Battered down in Battersea — how one couple is dealing with social distancing

Craig Bakay | Apr 01, 2020

Battersea is “quiet, very quiet” these days, says long-time resident Alvin Wood.

“We (he and his partner Donna) live close to a main road and normally it’s quite busy with people going to work or back and forth to their cottages,” he said. “But there’s very little traffic.

“And the village is very quiet too — The Manor and The Creekside are both only doing take-out.”

He said he and Donna are both retired but they had relatively active lifestyles before this.

“My weekly exercise class has been cancelled and the Township won’t let us use the pickleball courts,” he said. “We have another couple we go for walks with and we still do that but we do keep our six-foot distance.

“And there’s no kissing.”

He said one thing they’ve discovered is how to use Zoom — the internet based conferencing software.

“Donna used to host the Soulful Singing group at our house once a month,” he said. “But they’ve been doing it over the internet and it seems to work quite well.”

Wood is also very active in the Blue Skies Festival, which is also holding electronic meetings.

“I’ve ‘attended’ a couple of Blue Skies meetings and there will be another one at the end of April,” he said. “Right now, it’s very much a wait-and-see thing but we’ll have another meeting at the end of May where we’ll probably decide go-or-no-go.”

He’s also very involved in the Battersea Pumpkin Festival but he said plans for that don’t normally get under way until May anyways.

One thing he has been doing is watching a lot more television than he usually does.

“I’ve been watching the new Star Trek: Picard series and it features a lot of Borg stuff right now,” he said. “So I’ve been watching all the old Star Trek episodes on Netflix to refresh my memory on the history of the Borg.”

He said things are “sort of OK but frustrating at times.”

In particular, he misses seeing his children and grandchildren.

“I have grandchildren in Ottawa, Kingston and Saskatchewan,” he said. “We used to see them a lot, especially the ones in Kingston.

“Now all we get is a little FaceTime.”

He said he used to be in contact with people daily but “that’s the exception now. We’re all trying to follow the rules.”

And he’s been following the news because his son’s wife’s father and stepmother are on the Holland America Zaandam cruise ship that was denied entry into the Panama Canal.

“But I see they’re allowed through now and on their way to Florida,” he said.