This morning we awoke in our city centre apartment to… Silence. Pure silence, broken only by the twittering of birds and a very occasional motor vehicle driving by on official business. None of the usual clattering of engines in queuing traffic, incessant blowing of horns or clanking and banging from the countless construction sites.  Just lovely peace draped over the city like a blanket.

Once up and about, Rennie suggested that we sit outside on our balcony in the warm sunshine where for the first time we could hear lovely piano music coming from a practice session or lesson in another apartment.  We also noticed something that we have never seen before in Colombo; a complete absence of haze.  Compare the two photos above and you\’ll see what I mean (click each to open full size in a new tab). The difference of a week with hardly any traffic is profound – and this is just one city of our world.  In our case it was cause to just sit, enjoy this rare moment in a normally noisy and dirty city, sip our coffees and exercise some mindfulness. 

The backdrop to this is that on Saturday night last week, the Sri Lankan government announced that Monday would be an extra mercantile holiday with intention to reduce intermingling of the population.  As expected, one day became three, and even afterwards on Thursday and Friday the city was very quiet.  We took a decision to operate the business from employees\’ homes all week and will do so again in the week ahead.  The business continuity plan has been almost faultless in execution and the employee morale and can-do spirit, fantastic; I am enormously proud of everyone.  We are under no illusions though; the real test, and tough times, lie ahead.

On Friday morning, the government announced there would be a curfew from 6pm until 6am on Monday. This has since been extended to 6am on Tuesday. Whilst there have been nothing like the selfish behavioural scenes from the UK that sadden me as a fellow Brit, it is fair to say that there was some stocking up going on with bread, flour and rice gone by the time I went for a quick shop for weekend fayre in the late afternoon. For some reason milk has been completely unavailable for over a week now. Everything else though is normally in plentiful supply, including lovely fresh fruit and vegetables.

It feels like the calm before the storm, Sri Lanka so far having been a very low risk place to be but with early signs of a surge of cases starting to come.  All we can be is be calm and sensible ourselves, cutting each other slack when confined to barracks – so that\’s how we are.   We\’re lucky to have a couple of nice swimming pools just an elevator ride away, but the gym is closed, so during the curfew our other exercise is confined to taking many flights of stairs instead of using the elevator each time we come up.  Oh – and Rennie joined her zumba class via Zoom video call yesterday! 

Steve