Today I walked through an eerily deserted Godalming High Street. A thin woman, in her mid 30s stumbles towards me in the centre of the road. Wearing a blue surgical mask and with a grey-green scarf around lank blonde hair, she looks like an extra from Mad Max, and we are way beyond Thunderdome.

Why am I thinking like this? I feel a gust of wind and look behind me, half expecting to see tumbleweed rolling up the street. It’s a cop car pulling out, headlights on, windows shut tight against the lurking peril. Now driving slowly, its tyres click over the brickwork of the road. I feel guilty. Should I be here? Was this a necessary journey?

Two wary stragglers stand outside Boots the Chemist; a grey woman and a child of 9 or 10, perhaps younger. It’s not that her hair is grey, she is grey, weary, troubled. The doors securely bolted, a sign on the glass reads, ‘5 customers only’. She waits. An older gentleman, mid-70s, stands over the road at a safe social distance. He too is waiting – for prescriptions, presumably, or some other essential medical supplies. I doubt if he wants his holiday snaps printed. His eyes darting side to side, he looks anxious. Other shops are closed, cafés are deserted. Nero’s appears abandoned, the chairs all gone. The banks too are shut, ATMs displaying the strange but now strangely familiar image of a coronavirus along with dire health warnings. A sign reads, ‘This branch of Barclays will close on May 1st’. May has come early. A few metres up the road, like a private members club of dubious legal status, NatWest cautiously admits one customer at a time.

I walk through the unexpectedly open doors of Superdrug. Stepping over the pink taped gridlines on the floor, laid every 2 metres along the aisles, a shiver of fear runs through my body. I recognise the scenario. I have seen all this before. Am I playing a part in a George Romero movie? Or do velociraptors stalk the shampoo shelves, as they did in a Jurassic Park kitchen? Away from home, I am a little bit afraid. What is happening to me? What is happening to all of us that we have become so fearful of one other?

On my way home, I pass an open green field. Near the road the grass is now piled high with steaming straw and manure. Is this normal? Something doesn’t look right. An old bath and a load of trash and junk have been dumped in a layby. There are bits of wood, fabric, plastic piping. Really? Here? But recycling centres are closed. People are ‘acting like it was the end of the world.’ Meanwhile songs by U2, and the Doors play on my mental radio.

Yesterday another 563 people in the UK died of Coronavirus. So far we have lost 2,352 to this infection.

This is the end

My only friend

The end

Of our elaborate plans

The end

Of everything that stands

The end

No safety or surprise

The end

Back in the village I park outside the Spar. For once there is no queue spaced along the pavement. I walk straight in. As I stand at the post office counter, I ask one of the regular cashiers, ‘How is the zombie apocalypse for you?’ ‘Not as much fun as I had hoped’, he replies.

At home I am cocooned, but the world feels unsafe, full of lurking dangers. I went to New York when I was 9 years old. Growing up in Buckinghamshire, our family had often visited London. I knew what policemen looked like in the Home Counties – they were slender, genial 6 foot ‘Bobbies’ with tall custodian helmets, armed only with a whistle and a truncheon. But surly, flat capped, overweight and packing heat, New York cops exuded not reassurance but violence. ‘In New York you could drop dead in the street’, I remarked to dad, ‘and nobody would notice.’ Now I feel alien in the most familiar of places. My mental radio plays, ‘I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, an Englishman in Godalming.’

I am at my desk. TV news plays in the background. Today another 569 people in the UK have died. That makes a toll of 2,921 dead so far from Coronavirus. The radio plays on. It is Bob Dylan this time:

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need

When the pool of tears beneath my feet floods every new-born seed

There's a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere

Toiling in the danger and the morals of despair...

Never have the words of the Elder Zosima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, rung so true,

'Young man, be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage… Remember, too, every day, and whenever you can, repeat to yourself, "Lord, have mercy on all who appear before Thee to-day." For every hour and every moment thousands of men leave life on this earth, and their souls appear before God. And how many of them depart in solitude, unknown, sad, dejected that no one mourns for them or even knows whether they have lived or not!'

In a recent article in TIME magazine, New Testament theologian and former Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, writes concerning the Coronavirus crisis, “It is no part of the Christian vocation… to be able to explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain—and to lament instead.”

It is in lament that we love best. Dostoyevsky’s Zosima continues,

Brothers, have no fear of men's sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

Dylan is still playing on my radio,

In the fury of the moment I can see the master's hand

In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand…

In our pain we seek a presence. It may be elusive, fleeting, but it is real.

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea

Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me

I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man

Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

Chris Denne