That Was The Year That Was

What with President Putin practicing escalatio on the Ukrainians, and then the Covid variants on top of that, it has been a nervous year, and people have begun to feel a bit like Shrödinger’s cat. – after Tom Lehrer, That Was The Year That Was, 1965*

Looking back on 2022 it’s been a year of mixed blessings for us. Here are a few highlights and unrecounted tales:

Back to the Daily Grind

In January, eyeing Aleta’s long punch list, I reached out to my business contacts in search of a consulting gig. I wasn’t having much luck when, out of the blue, I was invited to bid on a project with the National Institute of Standards and Technology – which I landed. About two Zoom meetings in my client asked me if I was on a sailboat. Ordinarily it’s not something I volunteer, but in this post-COVID world hybrid work is done anywhere anytime. Turns out, after two years of lockdowns everyone in the government was working remotely, too. For five months I became a digital nomad. The gig, by the way, was a great success.

Sidebar: High tech’s vision of hybrid work goes way back, 20 years or more. At the time HP pitched its version of it we (the employees of HP) groaned at the prospect of working all day every day. I had already been working remotely for a decade by then, so when COVID rolled around I was surprised it, a) took something like a pandemic to change manager’s minds about hybrid work, and b) it had taken so long. But HP was always progressive when it came to wacky business practices like trusting your employees.

Turkey

Being a cruise missile’s flight from the start of the war in the Ukraine reminded us that whatever we may believe, there are bigger things going on in the world than finding the next anchorage. Not wanting to be too far from the action we headed east and fingered the pulse of the Ukraine’s sister state and proxy, Georgia. Unsurprisingly, all Georgian empathy lay with the Ukraine. Back at our winter HQ in Turkey, we discovered Marmaris was itself full of Russians, some having left their mega-yachts there for the winter. Even our dentist’s wife is Russian. Despite the warnings, everyone was caught flat-footed.

Having spent a couple of weeks in Istanbul in February and March, we headed off towards Kurdistan and the Syrian border exploring. Six months later a bomb exploded in Istanbul’s main shopping area, not far from our hotel. Officials blamed Syrian Kurds. Later, leaving Turkey after a lovely stay as temporary residents, the Turks declared several of the nearest Greek Islands their territory and threatened to take them back by force. We hustled westwards and kept a wary eye over our shoulders.

Greece

In June, during our stop in Corinth at the northern end of the canal, we did our best to help a refugee family with some shopping. The local refugee camp was manned by rent-a-cops from a private security agency. As such they took their work rather too seriously, but with some insistence we managed to get a few essentials into the right hands.

Regrexit

In August we headed back to the UK and partied into the night at Katie and Aron’s joyous wedding. Meanwhile, the rest of the UK was taking leadership lessons from Italy and changing prime ministers as regularly as they change their knickers. Liz Truss’s 45-day tenure reminded Britain’s voters that the real arbiters of sovereign power are the global financial markets, not the country’s citizens. Rishi Sunak, the year’s third Prime Minister, stepped in and immediately validated his own ineptitude by hailing Brexit just as the public woke up to the fact they had been sold a pig in a poke. (Are you done ranting? – ed.)

Both Carol and I enjoyed a bout of Covid in early September. For 24 hours leading up to my indisposition my olfactory glands went into overdrive. They have since settled back down, but it was fun to smell like a sommelier for a moment. (Some mistake, surely – ed.) Like other vaccinées who survived the disease, we agreed that if this is what it’s like after four jabs of Pfizer’s finest, then we never want to catch the disease without an amped-up immune system.

USA

Carol stopped sleeping in mid-September and didn’t get a full night’s rest until the first Tuesday in November. That was when she realised America’s looming mid-term elections had been the cause of her insomnia. In the end the predicted toxic bloom of red tide that threatened to wash away all reason in Washington spiralled down the plug hole, leaving only a nasty orange ring around the tub. Me? I slept like a baby during the whole thing.

Thank You!

The rest of the world has had it much tougher. We continue to appreciate the generosity and support of our friends and families in our adventures. A special shout out to Lauren and Wade for taking us in (again) when our Euro-visas expired, allowing us to visit Marlon and Spencer and our Portland-based kids. And thanks to Uncle Hugh for continuing to field our administrivia.

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*Schrödinger’s cat, for those of you who are not quantum physicists, is a thought experiment that helps illustrate the paradox of quantum superposition. (That didn’t help! – ed.) In the experiment a cat is locked inside a steel container with a bottle of poison set to be smashed open when a single atom’s decay is detected by a Geiger counter. The atom may or may not decay at any given time, but is guaranteed to at some point. In this sense the cat is both alive and dead – holding two positions at once. At least until the atom’s decay is detected and the poison released. It seems an appropriate metaphor for 2022.