I combined my brisk walk with a visit to the large Tesco in Kennington Lane. It’s further away than my small local Tesco so it almost qualifies as a ‘proper’ walk – almost but actually not, even if I include walking around inside the supermarket. I hadn’t been there since the beginning of Lockdown so I was also interested in discovering how it worked.

The staff were wonderful, helpful and friendly, my fellow customers less so. There are arrows on the floor and markings to show two meter intervals. Many of the shoppers ignored them totally. Following the arrows down one aisle I came face to face with a young couple coming towards me. ‘You are going in the wrong direction, you know,’ I said in what I hoped were friendly tones. They looked at me completely blankly. I wondered if they didn’t speak English. I pointed to the arrows on the floor. ‘Yeah,’ one of them said and continued going against the traffic.

There was a woman keeping her distance two meters behind me and I caught her eye and said, ‘Am I just a grumpy old man?’ ‘Not a bit,’ she said, ’Keep at it,’ then, ‘How are you managing?’ I wasn’t sure whether she meant with my shopping or life in general but I chose to think she meant shopping so I told her, ‘Just one more thing to get.’ ‘That’s good, what?’ ‘Gin,’ I said. ‘That’s really good,’ she replied and we went our separate ways, she to continue her shopping, me towards the gin.

On my way home I was thinking about the nature of God – as one does when walking back from the supermarket. Well it’s Trinity Sunday this Sunday and that is the only festival of the church which celebrates a doctrine rather than an event and I was thinking about it.

There’s a story I’ve always liked about St Augustine walking on the seashore contemplating the nature of the Holy Trinity – he’d been working for over thirty years on his treatise on the subject – and as he walked he noticed a small boy running backwards and forwards from the ocean to a spot on the beach carrying water in a seashell and pouring the water into a hole in the sand. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked the boy. ‘I’m trying to bring all the sea into this small hole,’ the boy said with a smile. ‘But that’s impossible,’ the Saint said. In some versions I’ve heard that St Augustine told the boy he was being ridiculous and unintelligent. In this version he just said it was impossible to which the boy replied, ‘It’s no more impossible than what you are trying to do – comprehend the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your small mind.’ And, of course the boy disappeared. There’s a painting by Alessandro Magnasco, from about 1740, of the incident.

Anyway I was thinking about the nature of God and I did not encounter any small boy with or without a seashell, but when I was going through Cleaver Square I saw a fellow parishioner from St Agnes and we stopped and chatted, at a distance, and got up to date on news and agreed that we knew God was everywhere but that we needed to be able to go to the church and that we needed to be together. We were not being particularly profound. I said how the previous evening when I’d done my walk around the Square I had met another parishioner who was sitting on a bench in the square reading the evening paper and we’d had a chat as well.

Each time I go out on my walk, sometimes trying to walk off the heaviness that Lockdown causes, the thing that really lifts my spirits is to meet another human being and to have a bit of a chat. I shouldn’t be surprised. The Christian understanding of God, the Holy Trinity, God being three in one, is that in some way the nature of God is community. And that we need one another in order to be who we

As an outsider looking in I guess community happens among the staff at Tesco down the road. They certainly all seem to get on and I guess they get to know each other and help each other out. Community does not happen among the shoppers, that’s for sure. Though there may have been the beginning of community with the woman who asked me how I was managing. And that was at two meters distance.

Here in Kennington the one place that I see community happening, regularly and actively, is at church. Only of course its closed. I only know St Agnes well but I understand it’s the same in all the other churches. At St Agnes there is a mixture of ages, races, of educations, of incomes, there’s certainly a diversity of political views, of sexuality of whatever you want to come up with, except of course religion. We’re all Christian. I suspect that community is an essential part of Christianity as it seems to be of most religions. Perhaps community is an essential part of being human. And it is community that is being threatened by many aspects of continuing Lockdown.

A friend who knows how strongly I feel about our closed churches sent me a link to a news item. He wanted to draw my attention to an article that, I’m told, has been in many UK newspapers. 

The Swiss Government has had strict lockdown rules. Prostitution has been legal in Switzerland since 1942. During Lockdown brothels have been closed. The industry group ProKoRe has been lobbying the government to let it restart as soon as possible. Their wish was granted when the Swiss health ministry put ‘erotic business’ on a list of activities which can resume on June 6. There are, of course, strict health and safety measures to be followed. They have been drawn up by ProKoRe and approved by the health ministry.

