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Good Morning

I met my thirteen-year-old self the other day – in my desk drawer.Ìý In a tiny notebook with a green plastic cover, and the words, ‘Day to Page DIARY’ in gold on the front.Ìý Why did I keep it for all these decades, when the entries stop at February the 11th?ÌýÌý Most of them are marvelously tedious and repetitive.Ìý They’re about school, television programmes, and more school.

And yet, and yet.ÌýÌý Sometimes it feels as if we’re locked inside a frozen, eternal present of Covid-19.ÌýÌý There’s no respite. ÌýBut a few minutes reading these self-centred scribbles from the past was like a door being flung open.Ìý Onto a world I remember now:Ìý when the mood of your Maths teacher was the most important consideration in your life, and Saturday morning TV programmes were bliss.ÌýÌýÌýÌý A world where what you had for your tea defined your day, and anything you didn’t like at school was ‘rubbish’.Ìý And when your big sister did your hair nicely for the party you’d been looking forward to all week.

It was such a narrow world.Ìý Trivial, and passionately serious.ÌýÌý And I wish it back for young people today.Ìý A world without Covid-19, where school is boring because you go every day - not in between outbreaks of disease; a world where you’re shoulder to shoulder and arm-in-arm with your friends;Ìý where you’re safe in that learning, growing place which is half your world, half of who you are, and who you will become.Ìý Ìý

God of hope - we ask your blessing on all young people whose learning has been disrupted for so long.Ìý Thank you for their energy and potential.Ìý Bless their resilience, we pray, keep them, and shine your face upon them.Ìý Amen.

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