Alea Acta Est - not so much Crossing the Rubicon as not crossing the start line

[davidgillon]

So I've confirmed with my family I won't be up for Christmas. I probably would have bailed anyway given the local Covid spike - my local MSOA* just overtook my family's home MSOA wrt infection rates (335 vs 327, but theirs is falling and mine's still rising), while the Gillingham Northwest MSOA is about two miles away and is at 662 cases/100,000 and rising sharply - but Boris's plans for Christmas travel chaos just hammered that message home.

If you haven't been paying attention to Boris's wizard scheme, the plan is the whole UK gets five days centred on Christmas with all Tier-based restrictions on travel lifted and up to three households allowed to mix. This is pointless for me anyway, because I always need at least one day, if not two, to recover from the all-day journey, so at most I'd have two days at home in a fit state to function, and possibly as little as one. And it wouldn't just be me trying to travel, it'll be everyone. Which is a particular problem, given that I need a wheelchair space on the train, and there are only three or four per train, possibly even less if any are ruled out due to Covid spacing. I've had "we'll have to change you to a later train, all the wheelchair spaces on that one are already booked" two or three times even when travelling midweek and offpeak. Trying to do it when everyone in the country will be trying to travel split over just two days pre-Christmas is asking the impossible (most of my journey is on the East Coast Main Line, one of the only two north-south mainlines, so I'd be trying to get on the same train as about half the country).

I've already seen a tweet from someone claiming every seat on every train between London and Newcastle is already booked, and the Office of Rail and Road telling the train companies they've got to do better about saying which seats are available - it's possible these two are linked, and it's actually just currently publicly released seats that are booked out, but it's still not a good omen. I've had nightmarish journeys in normal times, so this time I'm opting out in advance.

So good job my sister and I've got the Echo Shows, because Christmas dinner is going to be virtual.

* Medium Layer Super Output Area, a census neighbourhood of 5-7.2k people