Ladies and Gentlemen, We're Floating in Space

Monday 23 March 2020

It’s a beautiful morning: the sun is up, the sky is blue and everyone is trapped inside. While the promise of spring might lift my mood, the contrast between the sunny weather and the bleak headlines creates a weird dissonance I can’t quite resolve.

Yesterday I didn’t finish writing about the day’s events. That’s partly because I got carried away with discussing my adventures in French Bankland. But it’s also partly because I felt I needed some time to process everything I’d witnessed.

Following my success with opening a bank account, I had a Skype call with my church group. We had decided to have the Lord’s Table online since meeting in real life is no longer allowed. Last Sunday we didn’t meet at all. The law had only just come into effect, and I guess we hadn’t at that point thought to find an alternative way of getting together. The day before then many discussions centred around the distribution of bread and wine; there were concerns that if one person had the virus, they might unwittingly infect everyone else.

All those concerns became irrelevant in the end, and were today replaced by questions about how we could sing hymns in unison. Owing to unreliable wifi networks and the large spacial distances between each one of us, delays and fade-outs made singing quite a…