It is amazing what energetic lobbyists and a cooperative government can achieve.

Simon Acland © 2020

‘The News, the Sport and the Weather’ is not necessarily the most important or the best broadcast I gave. You can read the script of the broadcast as I gave it, if you want to, by going to BROADCASTS on my website.I find it difficult to judge my broadcasts in the same way that I can’t really judge my paintings – some that I want to tear up other people love – or my sermons for that matter – and with sermons I always remember the warning given me early on. ‘If someone says to you, ‘Lovely sermon, vicar,’ the chances are they’re actually saying, ‘Thank you for confirming my prejudices’, and that is not what preaching is about!’

But my broadcasts were never meant to be sermons and I was never accused of them being ‘preachy’ well, never to my face. Some of them I hoped would inform or amuse or perhaps encourage listeners to consider things from a different angle. Radio New Zealand was very generous in more or less letting me have free rein. However I resolved early on to avoid sport (I don’t know enough about any sport and would be bound to get the terminology wrong), to avoid politics (I’m a bit inclined to see things from too many different angles), and to avoid being negative (so many others seem to love doing negative). I wanted to try really hard to see the positive in situations or people or places. I didn’t always succeed.

I started out my working life as a newspaper reporter and, perhaps because of that, I have always been a bit wary and perhaps over critical of the media. I remember, uncomfortably now, having been to a meeting, as a very junior reporter, when I sat at the press desk alongside a colleague from another newspaper. The person chairing the meeting made clear she did not like the media. In the course of the meeting she said a number of sensible and newsworthy things. She also said one very stupid thing, well, something that made her look a bit stupid, also newsworthy.

I went back to the newsroom and wrote up my story for the next day’s paper and the other reporter went back to his paper. His paper came out first, his was a morning paper, mine an evening one. Each of us in our report of the meeting had included the piece that made the person chairing the meeting look a bit stupid. Neither of us included her saying anything sensible. Well, you can’t include everything. No wonder she didn’t like the media.

And then there was my conversation with the Illustrations Editor. An interesting and intelligent man who had been a very good photographer himself. He was a real newspaperman and committed to our sort of paper which was a popular afternoon paper. He showed me a number of photos of a man who was sometimes in the news, a public figure. The photos that were chosen to be published were always ones in profile. The man  didn’t have much of a chin and so he looked a bit of a ‘chinless wonder’. Then he was getting married to someone who was attractive and intelligent and they made a ‘lovely couple’. ‘We’ll use these ones now,’ the Illustrations Editor said to me, pointing to photos of the man, full face, good looking and strong. 

Nowadays there are brilliant fake photos and most people realise that. Then we used to say ‘The camera never lies’. That may have been the case but most of us are fairly choosy about which photo of ourselves, which truth, we want other people to see. On the Christchurch Star, our Editors, like the Editors of other newspapers, of radio and of television, chose the picture that suited the story with the particular slant we chose to write. 

It’s the insignificant things that matter, under Lockdown. No, that’s not strictly true. The churches still being closed is not, for me, insignificant and it matters. The insignificant thing I was thinking of is that I can’t touch my toes, lack of flexibility in the lower spine. It’s old age. So what? Well actually I can’t reach my toes which matters for me because I can’t reach my toe nails to cut them. And that means my toes hurt when I walk.

Never in earlier years was I a great one for sport or exercise. I enjoyed a game of tennis but was never as good as my older brothers. Mind you my elder brother was very good indeed – competition standard. I dreaded gym at school – all those pull ups and press ups and parallel bars and leaping over a horse. Looking back I realize that a lot of what passed for sport at school was more to do with bearing pain than playing a sport. Catching a cricket ball hurt. It hurt a lot. I was never taught how to catch a cricket ball. I’m told it doesn’t have to hurt at all, once you are taught how.

I was actually quite a good high jumper at school but the real test was not how high you could jump but how much pain you were prepared to endure when you landed – not falling onto a lovely foam filled mattress but into a pit with two inches of sawdust in it to ‘cushion’ your fall! That was not my scene.  Nor was the ice cold water in the school swimming pool. The pool was fed from an artesian well!

