This whole corona business is starting to get on my nerves. The restrictions aren’t particularly onerous in Switzerland, but they’re there, and they weigh on people. Without childcare, days at the office, business trips or anything to leave the house for except panic buying, the days blend into one. They’re all the same.
What little distraction I have comes from going to the office for quick stints once or twice a week. The coffee makers are still producing excellence, and a few people are still around for chats. What remains are days at home, with the children – who are good and surprisingly self-sufficient as a team of two but still only two and four years old – in frequent need of attention.
This afternoon we went out for a little walk in the bright sunshine of the first spring weekend. This hasn’t been banned yet. All official communication exhorts you to stay at home, but as long as you keep your distance, you’re fine. The town should have been heaving with people, but the streets were largely empty. I saw a few larger groups chatting animatedly, with individual subgroups, probably representing members of the same household, separated by at least three meters.
We were out on scooters, which the Swiss, taking a cue from the French, call trottis. The kids played around almost normally but kept off the playgrounds. No questions or discussions were necessary. Even the boy knows how to say coronavirus and knows the term as a reason for all the changes to our routines.
In the morning, once again, I had been too exhausted for my Saturday ride on the trainer. I took it as the desperate last calling from chemotherapy. Laying in bed half asleep, I silently shouted a triumphant good-bye. Chasing the kids on the trotti for 30 minutes probably doesn’t have the same benefit, but it’s surely better than a long ride on the sofa.
My rides on the sofa, on evenings when I’m not on the trainer, have been called off. For a change, this has nothing to do with corona. More prosaically, the lamp in my projector blew. Given that the box is nearly eleven years old and has seen good use, this didn’t come as a surprise. It’s nevertheless bad timing, as we’ve got into the habit of staring at the big screen on the nights that I’m not cycling. This was indirectly prompted by the kids who, by being around all day, give us the impression of a permanent weekend. It’s bad timing twice over as the bulb blew right before we were to watch the last episode of the Galician noble-gangsters-and-drugs drama that has entertained us for about a month now.
The upside to the enforced closure of our home cinema, is that I found the time to finish my taxes. This is punishment I brought upon myself when I decided to file a tax return three years ago even though I wasn’t required to. In Switzerland, most foreigners are taxed at the source and owe the government nothing beyond that. Smart people enjoy the peace. I thought I might get some money back because I had claims to deductions that could not have possibly been part of the equation when my tax was calculated. Since this initial return, I’ve been required to file my taxes every year, but I’ve never got any money back nor any word that I’ve even submitted them.
With the taxes out of the way and corona having put life to a halt, the coming month is one of relative leisure. There are no business trips, no visits, no family activities outside the home. If the children didn’t insist, Easter might pass unnoticed. On the upside, with no doctor’s appointments or treatments to break a routine of increasing tedium, I can feel like a healthy person until the PET-CT scan in a month.
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