Easter in the Time of COVID-19

Easter is usually a big deal for my family not least because it and the Cambodian New Year come close together so there are two big celebrations where we all get together within a few weeks of each other. My family is very multicultural - composed of multiple ethnicities and belief systems - and we celebrate every festival we can by getting together. We eat a lot and talk a lot and generally enjoy our time together.

This year, of course, is very different but Virgo and Miss Eight's mother organised a family catch up by video. This gave us a chance to see and talk and spend time with them and the children. Miss Eight and Miss I'm Four have grown up in a world of phones where you can talk face to face to anyone as well as iPads, tablets, laptops and computers. They've spending their isolation time doing school work at home.  Miss Eight's mother is a teacher so while she's been at school prepping for Term 2 Miss Eight has been spending her days learning with her other grandmother, a recently retired primary school teacher. But school holidays have now officially started and they were telling us how they are Skyping and videoing their friends now they can't see them in person.

This led to us saying how lucky they were that they could stay in touch. They were shocked as we went on to explain that the world had not always been like this. When their parents were the ages they are now there were no video phone calls - no mobile phones in fact and no tablets. Most families didn't even have home computers. The best they could do was to talk on the home phone to one another.

As the little ones struggle to imagine a world with no computers, no mobiles and no video chats - a world like the sufferers during the influenza pandemic in 1918 experienced - I think we should be counting our blessings, don't you. Grim as times are and with the likelihood of them being even grimmer in health and economic terms we are so much better off than they were then.