Of course you must visit your family. That outweighs all other factors and considerations. Zoom and Skype are no substitutes at all. Daft notion.
Many pubs are closing (and have closed) in the UK but many still remain. I was in my local, The Free Trade (in Lancashire) last night playing dominoes -- 50p a corner -- with John Willie Lees bitter at £3.35. (Not long ago it was just over two quid a pint)
The political situation in England is terrible, John, as I don't need to tell you, even though you're on the opposite side of the world. By that I mean many of us are disenfranchised, with FPTP meaning we have only the Tories and Starmer's Labour to vote for, which is no choice at all. The morale in the country is rock bottom. I've never known (and I'm older than you) such a widespread and deeply ingrained feeling of hopelessness and cynicism everywhere you look, and also a bitter distrust of, and disgust with, the political class, with that brazen crook Johnson and the shameless Tories to blame -- though Starmer and the SNP have if anything intensified that feeling of revulsion and a seething mood of "a plague on all your houses".