Goggles at Dawn

Freyberg, looking a little empty on Wednesday 18 March. If you bravely persevered to the end of my previous post, you'll have read that I had my post-swim breakfast on 20 March at Source. It was delicious, French toast and some sort of grilled banana, with bacon. Anyway, while we were sitting there chatting the news came through (why does news always 'come through'?) that Auckland City Council were closing pools, libraries, the art gallery, and other similar council facilities at the end of that day. News that the pools were to shut gave the table of swimmers pause for thought, but as we were sitting about five minutes' walk from some very nice sea, the loss of pools didn't seem like the end of the world. I spent the rest of Friday lodged in my cell-like room at Auckland YHA International. Actually, it was more like a sepulchre than a cell, and the smell of stale greasy food permeated the air. The window was horizontal, narrow, and very high up the wall....

View of Plimmerton and environs from the plane Two weeks ago exactly (give or take 12 hours) I walked through a chilly southerly to morning squad at WRAC, and on my way home stopped off at Countdown to pick up the remaining supplies for my Chopper Swim trip: apples, dried apples, peanut butter, penne pasta, Snackballs, dinosaurs, two tiny tins of tuna, and a packet of cherry tomatoes. After lugging this repast home, and pottering around for a while, preparing for work the next day, I took a bus into Lambton Quay for my pre-event massage. The numbers of cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand were increasing; a few days earlier all international travellers coming into the country were officially required to go into self-isolation for two weeks, and cruise liners had been banned, as had large gatherings of people. The most recent message from the Chopper Swim organisers was that we would go ahead: our group size was relatively small, and the risks were also small. The only fly in the oi...