movie we had imposed on him the previous evening, in our efforts to comply with a semblance of the school’s curriculum.

I snuck a relieved glance at the load shedding schedule for tomorrow to see that although off to a chilly start, our ‘shedding’ is done by 08h30. But Weds looms worryingly on the horizon with another mid afternoon slot scheduled and another  potential round of embarrassing postponements or frustrating reschedules. What was birthed in Covid season as a wave of ‘work from home’ liberation is proving a complete nightmare with our own electricity pandemic, coupled with freezing conditions and escalating infection rates.

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One response to “A bridge too far”

  1. Jeremy says:

    The UK government would have said they trust the British people to decide which neighbour will unplug their electricity and when, and one person can switch it off, but that three people are needed to switch it back on, but because of social distancing you cannot switch it back on.

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