In a change to unadvertised programming...

For a while now, I've been meaning to set up a newsletter as a replacement for my defunct blog, as a fun way of letting you know about all of the joyful and entertaining live storytelling events and theatrical shows and storytelling teaching I was going to be doing in this magical year of 2020.  And then... yeah. We all know what happened next.  So, instead, I'm reaching out from my solitary-ish confinement to yours with um, basically, just me writing about whatever pops into my head. That feels like a bar low enough for me to clear, though goodness knows these last few years have been an exercise in the constant lowering of expectations. Maybe by June it will seem like a ludicrous assumption that I would still have a head.  Anyway, off we go. Newsletter number one. This one will be a kind of what I did on my summer holidays meets apocalypse now sort of vibe. Future emails will become less virus-orientated.  First, though, a disclaimer. While this has all been kicking off, I have not been here in the UK, and I have not been following the news, social media etc. I may be about to make every observation and every joke that everyone has already made ad nauseam for the past three weeks, which in Coronatime, is approximately 15 years. This is because while you have all been getting used to the destruction of human interaction as we knew it, I have been on a yoga and meditation retreat in Costa Rica.  Costa Rica is a very small and intensely beautiful country where you basically can't take three steps without tripping over a coati, having a pair of scarlet macaws swoop over your head (if you still have a head) or being treated to an impromptu circus performance by a troupe of passing monkeys. When I made the booking several months ago it seemed to me that it would be a very lovely and healing experience to help me get over a painful break up, and it was absolutely that, but in reality it was also an exercise in being as far out of step with the rest of the world as I could get without taking a rocket to the moon and making one giant leap for humankind.  It's not as if I didn't know about the coronavirus before I left. (An aside: where are we on calling it Covid-19? I basically feel like a pedantic twit every time I do it, even though I know that your average boring non-deadly cold is also a coronavirus. I blame contemporary science's refusal to give things proper names the way that we used to - see also the known planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon, and 2003 UB313.) Virally-speaking, things were just getting underway: Northern Italy was already in lockdown, but the rest of Europe was mainly taking that as a sign of their dramatic way of overreacting, like Italy was a heavily-accented wine waiter who gesticulates a lot in a bad sitcom from the 1970s. In London, meanwhile, we had just started realising that it might be an idea to wash our hands after using public transport. I was travelling to Costa Rica with a friend, and while her friends and family were saying that she should stay at home, mine were saying that I should definitely go, and in fact, consider not coming back. I took this as being a sign that they thought I would be safer there, as opposed to a way of saying that they'd really liked it when I was living in Amsterdam, and maybe me being stuck in a foreign country even further away would suit them just fine. Anyway I didn't foresee there being any problem with return travel that I couldn't surmount by just returning to San Jose and getting on the next available flight if things started to look hairy. Even so, when I shopped for the trip, I wore latex gloves because I didn't want to get sick and miss my holiday. Everyone looked at me like I was an utter lunatic.  For the first few days in Costa Rica, things seemed fairly normal. The people working at San Jose airport were wearing gloves and masks, and I was impressed by these extensive precautions. In public places there were pots of hand gel everywhere and signs explaining how to wash your hands properly, but as a germ phobic of long standing this just served to make me very happy because my number one fear on any overseas holiday is food poisoning. So in the days before the retreat, off we went on boat rides and swims in the ocean and visits to animal sanctuaries where we fed sloths from our hand-gelled hands. We did notice that there didn't seem to be very many other tourists around, but there was no way of knowing whether that was normal or not. I asked one of the people running the hotel and they said that there had been a few cancellations but nothing major. I did not get food poisoning.  Then we transfered to the retreat which was at Finca Exotica, an eco lodge on the coast of the Osa Peninsula, several miles off grid. (I did not get food poisoning there either. At no point in this story do I get food poisoning. That is not the smoking gun of this story.) The retreat is set in a large expanse of jungle with open-sided cabins and tents dotted around a steep hillside that descends to the ocean. It's a breathtakingly beautiful spot, extremely relaxing if you don't object to constant heat and humidity plus the deafening sound of nature (the roar of the ocean plus the howler monkeys roughly equivalent to living next door to a three lane motorway with two enthusiastic newlyweds as your housemates). I'm pretty heat-resistant, plus I'd picked up some weird ear thing on the plane that left me pretty much deaf, so it was no problem for me. At the top of the hill, there was a yoga / meditation platform with a glorious view and frequent interruptions from troupes of curious monkeys, and at the bottom of the hill, a small concrete shack with a couple of benches and the retreat's only source of WiFi.  