November 14th Heathrow Terminal Two

Everything was different. Not everything. The building was familiar and the check in counters were still in the same place and there were queues. But all the human interactions were different. Of course everyone was wearing a mask and staff were behind shielding screens.

Check in went smoothly, London to Christchurch with Singapore Airlines. After security clearance there were very few shops open and no restaurants, of course. Everything was strangely quiet.

November 15th In Transit

Being five hours in transit in Changi Airport, Singapore, was not a good idea. The Singapore to Auckland flight had a much shorter connection time than mine to Christchurch. The two families in front and behind me on the London to Singapore flight were both going on to Auckland. The family in front, mother, father and two children coped brilliantly. I spent a bit of time doing ‘Hide and Seek’, no, more ‘Peek a Boo’, with the four year old in front. I really felt for the family behind me. A mother with three young children one of whom was not at all happy, and made it known, for much of the flight. Hearing aids out, earphones and either films or Beethoven on and I was able to cope very well.

Not so in the Premium Transit Lounge at Changi Airport. There were only nine of us in the lounge. One of the nine had very loud phone conversations with his phone on speaker so I could hear both sides of the conversations even with my hearing aids out. I could hear but not understand because the loud conversations were not in English. That was frustrating on many levels not least because I usually quite enjoy listening in to what others are talking about. Still it meant I left the Premium Lounge and went for walks. I managed to do 3065 steps in the comparatively limited area in which we were held.

On either side of the five hours in transit were two long flights. London to Singapore was twelve hours and fifty five minutes and then Singapore to Christchurch was nine hours and fifty minutes. I’m not certain we kept exactly to the minutes. The flights were fine. I did manage to sleep for some of the time, even with a face mask, but it was the films and the music that saved the day – and the night. I watched four films that I would never have seen otherwise. One in German ‘Sealed Lips’, one French ‘Portrait of a Woman on Fire’, one Tamil ‘Karrupu Durai’ and one Hindi ‘Kalank’, all with subtitles, and all beautifully filmed, acted and, fascinating. The music was Beethoven and Mozart – mainly Piano Sonatas.

November 16th Arrival

After landing in Christchurch it was the New Zealand army who seemed to be in charge. Everyone was masked and instructions were clear. Ours was the only international flight arriving and there were just fifty people in the aeroplane that can take over 500. Our military instructor told us that we must always wear our masks – standard issue, provided – and that we must never touch the front of the mask once it was on. He promptly touched his to adjust it and said, ‘I’m not a good example!’

My isolation hotel is the Distinction Hotel. If you have read anything of what I have written about Payless, the shop in Kennington Park Road, you can apply it to Distinction. However the people are very friendly and extremely helpful. When I arrived I mentioned I was fairly deaf and found it difficult to pick things up from the floor, food deliveries for example. Within half an hour of going to my room someone had put a chair outside my door for deliveries and on it stuck a note which reads, ‘DO NOT MOVE’ and on food deliveries there’s a note ‘KNOCK LOUD’. That’s consideration!

The mistake is to think of the hotel as a hotel. It is not. It’s an Isolation Facility. My room, number 510, is the only place where I may not wear a mask. There is an exercise yard on the ground floor. It is small and fenced off from the outside world. A circuit is 100 steps so calculations are easy. Even I can multiply the number of circuits I do by 100. The high fence is covered so that we cannot see out nor local citizens see in and there’s an inner fence two meters from the outer so that proper distance is kept. There are set times for exercise and you give your name and number – room number that is – going to and from exercise.

In my room there’s an electric kettle and a fridge. There are also two plates and cutlery. There’s a menu and the choice of food for lunch and dinner is very limited but I understand I can order food from local restaurants. I will explore that option over the next few days.

No one may come into my room. There are soldiers in the corridors from time to time. Just checking, I imagine. I’m beginning to be aware that not only is this unlike staying in a hotel but also it is unlike self isolating at home.. There are many discoveries to be made I’m sure, most of them about how to cope with isolation.

November 17th The Routine

The key to life in isolation is, I suspect, to have a routine. I have chosen my boarding school routine.

