As a youth learning computer studies in the evening at the local technical college, I and others from my school used to have access to a large computer. One of the programmes on it was the text-based adventure game “ADVENT”. This game is the ancestor, really, of all modern graphics-based computer games. When playing this game, the player typed in command – “Take weapon”, “Fight dwarf” “go left” etc., and the computer would in due course respond with a new situation. E.g. “You have arrived at a complex junction”.

This phrase came unbidden to my mind the other day when I was sat during my lunch break in Upper Grosvenor Park, that small triangular slice of grass and plane trees a couple of hundred yards from Victoria Station. I believe in running with my thoughts and hunches. I don’t think there are coincidences, and God above does direct our thoughts as He sees fit.

Both in my personal life and in the life of the world and the nation, this time is one of complexity. We often say that we live in unusual or interesting times. That’s been true throughout my adult life, even allowing for a healthy degree of English understatement. But now, in these times of the Corona Virus, we live in extraordinary times, even – and I don’t like this over-used word – “unprecedented” times. I think this is a badly overused word, misused by journalists chasing a cheap sensation – for there to be “unprecedented” weather or storms is the most common example I’ve seen recently. Really? Was it? Rather like describing something as an “incredible” experience. Yes, I rather think it probably was.

Yet, nothing like this has happened in our lifetime. Last week many of us were literally waiting on the outcome of the Cabinet office “COBRA” meeting. We’ve heard of any number of such meetings for one crisis or another – but since when did ordinary working people wait on the outcome of those meetings? The press briefing on life TV afterwards was sane and sage and measured in it’s tone: but what could happen? What does “delay phase” mean, what does “herd immunity” mean? In the meantime the trains get quieter, and London’s Victoria station at 7 o’clock in the morning looks oddly deserted.

The Chief Commissioner for Scouts in the UK, Tim Kidd, has written to members noting that we must continue to respond to the developing situation in a calm, measured and appropriate way. More typically English sound and sage advice, for I fear that the recent news frenzy about Corona Virus has not been calm, measured or appropriate. The media scramble over tiny scraps of news, like the gangs of monkeys so recently filmed fighting over a banana in some city in S.E Asia. Everything is hyperbole, journalists and reporters hyperventilating, almost, with excitement. And yet, it’s not even really started yet. Where will we go – which exit will we take from the complex junction? Both as individuals, and collectively as a civil society?

“The end of the world is nigh”...What, right nigh? We remember this one of the funnier Ronnie Barker sketches with a wry grin perhaps. We use the term metaphorically – but it is literally true of every day – the world we know disappears at sunset and is made new the following morn. As Linkin Park sing, “things aren’t the way they were before“. After this, things won’t be the way they were before. 2019 is more inaccessible than the other side of the universe. We can’t go back there. Companies will go bankrupt. Habits will change. Society will grow and alter under the influence of what is happening around us. People will die – yes, we knew that and it is deplorable, but no-one lives for ever.

It’s already been noted that pollution levels are falling in some places as a consequence of there being fewer aircraft in our skies. We find ourselves wondering what we can do in these times to be more careful of the vulnerable and the aged around us – how can we help when there is enforced self-isolation? Perhaps one way forward from the complex junction at which we find ourselves, is towards a world where we are much more deeply aware, both of the need to look after our planet, and also of the need to look after our nearest neighbours.