We're just over two weeks' worth of a spanking new year. Already it's the Ides of January; a half-month has flown quickly by. Hard to believe. The landscape has been renewed, and it's downy-light and looking brilliant in the intense glare of the January sun. We're expecting our first -20C overnight tonight for this New Year. Everything is refreshed and beautiful looking and the results of the holiday festivities when people mingled happily during family get-togethers and in an appealing social scene reborn after years of isolation and lockdowns are telling on the national health system.

New Year it may be, and a fresh beautiful one at that but the nightmare of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is still with  us. And because the variants of a variant called Omicron are far more contagious than the original COVID-19, people seriously infected are crowding hospitals everywhere, ICUs are inadequate to the numbers needing them, and the death toll keeps rising globally. We're fed up with it all and make ourselves deliberately 'unaware'.

 

China's outraged citizens' recent demonstrations against the 'zero-COVID' policy of the Chinese Communist Party and its President Xi Jinping prompted a sudden relaxation of the strict isolation and lockdowns which led to a massive flood of infections straining hospitals and morgues in the population-dense country.

And though here at home we're in far better shape thanks to a sweeping inoculation surge across the country resulting in a high percentage of circulating antibodies as close to group immunity as possible with this pandemic, our own hospitals are seeing challenges never before encountered in their response to demands on universal health care. Local epidemiologists lay the cause squarely on a population too eager to drop all common sense in the face of an implacable virus intent on fully dominating humanity.

 

How fortunate we've been so far to evade contracting the disease which at our age of 86 is a known, potentially lethal pathogen. Everyone's life has changed with the need for caution against exposure. What was frightening and difficult three years ago has now become routine common sense in self-protection. Hugely costly in many ways, stricturing our social agenda and just everything we've taken for granted. Worse for families with young children. The world truly turned itself upside down and inside-out.

 

Our own routine in life adjusted over time, and truth be told, life for us hasn't undergone a wholesale change. It has made life far more complicated and less spontaneous. Perhaps at our age you become more philosophical about things you can't really do much about other than accept them and get on as best you can.

So today we did just that, carrying on as usual, including getting out with our two little dogs to enjoy a truly fine winter slog through new snow in a beautiful forest setting.Tramping through a narrowed forest trail, breathing in crisp, fresh air, looking about at the various landscape presentations in a wide,  undulating ravine of hills and valleys, ridges and waterways, there is much to see and to enjoy. A total escape from nagging concerns, albeit temporarily. But one that is renewing and renewable.