I have only discovered latterly that it’s actually healthy body, healthy mind every bit as much as the other way round. And that, to my amazement, exercise can be enjoyable. Mind you I’m not into competitive sport and I’m amongst the very slow in the slow lane at the swimming pool. Now with the swimming pool and the gym closed walking has become necessary and even enjoyable, were it not for the toe nails.

Well! I have just discovered that along with my local off licence, my local dairy, and my local osteopath, my local chiropodist is open for business. I phoned yesterday and Cathy said that yes, it was fine, if for me it was ‘necessary’ and I was free from Covid – 19 symptoms. 

‘No symptoms!’ I said, ‘but do I qualify as being ‘necessary’. So Cathy asked if I was over seventy. What a tactful person she is. And when I said that I certainly was and explained about not being able to go for my customary brisk walks she said, ‘Essential’ and gave me an  appointment for 11 o’clock tomorrow morning.

There’s not been a squeak from civil or church authorities about churches being open. And, unlike the gym or the swimming pool you don’t have to change in a changing room with others before you go to church. I can’t, for the life of me, see why those churches and cathedrals that have paid cleaning staff, not to mention other paid staff who could be taught to clean, can’t be open. I see that in America some churches are open and that at least one priest is doing Baptisms by water pistol. I don’t think we have to go that far and anyway my aim wouldn’t be up to it. Though, who knows, I guess it could come under the heading of ‘imaginative’ worship.

I may not be back in church but at least I’ll be back doing my brisk walk after 11.30 tomorrow.

‘You’re the best thing I’ve seen all day,’ I said to the man in the ice cream van, back in his usual spot just opposite Saint Agnes Church next to Kennington Park. I couldn’t actually see him I must admit but I assumed he was there behind the plastic screen, and, because he called me Father, even though I wasn’t wearing a clerical collar, I assumed he was the same man who is usually there. Each summer we chat when I go past the van on my way back from mass.

It was very good to see him and the return of the ice cream van as a small sign of a social normality that doesn’t exist. I bought an ice cream, single whip, and he tried not to let me pay but I insisted and eventually I accepted a 50p discount.  For me it was a very good meeting. The return of a small bit of humanity.

I had spoken to friends and family on the telephone during the day some upbeat some downbeat but for me telephone calls, zooming, streaming, be it what you will is simply not the same as being together even through the plastic shield of an ice cream van. And church zooming or streaming for worship when everything seems to be focused on the other people and the word alone doesn’t do it for me either.

The news on my iPad, radio and tv and I gather in the newspapers, none of which I get, is full of Dominic Cummings, a Ministerial Advisor who may or may not have broken Lockdown rules. As if it is really about that! I don’t think so. It’s another small sign of a normality- a pathetic, in my opinion, political normality about some politicians sniping at each other and the media loving it.

It seems Mr Cummings is a hate figure for one political side in the same way that in the Jeremy Corbyn days Seamus Milne was a hate figure for the other side. I suppose we are influenced by what these people do. Or is it that their behaviour gives us an excuse, often after we’ve done it, along the lines of, ‘if he or she can do it why can’t I.’ Surely that’s rather sad reasoning. Sorry, I see in a news flash he’s not a Ministerial  Advisor he’s a ‘Key Aide’.

But there must be something as well as the ice cream van that brightened the day. I had sardines on toast for lunch which were ok but not my usual for Sunday lunch. Proper Sunday lunch is free range chicken from the Saturday Farmers’ Market at the Oval or lamb, leg or shoulder, from the same market, and company. The market is closed now.

I noticed, on my walk, 5,220 steps, four kilometres, a sticker on a number of the lamp posts I passed. ‘Make the rich pay for Covid – 19’. Wishful thinking on someone’s part. It is the poor, not only here but across the world, who are paying already and who will continue to pay proportionally far more than the rich.

But there has been something. Some friends sent me an email link to the Blog of the art lecturer, writer, teacher, Richard Stemp. He, I gather, has been writing something about a great painting every day during Lockdown. Today it was Day 67 – Psyche VII:  ‘Celebration!’ It is wonderful stuff and it has certainly brightened my day. Look up drrichardstemp.com