It can't be.

Steps walked: 10118.

Furthest point travelled: 1 mile. Hospital Chapel.

Face to face non-household interactions: 2.

Track of the day: ‘His Eye is on the Sparrow’ – Mahalia Jackson.

              Although the funeral ‘surge’ that we’d been let to expect hasn’t quite materialised here, nevertheless I’m taking more funerals than normally I would, speaking with more people who have been bereaved, listening to others who are being affected by this uncommon weight of mortality: listening to hospital staff struggling with the hopelessness of patients dying alone, to the grieving who long just to be with family and friends and know the simple comfort of a hug, to funeral directors and cemetery staff unable to offer the full care that they want to give, and who often have to be the ones who inform already distressed families about distressing new restrictions on their grief.

              You take these things in, and you pray about them, and you hope that you’re managing yourself properly, so that you can be with those same people again tomorrow. But I’ve just now taken a funeral for a Blue Tit fledgling, and all the sadness of these sad weeks seemed encapsulated in that tiny bereavement and our impromptu liturgy.

              Walking back from saying prayers at the hospital I’d phoned Susie to see if we needed anything from the corner shop. She told me everything the boys were up to, including the exciting news that they’d found a Blue Tit fledgling in the garden. Susie had checked out dos and don’ts online, and they were hopeful that all would end well, so long as no cat found the bird before its mother did.

              When I got home the boys rushed me to the corner of garden where the fledgling had been spotted. It was very perfect and too still. “It’s okay, it’s just resting,” one of them said. I’m no veterinarian, but it didn’t look to me like it was resting, it looked to me like it had gone to its rest. “I think it’s dead, boys.”

“It can’t be, it was alive last time I saw it.”

He crouched down, picked it up with such tenderness, and then stood, looking disbelieving at the beautiful dead thing in his hands. There was silence. I embraced them.

              And so it came to pass that I took the funeral of a Blue Tit fledgling. James held the bird as I said a prayer, then he laid it in the hole I’d dug between two roses; I re-filled the hole. With my arms around their shoulders we stood and said the Lord’s Prayer; and in my sandals in the sunshine, I felt on my bare foot the drop of a child’s tear.

              When the world feels too big for us to make any sense of, it’s sometimes the small things that mark our path to understanding.

              Sacraments.