Tales From The Lockdown - Martin Hesp

The coronavirus lockdown of 2020 heralded an extraordinary and worrying time for countless millions around the globe, and the UK was no exception. In these stories, written as the pandemic swept around the world, Martin Hesp attempts to paint a picture of rural life during the spring and early summer of that remarkable year. The six tales follow ordinary individuals as they attempt to cope with the sudden lockdown and the isolation in the English countryside. For the most part they manage to avoid contracting Covid-19, because the tales do not focus on the medical horrors of the virus but instead concentrate on the extraordinary and unique world we suddenly all found ourselves living in. Love, passion, anger, misrepresentation, misunderstanding, confusion, angst, jealousy - all these emotions and countless others can be both magnified and evaporated during a time when people find themselves very much on their own. The characters include a well known television reporter is ends up living in a yurt, a lonely forester who sets out to walk nearly 100 miles to visit his mother, a married woman who suddenly discovers her illicit affair must be put on hold, a travel writer confined to barracks, a woman who takes to megaphone diplomacy in her quiet country village and a famous concert pianist who falls out with her community.People fall in and out of love, make mistakes, fall victim to inaccurate assumptions... All of small town rural life is here, but under the stress caused by extraordinary circumstances.