The year was 2019 (also known as 1 Before Corona). Air travel was readily available, you could lick the handrails on any public escalator without fear of illness, and you could get a pint in a busy Irish pub on St. Patrick’s Day. A simpler time indeed.
Fast forward twelve months and the middle of March 2020 and the world starts to drastically change. Because if you are going to shut the pubs in Ireland on the busiest drinking day of the year, you’d better have a damn good reason for it…
Luxembourg may not be high on many bucket lists; this tiny country only gets about a million or so tourists each year and is seen often as an expensive and rather plain country full of EU diplomats.
But with cheap flights from London that take just over an hour, we decided it was worth the gamble and spent a weekend poking around there in February.
With the absolute hammering that the Australians dished out to us down under in 2017/18 fresh in the memory, I was eager to get back on the horse and follow my beloved English cricket team away from home again.
The opponents this time were the much maligned minnows of West Indies. It couldn’t be worse than the last tour…..could it?
Us Brits aren’t the most adventurous of souls. As a nation we are conservative, risk adverse, and have a huge fear of change. The fact that once upon a time our empire controlled a quarter of the globe is baffling considering that most of us wouldn’t even visit a restaurant unless half a dozen of our friends had tested the waters first.
Consequently, me choosing to spend the last day of 2019 in The West Bank was step forward that I was proud of, albeit a step that came in the guise of a day tour from our base in Jerusalem.
I Remember My First Gap Year 