This morning, instead of going to church, I put this note through all the houses on our street. Despite being an extrovert, I have a tendency toward social anxiety. Despite being an evangelist, I really hate door knocking. As I approached each door, I noticed lots of “no junk mail” stickers and felt briefly worried. One sticker said “no unaddressed mail”. Putting notes through the doors of people I’d never met - even though we live within a few dozen metres of each other - felt risky. Even worse - some people were outside their houses. I actually had to talk to them! “Don’t worry, I won’t come too close,” was my opening gambit. As someone who suffered from OCD as a young adult, fear of contaminating others is quite a familiar sensation. We Brits have the reputation of being standoffish and maybe a bit antisocial, and the virus is not helping in this regard. And yet, I live in the commuter belt; many of us on our street go off to London on trains every morning and come home late
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash When I was 15 years old there was a particularly unpleasant murder which was splashed all over the news. The culprits were identified, given long prison sentences and, many years later, new identities upon their release. I remember watching news footage of the defendants being brought to trial in a prison van, angry crowds screaming abuse as it drove past. My mother's perspective on this was interesting. "We all have darkness inside us," she explained. "It's easier to scream at it in someone else than to face our own." Today is All Hallows' Eve: for the past week, pumpkins, skeletons, witches and ghosts have loomed at us out of shop windows, from supermarket shelves and strung up as decorations outside homes. Tonight it reaches its peak as many of us, adults and children, dress up in the things we most fear. Axe murderers, which come to mind whenever we're alone in the house and hear a creak on the stai