Virtually there

I think I've mentioned this memory on Blip before: a film, on black & white TV, at my Grandmother's house when we didn't have a telly, a film of a story by - I think - H G Wells in which the masters of the future sit in front of screens controlling ... everything. They had big heads and tiny, wasted legs, and they did nothing except watch their screens. I don't remember the conclusion. (If anyone knows what I'm talking about, do tell ...)

Today I was one of these future people. I spent the whole day online at the Argyll and The Isles Diocesan Synod, taking place in Oban. I've always found these two days a tad intensive - this was my take on the last one I attended physically, in the final weeks before lockdown - but I didn't expect this half-life thing to be as tiring as it was. It wasn't helped by the less-than-perfect internet signal from the venue in Oban, nor by the lack of facilities on Teams as I was experiencing it - I'm used to being able to text people directly on Zoom when I need to communicate off-piste, as it were. In the event, I did send a text to the Dean's phone, and then heard what I wanted to say read out and responded to, which felt very odd indeed. 

The discussions today, aside from the usual elections and reports, dealt with the lockdown experiences of the various charges, and the good/bad outcomes, as well as an extraordinary examination of the language use in the liturgical revisions currently under review. That's right up my alley, though more from the point of view of poetry and music than of theology; I have a feeling that some of what liturgical committees come up with is a result of linguistic expediency. 

Apart from that, I took a break after lunch to nip along the road in the teeming rain to a session with the sports therapist - a wonderfully searching back massage to try to sort out a niggling pain and feeling of ... squintness. I don't think this ageing malarkey is very good for me. And my pal - who should also have been in Oban but wasn't - called in from an appointment in town to see the end of Synod and discuss clothes for our forthcoming trip.

And that was that - except that I finished a heavy computer day by paying the balance on our proposed Italian holiday first booked for May 2020 and taking out travel insurance. 

One last thing: there's a young woman in Ukraine who tweets - sometimes twice daily - about her life right now. She was in Kyiv, she's now with her mother in the west of the country, and she asked last week if people would follow her and share her life. So yesterday we all - thousands of us - posted pictures of our morning coffee in answer to her "war coffee", and today we posted the views from our windows, though she was afraid to post hers. There's a man in the next apartment who snores loudly enough for her to hear him, and today he was commenting on the TV news ...I remember following a Palestinian teenager in Gaza during intensive bombing, for this same sense of a window on a nightmare.

Blipping my computer in mid-Synod. I've just realised the Bishop was wearing a red cassock ...