Snow globe world

Someone sent us this Christmas card today and it appealed to me. Wouldn't life be simple, I thought, if we could all live there? Everyone seems to have a nice, detached, tidy-looking house. All the village people are cheerfully assembled round a neat tree to sing carols. There's a very well-built snowman. The snow that's falling is soft and downy and no one seems bothered by it, possibly because there's no traffic and they've just come out of a warm church and are about to go to their warm homes. True, there's a rather higher proportion of dogs to people than I would ideally prefer, and no visible cats, but the latter are presumably curled up in front of cosy fires in those pretty houses. And isn't everyone enviably thin? 

Granted, the church has been rather oddly positioned right against the fence; and the red door above the snow-covered roof of the church seems to be hovering in mid-air. And the houses have no front gardens and don't look as if they have very big back ones, and these tall, thin houses must have a lot of stairs to vacuum. But still. I feel it would be a nice place to live - and even nicer in summer. 

Back in the real world, the Omicron variant of Covid is looking horribly as if it's going to pitch us back to the nastiness of 2020/early 2021. Already just in the past couple of days, Littlest Granddaughter and Daughter 2 in London have taken PCR tests because Littlest has a cold and cough, and there are five positive Covid cases in her nursery, though not in her particular section of it. Daughter 2 asked diagnostically this morning if Littlest's breakfast tasted funny. Litttlest said yes, part of her toast tasted of rabbits and the other part of hedgehogs. 

Their tests were negative, but Daughter and Son-in-Law 2 are going to keep Littlest off anyway so that she doesn't get Covid (they hope). They're supposed to be going to Center Parcs to spend Christmas with SIL 2's parents and his sister and family, and they can't risk not being able to go. Unless, of course, everything has closed down by then, which is presumably not impossible. Meanwhile they face working at home aided by a four-year-old. 

And today, Biggest Granddaughter, who's been getting over a cold, was sent home from school because she was coughing. She's taken a test but they haven't yet got the results, but it means that the four of them have to isolate meantime. We're all pretty sure it's just a cold, as we were with Littlest, but of course there's no way of being absolutely sure till the test comes back.  

O me miserum! Though of course it's not really that bad. Just very very tedious after we all thought that we were coming out of - if not the end of it, at least the middlish part of it. The beginning of the end, the end of the beginning... what is the situation really, I wonder?

I bet there's no Covid in that snowy village.

Ah well, on with the Christmas preparations.