Looking to a brighter time ahead

JUDY MURRAY DREAMS OF FA RETURN TO NORMAL

Last week, a phone call with Jamie gave me a glimpse into the future – or, perhaps, I should say a flashback to the past.

Ahead of competing in the Australian Open, Jamie, and around 500 other top players, has been holed up in a hotel room in Melbourne, completing a 14-day compulsory quarantine. Other than an allotted five-hours of freedom for training and exercise every day (from 6.30am-11.30am), he’s been stuck indoors (with air con) trying to come up with creative ways to fill the day.

During this time, he’s been able to look out at the parks and tennis courts just outside his window, where he can see – brace yourself – people enjoying normal life in 40°C heat. Having come straight from the UK, where it feels like we’ve been locked down forever and a day, he said it’s been strange to see everyone walking in groups, hugging and doing formerly everyday things like going out for lunch or dinner and watching live sport.

And now that his isolation has ended, he can start enjoying some simple pleasures again, too. I must admit, I’m beyond jealous – he’s got sunshine and we have snow!

Australia isn’t the only country now reaping the benefits of taking a hard and fast line with coronavirus restrictions. Similarly, residents of New Zealand – where there has been just 25 deaths from the virus – are living like it’s 2019 again. While Kiwi newspapers have been printing pictures of fans enjoying a crowded music festival, we’ve had to deal with the stark reality that 100,000 Brits have lost their lives to coronavirus – and counting.

We reached that tragic milestone of deaths last week, and the total has already crept up by another thousand. What’s more, it seems the new more infectious strain of the virus is proving difficult to curtail.

So how did we, an island just like Australia and New Zealand, end up here? It’s simple, the right measures were not put in place early enough. The government was too slow to act on too many fronts. Yes, it’s true we have never faced a global crisis on this scale before, but the panic over SARS and Ebola happened only in recent history, so we should have learned lessons from those smaller-scale infections and acted accordingly. I am no politician or infectious disease expert but surely keeping the borders open throughout the pandemic was the biggest mistake of all, especially in a world that’s so connected.

Who would have believed that 10 months on from the first national lockdown we would be stuck back at home yet

again? I don’t know about you but I’m finding it hard to stay optimistic when the end, and a return to normal life, still seems so far away.

I can hear my granny saying, “Get your chin out of your drawers and get on with it”, so I buckle up, reset and carry on. It’s important to remember we do have a weapon in our arsenal now that we didn’t last year; the vaccine. The rollout seems to be moving at pace (more than half of our over-80s have now had their first dose). Let’s keep looking forward towards summer with sunshine, friends and family.