Breakfast arrives here at about 8.30 then it’s Chapel for about twenty minutes. I say my prayers. From my window I can see the Cathedral and people working on it so that helps. After that I am dividing the day into fifty minute periods with ten minutes to get to the next class. P T is from 9.30 to 10.20. That’s within the allocated time for the exercise area. I know everyone else calls it P E Physical Exercise, for us it was Physical Training. Our P T master, Hector MacKay was ex army. The army present again.

After that it’s a double period for Art and Music. I’m determined to get drawing and painting again. Some of the family sent flowers to brighten my room. I can start with them or with the fresh fruit family have delivered. And the hotel have given me a radio which, with help on the phone from a member of staff, I’ve set to the concert programme.

Lunch is delivered between 12.30 and 2.30. Then I’m giving myself a period from 2.30 to 3.20 that I will call Relaxation – my afternoon sleep.

Another period of P T in the afternoon if it’s not raining. School finishes at 4.20 but then I have Drama as my extracurricular activity. I’m giving some talks when this time is over so I need to prepare for them. The evening meal arrives between 6.30 and 8.30 then it’s time for Prep – writing this.

There are no bells to guide or contain me, no one to say, ‘Hurry along, boy!’ and, sadly, no roll call. It’s only me.

Usually I look forward to long haul flights. Of course I panic five days before I’m due to leave and think it’s all a big mistake but after I’ve recovered from that I can even enjoy the packing and getting ready. Then there’s the drive to the airport and wondering whether or not I will get there on time. I usually do get there on time as I’m genetically programmed to be early. Once, in Bangkok, I arrived twenty four hours early but that was because my flight left at 00.30 and I knew that meant I had to get there the day before. That thought was so firmly fixed in my mind that I arrived at check in the day before the day before. 

The staff at the check in desk are always polite and I like the check in process and the feeling of relaxation after going through passport control and security and into that limbo where I have no responsibilities at all. I know the plane won’t go without me because my luggage is already on board and it would be less of a security hassle for them to find me than to unload my luggage. Then there’s the boarding call and getting on board and arranging everything for a twelve hour flight. The whole process has a comfortable familiarity about it which is not surprising as I’ve been doing it fairly regularly for more than thirty years.  

I’m due to fly out this Saturday, to Christchurch via Singapore. This time things are not as they usually are at all. I have the required documentation, my E ticket, my New Zealand Passport and, this is new, an Accommodation Voucher for my arrival. The Accommodation Voucher allows me a room in a government designated hotel as a place to stay in quarantine for a fortnight. I will not be allowed to travel without the voucher.

However I’m told by my travel agent and the New Zealand Government website that none of these things guarantees that I will be allowed to travel. I will discover more after 8.35 this evening, forty-eight hours before my flight is due to depart, when I can check in – if the flight is leaving as scheduled. The ‘not knowing for sure’ I find quite difficult to deal with. But so much of this second Lockdown is about ‘not knowing’ even with the glad news of a possible vaccine by the end of the year.

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which he presented in a paper in 1943 and which I must have encountered somewhere along the way, Maslow presents ‘security’ as a fundamental psychological need. Without security, he suggested, it was impossible to move to a ‘higher’ level. Certainly I have realised that ‘not knowing for sure’ leads to a lot of anxiety. I have also realised that much of the world’s population lives without security and that most of us, in the comparatively secure west, are incredibly privileged to live in secure societies. 

I do hope that the experience of the insecurity brought about by Covid19, or perhaps by the way governments and the media have reacted to Covid19, may make us all more aware of the much greater daily insecurity with which many of our fellow men and women live. Certainly the very significant number of Covid related deaths in the developed countries has made me more aware of the even greater number od deaths in other parts of the world from starvation and disease.

In 2003 I broadcast my thoughts about the whole idea of ‘Rights’. I think it ties in with this somewhere. You can find it under BROADCASTS

Last Sunday, November 1^st, was All Saints’ Day and I preached at St Agnes Kennington Park for the first time since the beginning of Lockdown. I gave my sermon a lot of thought – I usually do – but for the first time in more than fifty years of preaching sermons a totally new thought occurred to me. 

It isn’t what I say that matters. It’s what people think I’ve said.

And more than that. Perhaps there should be some feedback method for preachers not so that we can correct what people think we’ve said but so that we can understand more the people to whom we’re preaching and understand more of what they are thinking. Certainly on Sunday I found it very difficult to assess what the congregation of St Agnes made of what I was saying because everyone was wearing a face mask.

