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Good Morning. This week, I bought a newspaper and a take away coffee for the first time in two months. As I sat on a park bench, it was like the good old days, Before-Covid. I felt giddy emerging into my new found freedom, like someone feasting after a fast. Thank you, I said. Gratitude for small things has come easily recently. But the coffee had too much milk in it and the newspaper too much bile. As I sat there reading about the lifting of restrictions, and the people who are ignoring them, and the anger people feel about this, I was taken back to something I’d almost forgotten – the old paradigm of a nation stuck in shouty binary positions, divisions that, for a few months at least, seemed to have been replaced by a kind of unity, even a vision for a different kind of world. This is a significant, possibly dangerous moment for all of us. As we slowly emerge from lockdown and return to what passes for normal life, whilst still trying to take the thing that put us there seriously. I feel no nostalgia for the deprivations of lockdown; give me the company of friends, the miracle of human presence any day. I’ve had the virus and have lost friends to it. People have lost jobs. People have lost lives. And yet, in the midst of suffering, many have spoken of noticing things for the first time: the silent skies, the empty roads, the five different kinds of birdsong heard at dusk. Fresh air. The neighbour of ten years who brought you groceries when you were sick and whose name you now know. Glimpses of things that were either lost or impossible to see before all this; glimpses of a better world. As we re-emerge it would be a shame to go back to the old settings, to miss the opportunity, to forget the things that this great stopping of the world has shown us, to forget the good we’ve glimpsed. A better world is not found in utopian visions. Those are illusions. No, it is found here. In the world we’ve been given. As the French poet Paul Eluard said: ‘There is another world and it is in this one.’ Sometimes, like the Psalmist, we just have to be still in order to see it. Outside I hear planes again. Cars swoosh down our road. And someone is drilling the wall the other side of my study. To record this, I’m going to have to get in a cupboard to find the silence I need. The world is getting noisier again, and we’re going to have to work hard not to let the volume drown out that Still Small Voice that’s been telling us what we always suspected: that there is a world better than this.