Of course, we all felt it coming. This week marked the passing of a year since the United Nations officially marked Covid as a global pandemic.

We personally got to celebrate on Quest by going straight back into lockdown. Yay. Back to basics for us. Oh well. We might not be exploring the island or be hanging out with our friends. We can still swim though. And we swim – a lot.

Nature-wise, it seems this pandemic is a double-edged sword. Whether Covid-19 really was manufactured to some degree, or arose organically, its biological origin has still come from the depths of nature. And nature gives as well as it takes.

If only to do something different. While the lab people came up with a vaccine over the last year. Besides doom-scrolling, binge-watching tv series and random, mostly cooking-based hobbies, there were long walks, long swims. We went with the latter. Though we don’t carry enough cooking gas on Quest for the baking.

I’ll never forget an acquaintance in Barbados, telling Jack and I that Barbados would be ok. It was right at the beginning of the first lockdown, He said Barbados would ‘return to the old ways’. He explained the island would once again pick up its small-scale farming practices which had largely been abandoned in recent years. Abandoned because the tourist industry produced much more income than selling fruit and vegetables ever would – until it didn’t.

For him to have it all sewn up so early was impressive. I thought so. My head wasn’t even able to process anything except the immediate – like when the supermarket would re-open. More circumspect however, was the way he also advocated eating the island’s wild, green monkey population. It was another old-school practice in Barbados, largely derived from non-native monkey numbers being so high – because they eat so much of the island’s fruit and veg.

Full-circle in a way. I couldn’t help but wince. Ok, when in Rome. Except surely the eating of wild animals had caused the problem in the first place? After we spoke to him, I should say that we asked other Barbadians what they thought. All of them said they would never, in a million years, eat green monkey. To be honest, it still makes me a bit queasy.

Tonight I read an article confirming that many Pacific islands have also returned to the old ways with families growing their own fruit and veg once again, in response to the pandemic. Full circle. Just like Barbados. From nature we come and to nature we return. And do they even have monkeys in the Pacific? I’m crossing digits that’s a negative.

Meanwhile, a whole year has passed. Along with terrible tragedy the virus has inflicted, it seems the quieter Earth has also brought people closer to nature and helped nature to flourish in its lull. Perhaps it has also even turned the tide on how we see and respect nature. Until everything goes back to normal? Perhaps. For someone interested in such things, I’m curious to know. How it’ll go.