Peak spread

What strange times we are living in. Arriving in the UK during peak corona media frenzy feels very strange, but I can’t be in Mozambique as my visa has expired, so I’ve got to be somewhere. I am in the UK office for a couple of weeks during which time I was planning to acquire a new visa to get me back to the country where I am based. My main preoccupation now is whether it’s worth the hassle to battle for a visa with the Mozambique High Commission in London given the new scrutiny Mozambique is placing on countries with worsening crises and that a big chunk of the visa’s lifetime could be spent in self-isolation in Mozambique even if I manage to get back in. I have a flight already in hand to South Africa on 30 March, and I’d prefer to board that and figure out the visa situation from the next door country. This plan assumes the situation in South Africa doesn’t worsen, as it well might. There are about a thousand moving parts and right now the world feels even more like a fragile house of cards than the tightly coiled semblance of stability that it usually is.

‘3 degrees with rain’, announced the pilot on arrival at Gatwick. I immediately self-isolated with a coffee as I’d been deprived on the plane. Then I sought patches of sunlight on the station platform. These were bearable. When a train or wall blocked the rays, it was much less so.