The Quarantine Diaries #43: Third time’s the charm

April, and the good people of Slovenia are placed in lockdown for the third time since the pandemic started. It is also the third lockdown for us as a family, though the first one we experienced was in Spain.

Feeling the strain

This is supposed to be an eleven day ‘short, sharp shock’ lockdown to bring the spread of the virus under control, as for whatever reason, the vaccine programme seems to be rolling out very slowly here. Some people have just plain had enough, for example the now-famous ‘chainsaw man’ who approached the Slovenian parliament building in Ljubljana wielding a chainsaw and screaming that he’d ‘had enough’ of the containment measures:

While I certainly don’t condone this kind of behaviour, I think that anyone can feel the impact on their mental health of repeated lockdowns, particularly those who live in inner-city areas and are perhaps isolated, or in a difficult domestic situation. It also angers me to hear that it is possible to cross the border into Croatia, so long as you’re prepared to pay a €400 ‘fine.’ I am not sure whether this is true, but it would not surprise me too much if it were. It seems to be a different set of rules for the wealthy, as always. But let us not forget that we are still trying to bring the virus under control, a fact of which I was given a stark reminder only last week.

Corona scare

Only the day after the schools broke up for Easter, my eldest son took ill with a fever and cough. Of course I feared it was a covid infection, and we arranged for him to have a test. As I waited for the results, and for the fever to break, I wondered if I had been right to send him back to school in the first place. Luckily, he was better after only two days, and it turned out to be a more run-of-the-mill virus. Of course it’s perfectly natural for parents to worry about covid, and forget that all of the usual infections are doing the rounds at the same time.

I took this as a lesson in gratitude: how important it is to be grateful for all that I have, not least my family’s health, and my own.

What this lockdown means for me

This lockdown feels like the least oppressive so far. We’re allowed out for exercise, and indeed took advantage of the beautiful spring weather to climb a mountain at the weekend (see Featured Image). I haven’t yet felt the impact on my work of having the kids home, as during this holiday weekend we’ve been going out and about as a family.

I suspect for as long as the lockdown lasts it will be something of a juggling act to keep on top of schoolwork and ahead of schedule with my writing. Please be patient if you’ve submitted work to The Anthropocene Hymnal, I am reviewing all submissions but have a limited time window each day in which to do this at present.

Whatever the covid situation where you are, please do take care of yourself and your mental health. Eventually this will be over and we can all get back to some kind of ‘normal,’ whatever that may look like in the post-pandemic world…

Wishing you well,
Ingrid