Illegal gathering ...?

We're becoming so alarmed at the sight of people approaching along the same pavement we travel that the sight of these assorted seabirds - gulls on the shore, eiders and other black ducks/divers ducking and diving - caught the attention. On an utterly calm sea, they had not a thought of social distancing ...

This has to be the strangest Good Friday I've spent in all the years of being religious. It certainly had the necessary bleakness, paradoxically in that the day until late afternoon was gently sunny and benign, and there was little of the secular jollity that always used to jar when we came down the hill from church into the town after the service marking the last hour of Jesus' passion. But the tensions generated by the need to exercise and the need to avoid people create a whole new range of angst...

A word about church. I'm amazed at the proliferation of online services - probably shouldn't be, as there are a multitude of services every Sunday, and certainly every Holy Week. People I would never have imagined committing to the provision of online services are suddenly to be heard singing the Lent prose off camera or sharing inspired meditations on YouTube. We had the Stations of the Cross for the last hour today; I missed the Reproaches and the Veneration but appreciated the lack of any attempt to replicate these on Zoom. But what has particularly struck me is the constant number "attending" these services, so that my screen is full of little faces and my study full of their voices before we're all muted to pray. And there seems to me to have been more mention of church, churches and religious activity in the news than I've heard in decades. 

Yes, world - we're still here.