Not a time for heroes

A Bermuda national holiday today. Once the Queen’s Birthday holiday, in recent times the island took to celebrating local historical figures, and renamed it National Heroes Day. Although from what I can make out very few heroes have ever been named, which seems very strange to me. I have long given up by being bewildered by Bermuda’s idiosyncrasies though.

In recent years this weekend became the focal point of a growing Carnival scene, attempting to emulate those in other Caribbean countries. Bermuda’s efforts have been rewarded as numbers have grown consistently helped by more and more tourists. From memory the number of visitors for last last year’s carnival weekend topped 1,500.

Like everything that was long cancelled, so today will for me at least be sedate and family orientated with a rare break away from the work computer sat in the next room.

Bermuda is now in Phase 3 of re-opening with a lot of the island now open with strict and enforced rules around social distancing, numbers, deep cleaning and the wearing of masks.

Schools will now remain shut for the school year and restaurants inside have followed outdoor ones in re-opening with much reduced capacities. The government has also allowed the resumption of being back in an office outside of essential workers.

For us, we are working on a gradual re-introduction into an office environment for our staff. I think we are still a month away but there will be plenty of guidelines, both enforced and voluntary. One requirement however is the compulsory wearing of a face mask while in the office…. all day.

That is a game-changer for me, and I quite expect to stay working from home until at least after the summer. For me I will just head into town (I can walk in from where we live now) and have my much missed interactions with people over a coffee or lunch, whilst doing ‘proper’ work from home.

We’ve been lucky here that for a few weeks we could see friends (and family if they were here) with a maximum number of ten. We were at a friends’ house on Friday for a BBQ and a few much needed wines after another fraught work week. We had to leg it from there though to beat the 11pm curfew (it was 10pm up until last Thursday) as it is strictly enforced with military roadblocks.

The same rules apply on the ocean, and yesterday we got invited for an afternoon’s cruise on my mates new boat for a swim and laughs. It’s quite the boat, and it reminded me of a phrase I learnt within the first few weeks of moving here all those years ago – don’t buy a boat, but make friends with someone with a boat!