Our NHS Heroes.

Steps walked: 3,994.

Furthest point travelled to: Couple of hundred yards – corner shop.

Face to face non-household interactions: 1.

Track of the day: ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ – Tina Turner.

              At the risk of being a bit like a dog with a bone, I’ve been thinking about masks some more.

   It all started when I realised that we were on the cusp of running out of milk. Heading down the road to our corner-shop, it belatedly occurred to me that I was heading towards the sort of relatively confined space where I might be asked to wear a mask. As things turned out, on this occasion I was able to get milk, bread and Merlot without covering up, but I guess it’s only a matter of time.

          As I write this, my boys are watching a cartoon called ‘The Justice League’; it’s all about superheroes, and as we all know, superheroes like to wear masks. Just like their Dad before them, when my boys are playing their games, it’s not unknown for them to tie a towel around their neck to form a makeshift cape, and to don some sort of mask, to mark their transition to superhero-dom.

             If the boys remain interested in the worlds of Marvel and DC Comics as they grow up, they’ll discover that many of these powerful and complicated comic-book heroes also wear metaphorical masks; nobody must know their true identity, their powers must remain hidden from the world at large. Weirdly, I find myself thinking of all those Gospel accounts of Jesus adjuring people not to tell others what they’d seen of His miraculous power, what they knew of Who He truly was – the Messianic secret, a kind of mask.

            And from that Galilean Jewish healer we can leap forward two millennia to those who work in the healing professions today. We hear a lot at the moment about our ‘NHS heroes’. I always feel slightly ambivalent about describing anyone as a hero; sometimes when we mark people out as heroes we rather distance them, separate them off from the rest of us, and make it that little bit harder for them to be quite like us. Our conventional image of heroes, formed in childhood, is of people who don’t get tired, who don’t feel fear, who don’t get anxious, or depressed, or just plain angry; sometimes telling people that they’re heroes, can make it that little bit harder for them to acknowledge that they’re also human, with frailties like ours.

 For me, those people in the NHS and across a wide range of other fields of service right now, are deeply human people, doing greatly heroic deeds. And a lot of the people working heroically tonight in my local hospital will spend much of their shift wearing masks.

              This morning one of the boys ran into my study waving a piece of A4 paper and clutching some small paper squares: ‘I’ve invented a board game.’ Given the choice between playing his game for a while or trying to understand a lot of paperwork from OFCOM about our wireless microphones, I opted to play. This was a good choice, as the game proved to be an inspired metaphor for coming out of lockdown. The rules changed regularly, and paradoxically, the more rules we were given, the less clear it was what the rules actually were.