Keep calm and carry on

It is difficult not to be concerned; the usual busy streets of Palma are empty, the restaurant where I had lunch was pondering closing down and my daughter’s school will close from Monday.

It is probably the biggest crisis I have known in my almost 50 years of life. But while I was pondering our fate over lunch I recalled some of the stories which were told to me by my parents of living and growing up during the Second World War. My mother used to recount how she had watched the Battle of Britain being fought out over the skies above Kent during her childhood and narrowly escaping the explosion from a V1 flying bomb as she cycled home from school. A story which has always stuck in my mind is that she didn’t have an ice-cream to the age of eight because of rationing during the war. My father had joined the Royal Air Force when he was 17 and spent the next six years abroad. My grandfather, survived the horrors of the trenches and was too old to fight in the Second World War. But he used to spend most nights on the roof searching for enemy bombers as an Air Raid Warden. He would also say that he was never late for work even though his journey would take him from North London to the West End in blitz-hit London.

Their attitude was Keep Calm and Carry On and we need the same spirit now.