From my Isolation Pod

As I float through Isolation, dodging cans of Spam, cruising in to link my Pod with the Congregation Ship 3 times a week in the vast cyberspace universe, I am wondering what sort of world we will be emerging into when we are allowed out again.  I guess it will be an even higher surveillance world than it was before.

I also keep thinking about the first series of Red Dwarf - in which the virus came through the computer screen and infected the crew (in some very amusing ways).  They got on each other's nerves severely isolated in quarantine I seem to remember - even calm Kryten (a robot) lost it.

We seem to be doing OK.  It probably helps having being married for a long time - we first met when we were students, back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth - and after all that time you have lots of running jokes that really help, and get funnier as the years go by.

We actually got a supermarket delivery slot. WE GOT A SUPERMARKET DELIVERY SLOT!!  They are rarer than hen's teeth at the moment, and even though it is for 2 weeks ahead, we only had a couple of hours in which to grab the slot. So we had to work out a virtual shopping list.

How strange this all is.   And another thing I am wondering about is if I will ever be able to venture out again after all this is over. I have always been a complete homebody.   And as for driving again...

I identify to a distressing extent with these words from the writer Janet Frame.  They are from the biography by Michael King "Wrestling with the Angel".

She says:  "I have sometimes thought that I have an allergy to people, or that I have some chemical which is in short supply and which is needed to go through the usual process of being sociable, that a large "dose" of people exhausts the supply which must be built up again before the next "dose" and while the supply is being built up there is an aversion, a turning away, an avoidance of people as if one had been seasick and couldn't face the thought of food...  (Josie , her sister's daughter) has this avoidance of contact to such an extreme degree that she has not acquired the spoken language of people, whether through some deficiency in perception (or) as part of the avoiding process."

I think there Janet Frame is speaking of the silence of deep autism, where nothing makes sense and nothing connects. I have always been conscious of flickering connections in my brain, that on one memorable occasion meant I failed to recognise my own brother. We don't realise just what an amazing and complex job our brain does until its fails to do it.  "Of course",   I say, "Of course I can recognise my own brother"!

Well, no I can't, not unless the complex network of connections in my brain that enable me to do so actually connect and spark.   Mine do not always..  But I never wondered until I read this how much of it is chemically induced.

Of course we all carry damage, fatal damage, from the moment when our first parents cut themselves off from their Creator, their Source of life. So no-one's body or brain is working as it should.  But if we, their damaged children, turn back to our Creator, Jehovah, he will help us right now, and he will restore us to the life and perfection we have never yet known, under the loving rule of God's Kingdom.

How would I cope without Jehovah's constant loving and patient teaching?