We arrive on Saturday, meet everyone, everyone very lovely. Most are Canadian and one is an actual Mountie, though alas she is not wearing her uniform, because it is over 30 degrees day and night and also she is not at work. Sunday we do yoga with Scott and meditation with Jeff and splash around in the sea (the beach was spectacular but you couldn't really swim because the waves were enormous and current so strong, but nobody drowned. This is also not the smoking gun of the story.) (I'm going to spoil it for you. The smoking gun of the story is that there is a global pandemic.) We check our emails and our WhatsApp messages. People back home are buying a lot of toilet paper. Other than that everything seems fine, and there is loads of toilet paper in Costa Rica, so we're not worried.  On Monday morning I go down to the WiFi zone to discover that three of my friends have messaged me, separately, to ask whether I am OK. I am OK. They, on the other hand, are very clearly not OK. They are living in something that one of them describes as 'a warzone without bombs.' I don't watch whatever speech it was that Boris Johnson made that day, because if I go on a retreat it is not in order to take Boris Johnson with me, but the paraphrase appears to be 'sorry I said that you weren't all fucked, you are in fact all fucked'. It is extremely unsettling. I reply to reassure them that everything at my end is fine.  And then I go and do some yoga.  When you were a kid, did you ever play a game called Grandmother's Footsteps? The rules go like this. One person stands with their back to everyone else. The other players, starting from a long distance away, have to creep up on them. Every so often, the first player (the grandmother? not entirely clear, as they are the only one without the footsteps, but otherwise you have one grandchild and fifteen grandmothers? does not tally with anything I know about human reproduction) turns around, and everyone else has to freeze. If grandmother (let's go with that) catches you moving, you are out. If you manage to get as far as grandmother and tag her without getting caught, you win.  In Costa Rica, we were grandmother, and the news was creeping up on us. We turned one way to face the meditation and the yoga and the amazing jungle walk where we watched an anteater eat a lot of ants. We turned back to find that the virus had got closer and closer and CLOSER.  My mother got sick. My brother got sick. (My mother recovered. My brother recovered.) Borders closed. Flights started to get cancelled. My friend and I got a semi-not-very-reassuring email from BA that said something along the lines of 'your flight will probably go maybe but hey don't rely on us, we're only the airline' and my friend bought new flights and left on Wednesday morning, only to call me from the capital the next day to tell me that she couldn't take the flights because they went via Panama and the US, and the US wouldn't let her in. My father, an unshakably calm man who has previously (just one example) reassured me that it is perfectly OK to swim in a crocodile-infested lake because crocodiles only eat twice a day (he was right - the crocodiles are not the smoking gun in this story), emailed to tell me to come home immediately. This was not an email designed to make me feel confident about my situation. Especially as I then realised that I couldn't come home because all the available flights were routing through the US and - see above. Meanwhile everyone else in the group was going through a similar thing - flights cancelling, relatives ailing, jobs vaporising, savings plummeting. As mentioned, they were almost all Canadians, so the panic happened in a very low key and gentle way. But you could hear the edge creeping in as their ehs turned into ehs.  We settled into a functional cycle. First we would go down to the WiFi station and load up on anxiety, and then we would go up to the yoga platform and siphon it off. As the world went into lockdown, we just carried on together, in this tiny isolated off grid speck of paradise that was probably the safest place to be on earth. I highly advise riding out a global pandemic in a meditation retreat. I almost advise timing your meditation retreat for a global pandemic, because it turns all of those theoretical notions about tolerating discomfort and uncertainty into something very, very real. Breathe in global economic meltdown. Breathe out we're all going to die.  Saturday came and the retreat ended. Everyone had managed to secure flights, but I had to wait until Tuesday for mine. Each day felt like a week, as more airlines folded and more countries closed their borders. By then, Costa Rica itself had gone into lockdown, with hotels, restaurants and beaches all closing and a night time curfew imposed. One by one everybody left, but the retreat kindly allowed me to stay. By Tuesday I was the only remaining guest. They upgraded me to the best cabin on the property. I ate my meals in the restaurant alone and did solo meditations on the yoga platform and had my panic attacks in solitude in my hammock overlooking the sea. It was an experience somewhere between being a celebrity millionaire and The Shining. The staff at the retreat couldn't have been friendlier, but I'm not sure what they thought about the prospect of me living there for, say, four months. Meanwhile I wondered if I should start learning Spanish.  And then, on Tuesday, by some extraordinary piece of luck, I flew home on my original scheduled flight, the penultimate flight to the UK out of Costa Rica.  And now I'm with the rest of you in quarantine.  More soon.