We walked to John o'Groats

May dragged by in some ways, as the Spanish quarantine lockdown kept being extended for more and more weeks confined to our homes. But in another sense, it seems to have gone by very fast. It was a month where I had a lot of work "online" - many meetings and classes by video-conferencing, coaching and coach evaluations also happening over the internet - as well as other work that is simply done from behind a computer.

We seem to have turned the corner here in Spain. As the summer heat begins to increase, the coronavirus statistics seem to be decreasing. Deaths, which were hovering around 900 per day at the beginning of April, have dropped to just two or three per day, and there were two days this week when we had no deaths at all.

As a result, we've begun a process of "de-escalation" where we are slowly being allowed a bit more freedom. Mask wearing is compulsory in public places, but restaurants and coffee shops are beginning to open, and we're now allowed to venture more than one kilometre from our homes.

In the second stage of relaxing the lockdown, we are allowed to go into friends' homes and meet in small groups of fewer than ten people. My church house group met in person for the first time this week, with five of us meeting face to face and four others (still stranded out of the country) joining over the internet. Church services are allowed to begin this coming Sunday, but only with one third of the usual capacity, and so people need to reserve their places in advance. As I have a lung condition that puts me in the "vulnerable"category, I've decided just to join the service over Zoom, and not to attend the church in person yet. I did go to house group this week, though. 

Our locally based leadership team of five people for the LDC also had a face to face meeting over coffee this week, and we got the good news that the hotel and apartments we planned to use as accommodation for the leadership development course will be opening their doors again from 1st July. Now we only need to wait and see if borders and airports open sufficiently for us to go ahead with the course this autumn as planned.

While most of the world has been in lockdown, with limited access to the outside world, there's been a flourishing of websites encouraging you to "virtually" walk the Camino de Santiago, the Inca Trail, or other famous hiking routes around the world. You do it by walking around your own home or garden, or within the limits that are permitted in your own town, and some kind of app counts the kilometres that you've covered.... until they announce that you've now walked the equivalent of Lands End to John o'Groats. I decided to count up our current kilometre count, and discovered that we had indeed walked from Penzance to John o'Groats, from Malaga almost to the French border, or a good chunk of the way from Cape Town to Johannesburg.

Part of the key to this success is the use of a new canine-rucksack I bought, which is worn by one of the three bigger dogs (they take turns) and means that they can carry their own bottles of water for the hike. I'd been finding that my arthritic shoulders weren't strong enough to carry water for the dogs as well as for myself, and so it's made a huge difference to have the dogs carry their own water. Still within our current "de-escalation" regulations (ie, within our town limits), we've been able to go a little further than would otherwise have been possible for me. This week, a friend and I climbed the mountain to the wolf's lookout - a spot with amazing views over the Mediterranean coastline. (That's the photo at the top of this post.) Another day, I took the dogs for a long, shady walk in a nearby forest. It's been good to get out into nature, to compensate for the many hours spent looking at a computer screen. Looking ahead, further freedoms may open up.... and other kinds of ministry involvement can begin again.