A Port Moody student who’s spending his gap year in the U.K. is hoping to return home on Saturday.
But 18-year-old Fraser Hopewell said he feels like he’s in a race against time.
Hopewell, a Port Moody secondary 2019 grad who has been living in Sheffield since last August, said before British Prime Minister Boris Johnson enacted tighter restrictions on travel and extended the period for self-isolation to 14 days from seven, Britons had been fairly stiff-upper-lipped about the whole threat of a COVID-19 pandemic.
“I would posit that someone from Sheffield could lose an eye, get an eye patch and start making pirate jokes by the end of the week,” Hopewell said in an email to The Tri-City News. “It’s a very Sheffield and broadly British attitude to make fun of a situation and not let it get you down much.”
But with concerns about the pandemic spiralling upwards at a dizzying pace and the fear of total border closures growing, Hopewell said the time is right to get out while he still can.
“The outbreak here in the U.K. hasn’t devolved to quite a serious level as, say, Italy,” he said, adding the severity of the situation first started
registering with people when sporting events such as soccer matches were getting cancelled.
“These soccer teams are pillars of the community and have survived world wars and other major events in history,” said Hopewell, who has been working for Kitlocker, a retailer of sports and lifestyle gear, for the past several months.
For the most part, the pandemic has had little impact on his own routines, Hopewell said. There are fewer passengers on the tram he takes to work and there was some panic buying in stores, he said. But as the threat has become more apparent, he has trimmed his life to the basics, forgoing his own sporting pursuits, staying home as much as possible and cancelling plans for exploring Europe this summer — and discouraging anyone planning to visit him.
Hopewell said the decision to head home came only after weighing several factors, like his own sense of safety and the financial capability of his family to get him back in a hurry.
“I felt that the situation here could get severely worse than it already is,” he said, adding he has less than four days to undo a life he’s already managed to build over the past eight months.