I know that a wise friend once told me to beware of self congratulation when someone says, ‘Thank you Vicar, that was such a lovely/wonderful/good sermon you preached this morning.’

‘The chances are,’ he said, ‘that all you’ve done is to confirm their already held prejudices.’

And another colleague said to me, ‘Surely you’ve had the situation when someone has repeated back to you something you’ve said in a sermon and in fact you thought you were saying the opposite!’ And I have.

But my most enjoyable sermon memory is from St Luke’s, Christchurch, New Zealand when I began a sermon with, 

‘I don’t like some of you and some of you don’t like me.’

I went on to develop the difference between ‘liking’ and Christian ‘loving’. And how Christian loving is an act of the will not an emotion. I thought it rather a good sermon.

One day in the week after I’d preached that rather good sermon I met, in the street, one of the Churchwardens who  commented, 

’That was an interesting sermon on Sunday, Vicar. I had some others from church for lunch afterwards and we spent quite a bit of time talking about it.’

‘Oh good!’ I said. ‘And did you come to a greater understanding of the nature of Christian love?’

‘Not really,’ she replied, ‘We just tried to work out who you didn’t like and who didn’t like you!’

I haven’t asked anyone for feedback on last Sunday’s sermon. I’m not going to take the risk. And I have an uncomfortable feeling that all too often the difference between what I think I’ve said and what other people think I’ve said,  may not only apply to sermons. And I haven’t bothered to find out.

OH DEAR!

I was so pleased with my Neck Gaiter Face Cover Scarf that protects me and others from Covid 19 and doesn’t pull out my hearing aids or knock off my glasses. Now a doctor friend, having read my THOUGHTS has expressed surprise and has told me they are not good and not at all effective. And he sent a link to a Washington Post article to back up his case. Oh dear!

ANOTHER LOCKDOWN

I will be going for my swim soon, my last at the Castle Centre for a while as swimming pools and gyms will be closed tomorrow under the new lockdown rules. There are a number of new restrictions that come into force from midnight and I suspect the real issue is whether or not people will obey them. In 2003 I broadcast ‘Obeying the Law’. I think it has a relevance to the latest rules. You can find it under my BROADCASTS.

Monday

The 1966, ‘I Look Down on Him’, Class Sketch with John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett still makes me laugh. But I hadn’t realised until today just how far it extends beyond sending up the class system nor had I realised that John Cleese himself had reworked it in 2017 for Hacked Off in support of section 40.

My personal discovery, today, is that it applies just as aptly to lane swimming at the Castle Centre. We have three lanes, Slow, Medium and Fast. Usually I swim in the slow lane except when it’s Silver Swim and the slow lane is even slower than usual and I swim in the medium lane but that’s Tuesdays and Thursdays and today is Monday and that’s nothing to do with my discovery.

Today it was lane swimming open to all. I had booked for the slow lane. In the slow lane we are all good sorts. We observe pool etiquette and give way to those faster and are understanding of those slower. We say good morning and smile. We know that we are in the slow lane. We know our place.

When I arrived this morning there were already quite a few swimming in the slow lane, eight I think, so I thought I would sneak into the medium lane. There were only three others there. I managed to keep up as far as speed was concerned but swimming in the medium lane is different. It’s competitive. There are no smiles at the turn. In the medium lane swimmers eye each other with suspicion and the question, I think, ‘Does he really belong here?’

In the fast lane there is no doubt. They know where they belong and we know where they belong – in the fast lane. It’s all confidence and style in the fast line. 

I’ve discovered that I am happiest in the slow lane, where I know my place.

Tuesday

My second discovery of the week is my Neck Gaiter Face Cover Scarf. I bought it on Amazon. I doubt it existed before Covid19 and certainly not in this form. It’s a legging for the neck and has a pocket into which you put a carbon filter. It looks like a scarf and you pull it up over your chin mouth and nose when a mask is required.

They come in all colours to match your outfit. Mine is black. The bliss is that you don’t loop it over you ears like the masks I’ve been battling with, you pull it over your head and it’s round your neck, like a legging only I can’t call it a necking that’s something from the fifties and is quite different. The great thing with the neck gaiter is that hearing aids and spectacles are left alone. So I look like an elderly bank robber when I go into church or a shop but I’m comfortable and even though my glasses still steam up my hearing aids don’t fall out. I’m really pleased I’ve discovered the neck gaiter face cover scarf.

