I'm a newbie here, with a European family. Son lives in England with his Spanish wife and their daughter. She has one set of grandparents in Spain, us in France and an aunt, uncle and cousins in Portugal. It can be hard to find a mutually convenient time to visit each other! We have communicated by phone, Whatsapp, Messenger, email and Facebook over the last 12 years, but when Gdaughter became mobile and aware of TV screens we invested in Portals, and at 2.5 yrs she now interacts well with us on screen, we show each other new paintings, toys, DIY tools (she is destined to be an engineer, I think) and play games and sing songs together. So the fact that we are now self-isolating at our flat in London and they are doing the same at the South Coast has made little difference to us. We would have been in France by now, had spouse not had a heart attack while packing the car, but we will now remain in the UK until his treatment is stable and until the situation in both countries is less restrictive. I guess we are used to less physical contact owing to our circumstances, so are not a lot worse off owing to Covid-19, and nobody delivers groceries in our French village, so the UK is, in some ways, better. I dare say many grans-at-a-distance will think we are crackers living less than an hour from our family but not visiting them: diabetes at both addresses necessitates this and having lost my elder son to that alone a couple of years ago, I'm not prepared to risk his brother's life during this pandemic. We have to be stoical, for everyone's sake. We feel privileged to have a granddaughter, delighted that she is bilingual and knows we don't speak Spanish, thrilled to see her grow and develop, amused by Whatsapp videos of her games and exploration of the world. It is for her future that we remain isolated in our flat, and in a few months she will run to me as she did before this, arms wide apart, calling "Nana, Nana" as she leaps into the hug for which we will have waited so long.
