This issue of Gazette Life magazine is unlike any that have come before.
For years, we’ve prided ourselves on getting our magazine to you every single month without fail. Sometimes, circumstances such as bad weather have meant it arrived late, but it’s always been here eventually, a reliable event in the life of a small island.
This month is different. As the coronavirus crisis escalated and lockdown approached it soon became clear that distributing our magazine in April would have been an unnecessary risk. As several of our distribution points are closed, it would also have been pointless.
As a result, this month’s magazine has been published in online form only. We’ve included some news and information about the crisis, but we’d also recommend everyone to stay in touch with our daily updates at www.gazettelife.com and our Facebook page.
Every single month we go through the magazine carefully, checking every page for errors and ensuring that our clients and readers are getting the professionalism you deserve. It’s not easy – mistakes still manage to slip through – but this month it’s also been an emotional experience.
Going though the pages, we can see so many businesses and friends whose future has been made more difficult because of this virus . It’s happened to us, as well, so we understand and sympathize with the worries everyone is feeling now.
But there’s also a positive feeling from leafing through the following pages. We deliberately haven’t removed the What’s On and Sport pages, even though every concert, exhibition and event scheduled for April will almost certainly be cancelled or postponed, and we haven’t removed our Tourist Guide, despite the fact that tourists are barely present on an island where they usually account for one in four of us.
Why not? Because just look at those pages. They are a glorious reminder of what we normally enjoy every single day, week and month on this gorgeous island, a place where art, culture, celebration and fun are a way of life, where sport is practiced everywhere and where visitors have their breath taken away and are enchanted by beauty, joy and life every single day.
Let’s never forget that, and once this is over and the sad cost has been counted, let’s do our best to help each other get back to that place as fast as we can.