Wednesday

Sweet succulent tenderstem broccoli spears  were my third discovery of the week. I found them in their supermarket packet at the back of the fridge. 

‘Excellent for soup,’ I thought. 

Only after I’d sweated the onions and added the chopped stems of the broccoli did I look at the packet. ‘BEST BEFORE 21 SEP’. Best a month ago and they still appeared fresh. There’s something wrong somewhere. There must have been something else lurking in that packet to keep the broccoli looking good. There’s nothing to tell me what it is.

Of course it says on the packet, ‘wash before use’ and, ‘refrigerate after purchase’. It isn’t as if the broccoli needed special preservation because it came from Kenya or Peru. It is printed on the packet, Worcestershire UK. It didn’t have to travel far. I know from the vegetable garden of my childhood that vegetables once picked do not last a month. 

Rather shocked at my discovery I added the rest of the broccoli to the saucepan, then  stock from the bones of Sunday’s roast chicken and a lump of blue cheese. I’m having the soup for my supper this evening.

The 453 bus goes from Elephant and Castle to Deptford Bridge but the important thing for me is that it goes via Marylebone and that there is a bus stop right outside my dentist. I had a dentist’s  appointment, for a check up, on Monday. In the past I’ve gone on the underground but I’m not doing the underground these covid days and though the bus takes longer I have the time. 

The journey took me over Westminster Bridge, passed Big Ben very much under scaffolding, up Whitehall and through Trafalgar Square, practically deserted, through Piccadilly Circus and up Regent Street, hardly a shopper in sight. It is very strange. There are boarded up souvenir shops and closed restaurants. Outside Hamleys two of the staff were in costume dancing in the doorway. That was a cheerful sight.

There wasn’t much traffic so I arrived nearly an hour early for my 3 o’clock appointment. The rules for the dentist are fairly strict and you are meant to arrive on time so I did some exploring locally. There’s the gravestone of Charles Wesley in what I guess was a graveyard now a public garden in Marylebone High Street. On the gravestone the words,

‘HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF THE REVd CHARLES WESLEY M.A.

Only they don’t. On the bottom of the gravestone it states that it was removed from its original site in 1950 and placed where it now is in 1952. So I wondered where this great evangelist and hymn writer, he wrote more than six thousand hymns, had been buried.

I spent some time in St Marylebone Parish Church and lit a candle. Just as I was leaving a young priest came through the church so I stopped and asked him about the grave. He told me that its only six feet away from the gravestone, so that answered that question. Charles Wesley’s remains do lie there, sort of.

After I introduced myself to the priest he said  he thought my name was familiar to him. Unlikely, I suggested. However it turned out he knew well my successor, more than twenty years ago, at St George’s Campden Hill and that he was Chaplain to the Marylebone school where one of my closest friends is Chair of Governors. Small world. The dentist was fine.

On Tuesday, coming back from church, what a sight! A cyclist, cycling very slowly along the bus lane of Kennington Park Road towards the Oval, one hand on the handlebar the other holding his mobile telephone on which he was texting a message with his thumb. I could see it all. And I could see the bus behind the cyclist going equally slowly and not able to pass. The bus driver saw my amazed look and shrugged his shoulders. Clearly he couldn’t toot because the cyclist would have had such a fright he would have fallen off and been run over. I’ve a new mobile phone. I can only just text with my forefinger let alone a thumb. And I doubt I could now ride a bicycle,

Today it was Public Swimming at 10.30. It is a very different experience from lane swimming. Not so much because there are few people in the pool, this morning there were thirteen of us, it’s something else. When lane swimming is on there’s an almost cathedral like quietness in the pool. We swim. We regulars acknowledge each other and sometimes say ‘Hello,’ but basically, we swim.

Of the thirteen this morning five were small children, a father with two and three mothers, I suppose they were mothers, with one each. When children swim they really enjoy themselves and when children enjoy themselves they tell the world. The joyful noise that filled the pool this morning was heart warming.

By the way. There was another bus journey in 2003 that I enjoyed and spoke about in a broadcast. Here is is.

Simon Acland · The 159 Bus