Day 39 - SkyLines from the French Lock-down: When Quarantine Ends

Bonjour nos amis! Ca va? (Hello our friends! How are you?) 
We hope you are staying safe and getting through this. And Hope really is in the air in spite of all the scary statistics being bandied on TV. We are a few weeks away from a planned re-opening of business and life in France. Each day we are told that because we've stayed home there will be room in the hospitals to deal with the inevitable spike in cases as we do so. But will we ever return to normal life? With luck, at least the latest treatments will prove effective and mean better chances of survival.

When Quarantine began the fields were bare.

Day 39 - The sun woke us again and it was late. It feels like we have come unhinged from the clock. Quarantine has rearranged life. Not only ours, everybody's life, I mean. Then I think of

Our village

those health workers who are working overtime. They look stressed and tired. There are beautiful stories on the news of the people providing them with hotel rooms free of charge and others who are cooking them meals. And here we sit, locked into our village, so lucky to be safe. I feel guilty that we are doing nothing to help. I know, I know, we are doing our part. But if feels really feeble.

Our new routine went without a hitch: breakfast - long and lazy, emails answered, friend's posts shared, with the cat sleeping beneath the table except when she got stroppy and wanted us to do something to entertain her. In that she was disappointed. The final exercise video in the Easy Core Challenge was filmed.  We talked about what to do next time.

Y, my French partner, has become a great filmmaker. He askes, "Quand puis-je m'attendre à mon cachet?" I look perplexed and ask, "Quoi?" (what?) "Cachet d'aritiste," he adds, which still leaves me in the dark. He

The last of the series - and not a
minute too soon - she's gone folks!

looks at me as if I am five. "Money," he says in English. I laugh, "Oh! Yes! I will pay you when I earn any," I say, "So that's probably never, mon amour." I look it up and a cachet is kinda like an official stamp. I guess asking 'when can I expect my artist's stamp?' means  the royalties from our fantastic YouTube production! Yeah, I'm giggling as I write that.

Lunch was great and we watched the midday reports on TV.  The news was all about the approaching de-confinement. It was mostly good news but a bit contradictory at times. Like these soundbites:

 Tests are ongoing to see if nicotine patches will help health workers avoid becoming infected with the virus - Wow - mon cheri, quick go buy us a pack of cigarettes, it's time to take up smoking!

 Oh wait a minute - also in the news: Smokers are more prone to get the severe form of this virus and more likely to die than non-smokers. Cheri, never mind. We aren't going to start smoking.

 The country will open in May, Liberation at last! Normal life will start again. Also in the news:

No impromptu wine tasting I suppose.

masks will be distributed starting in May. A mask is mandatory in public from May 4th.  Restaurants and cafés will remain closed until at the very earliest June and maybe not even then. So... not normal life as we know it then, is it?

All week we have heard a variety of scenarios for how France will come out of quarantine. Many people will continue to "tele-travail" - work from home via the internet. There is a planned "chommage-partial" (meaning planned unemployment with enough benefits to survive the interim period.) All Cult meeting places will remain closed. What? You ask. We

perhaps picnics will be okay?

have special places for cults in France? Oh yes. They are called meeting halls, temple, chapels, churches, and such. This country actually believes in separation of church and state. There is no difference between the places where Muslims, Christians, Jewish people, Hare Krishna devotees or The Order of the Solar Temple followers meet.  I agree. To make any distinction is to say that one person's faith is more valid than another's. You should have a right to choose but for now, practice what you preach at home. Until a vaccine is found or an immunity proved, we must not congregate in large numbers in confined places.

The big question is how to reopen the schools. It's tricky!  Parents are being told they can decide to keep their children at home if they prefer. One plan calls for 15 kids to a class, all masked, and for the

what about harvest times?

slightly older kids with different teachers for each subject, it will be the instructors who change rooms instead of the kids moving for the next class. That's going to be tough on everybody. We think buses will stick with having passengers board by the middle doors to avoid infecting the drivers. There is a lot to be ironed out!

Even on the day of de-confinement, public transport is going to be restricted with trains only carrying people to work and back. And the proposal is to allow only professional travel throughout the country. No jumping in the car to travel outside the "Territoire: (territory) you live in for a while until we see what happens. For example, we would be allowed to travel around Occitanie, which a collection of 13 departments in the south of France - or  as I

Will the workers come from Spain
or Morocco as usual?

call it "The fun south west by the Med."

Macron has told us it will be slow. We may end up doing a stop-and-go with a series of shorter quarantine periods to keep the waves of infection low. There may be several waves until a vaccine is found or an immunity builds. A proposal bandied around at the start was to open up by regions, but that has been axed in favor of everyone together. That sounds way more French to me. I love these guys and not just the one who is "mon mec" (my guy.) The word "Fraternité" for brotherhood can be easily exchanged for another word we use here in France to describe how things are done.  This is a word that is very close to my heart.  It is "Ensemble" - TOGETHER.

And that, nos amis, is how we are going to move into the future. Quarantine is still on, but a day is coming soon when we will be out and about. And when we get beyond that inevitable second wave (or even third or fourth) we will look back at this time and know, dear friends, that we went through it together. Now, we're going out on the terrace to dream of days to come.

A demain, cher amis! (Until tomrrow, dear friends!) Link to Day 40

For the moment, life is still in Quarantine