Ring a Ring – Frank McNally on the shrinking (and expanding) circles of lockdown

The anti-social circles to which we're confined these days – I mean both the two-metre personal hygiene cordon and the 2km corral for exercise – remind me of a description I read once about life in 19th-century France.

It was by the writer Graham Robb, when discussing that country's multiplicity of localised identities, all different from each other even where there were no obvious boundaries.

Demarcations were aural rather than visual, he said: “The area in which a church bell can be heard more distinctly than those of other villages in the region is likely to be an area whose inhabitants had the same customs and language, the same memories and fears, and the same local saint.”

The bells had other uses on occasion, Robb added: “In the 1790s, recruiting sergeants marched across the Sologne through overlapping circles of sound to find, when they arrived in each village, that all the young men had disappeared.”

Sex, Lies, and Idiot Tales – Frank McNally on catching up with Boccaccio

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Through a Glass, Darkly – Frank McNally on the mythology of Dublin pubs

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Distance learning – Frank McNally on the revelations of lockdown

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Words to Live By (two metres apart) on World Poetry Day 2020

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Speaking of churches, I suggested here earlier in the week, albeit facetiously, that growing up in the border diocese of Clogher (from the Irish “stony place”) may have helped me adapt easier than most to social distancing.

Well, for French people, the traditional identifier was Clogher’s near namesake, “Clocher” (no relation, meaning “bell tower”). Robb again: “When migrants talked nostalgically of their distant native clocher, they were referring not only to the architectural presence of a steeple but also to its aural domain.”

Trying to make the most of our current crisis, I now think of my 2km circle of confinement in Dublin as a clocher.  It’s certainly an aural domain in Robb’s terms, being unusually well stocked with bells. Never mind mere churches, my eastern perimeter has not one but two cathedrals, both highly audible on Sunday mornings.

As for our smaller spheres of confinement, those do not usually involve bell ringing (we’re not lepers yet). But in our isolation, we can still speak to each other. In fact, the lockdown has provoked an upsurge in strangers saying hello. Even passing runners are now exchanging nods or smiles that ripple out beyond their two-metre cordons, in small but overlapping circles of encouragement.

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While our physical horizons may have narrowed of late, our virtual ones have expanded dramatically. At least mine have. The lockdown has forced a crash course in remote technologies, including ones that have been around for years but I had ignored until now, eg Skype.

Like many people, I have also discovered Zoom, a multi-screen app that allows for group meetings, classes, even parties, with people in different locations able to see and communicate with each other.

This can be like having the world in your kitchen, as I discovered the other day while taking part in a pilates class there. The instructor was in darkest Cork, which would have been impressive enough normally, except that another member of the class was in Tanzania.

My new skills include becoming an amateur film director, working out optimum camera angles for gym sessions – with for just enough personal exposure that I can still cheat on the harder moves – and arranging set scenery, if only by moving the cat litter tray out of shot.

One day recently, I went from doing my own class to setting up my 14-year-old son for his weekly trumpet lesson. Then we had to switch that from Zoom on the laptop to Skype (or was it Facetime?) on the iPhone, because the teacher’s wife was using his computer simultaneously with her Irish dance students.

Anyway, this has all been great fun. And I was delighted with my apparent mastery of the technology. Then, only today, I heard about something called “Zoom-bombing”, which has suddenly become a problem in America.

In one typical example, a college student was defending his PhD, live via the app, and had invited 50-odd friends and family members to join the session. Then mid-broadcast, to the student’s horror, a person unknown hijacked the screen with a depiction of male genitalia.

It sounds like the sort of thing my teenage sons would have done to each other, for mutual hilarity. But in this case, there was a racial motivation, so no-one found it funny. Moreover, there have been a rash of such attacks, where gate-crashers interrupt meetings with verbal abuse, pornography, and worse.

The company behind the app, a victim of its success as millions of new users signed up overnight thanks to Covid-19,- is now working urgently to address security shortcomings. In the meantime, I’m told that even in its existing privacy settings, there are buttons you can switch on and off. I’m now working urgently to find them.