I’m on a riverboat, sailing slowly down the Nile, ahead of us the Pyramids, a sight, I’m told, to behold despite the ravages of time.

There are others, a curious bunch of people, drawn from all over the globe, and from different classes, in a time when that seemed to matter.

Of course, it’s 1935.

And it’s all in my head.  Something I’d seen somewhere, or read perhaps, and now that I come to think of it, it was an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

Even now, nearly a hundred years later, it may have been possible to replicate it; only a world war, British Empire aspirations and later abandonment, and civil strife made it difficult, but not impossible.

And then, closing off travel anywhere, COVID-19 finished the job.

For someone who likes to travel the world, looking for locations and inspiration for my stories, that had made life far more unbearable than just having to remain locked up for fear of catching it. And, even though it is gone, we now seem to have was popping up everywhere, closing off things that we just took for granted would be there forever.

Not any more. Nationalism, greed, and in some cases, utter stupidity, are closing off countries that are no longer safe to visit. Even the United States was once thought to be the safest place on earth.

Gone are those treasured moments…

Like sitting at an outside cafe overlooking the main piazza in San Gimignano, having a pizza, an authentic pizza, and a bottle of Moretti beer.

Like wandering the narrow cobbled streets of Florence, staying in what was once a 12th-century monastery, having wild boar pasta, and just a short distance away, a gelato.

Like wandering around similarly narrow and cobbled laneways in Montmartre, stopping at a corner crepe restaurant, where the crepes are to die for.

Taking that away is like taking away a hand or a leg.

How long will it be before the world returns to normal, or will it?

In my conspiracy theory mind, it seems to me there is more going on than just viruses and greed; it has overtones of world domination, or worse, watching the destruction of the world economy, and capitalism for want of a better word, at the same pace that climate change is changing the planet.

Neither occurrence is new; it’s happened time and time again over many millennia, and it’s just that we don’t seem to learn from it.   

Well, maybe not in my lifetime. 

Let’s hope generations to come do.