It being a weekend and therefore time for a longer walk, we headed up Mt Victoria again. It’s a nice change from city streets, even if it can be a little challenging to maintain the required social distance, the path in places being a mere metre wide. Some creative thinking is required when meeting walkers coming the other way, precariously balancing on the edge of the path or scrabbling up a steep incline, clinging onto a tree, whilst they scuttle past. Right at the top we found a lookout we hadn’t seen before, alongside the radio mast. It’s not new, having been opened in 1940 for Wellington’s centenary, so how we’ve missed it for the past seventeen years and many walks up here I have no idea.
On today’s live update the PM listed a few statistics, including that it’s 31 days since we closed our borders, a week before we entered full lockdown. Despite that some days I feel we’ve been living like this forever, it’s a remarkably short period of time since things were ‘normal’. Tomorrow we find out if our lockdown will be relaxed. A move to level three won’t make much difference to the average Kiwi, but it will enable some businesses to re-commence trading, many people to be allowed back to work. Otherwise we will still have to stay in our bubbles. For now at least.
I’m looking forward to when I can drive to the other side of the city and walk along the south coast. That’s if I can remember how to drive, it’s been so long since I was behind the wheel of a car. Given how deserted the streets are and how casual walkers, cyclists, skateboarders, and runners have become, I wonder if ED will be swamped within a few days of lockdown ending.
I still stop at the kerb and look right and left – I do that even on a one-way street, so the lack of cars isn’t going to stop me – but many saunter off the pavement with no thought that one day soon there will be large metal objects hurtling along and with which they won’t win a fight. I’ve seen skateboarders weaving in and out of white lines on three-lane roads, and cyclists going the wrong way on the same, an alarming amount of them not wearing helmets, foolish in my opinion even if it wasn’t a legal requirement in this country. Add in that many won’t have been driving for a while and I predict carnage. Good job our hospitals aren’t swamped with pandemic patients.
Tracy Annenberg 