Although many of us have not gone very far, if anywhere (!), for two months the Coronavirus Lock Down means that we find ourselves in a “different place.”  Of course the pressures on some of our brothers and sisters have been enormous as they are locked down in a big family twenty/four seven.  All those meals to put on the table, all that extra washing and cleaning, let alone home schooling: that must be very demanding if not exhausting. Others with serious health issues find themselves “shielded” on their own or with one other and very dependent on family,  neighbours and the local authority to get  shopping and prescriptions.  I do hope that if that is your situation that you have relaxed into being a VIP and adjusted to being confined to your house and garden “for the duration”.  Ten days before the lockdown I phoned our daughter at university to explain that she was unlikely to be able to come home for a long time. I am proud that she has been able to cope well and we enjoy our phone chats. God bless children and young people with patience and resilience and ways to experience His joy!

Early on journalists and others stressed the imperative of having fairly strict routines: almost as if we might lose the plot without routine. I was amazed by the industry going on in our road with large deliveries of shingle, turf and compost arriving to different houses in the early weeks. I think there was then, but less so now, an element of displacement activity where people threw themselves into big gardening or DIY projects to blot out the worry if not fear that the invisible threat of Covid-19 brought us all. We have prayed for some people known to us who have been hospitalised and very sadly not all of them have recovered but mercifully most  people we know have remained well. Being so far unscathed makes social distancing, virtual church and lack of freedom to plan forward strangely surreal.

For me, once the urge to clean the house every day diminished, I have had little routine apart from a daily long walk around our village, greeting and chatting to people at a distance. Acquaintances have become friends, cakes have appeared out of nowhere and my banana bread and flapjack have got new takers (always untouched post oven). There is a definite enlivening of the community and a breaking down of barriers between people of different generations.  I strongly believe that God is in these new friendships and the greater personal  inter-dependency. Two things stand out as moving me profoundly.. These are the well supported weekly Clap for NHS staff and Carers and the VE Day 75 years  front garden parties with neighbours sharing at a distance their photos and family stories of the Second World War. Although we need to be two metres apart when outside our homes we are actually becoming closer.  One of the latest pictorial messages from our Government  shows two people spaced by  two opposed arrows marked  “Stay 2 metres apart”  but  where the arrows meet there is a  big heart. We can read this as love for one another and also as God loving us all in the midst of the pandemic. May we all find comfort in messages and signs of love and kindness and mutual support at a time where handshakes and hugs are on hold for the moment.