Jack makes it just in time again – –

For a good few months we’ve been holding Zoom meetings every Sunday with some close friends in North Carolina, Virginia and Scotland. It’s an odd way to connect but better than nothing.

It’s kind of amazing for me that what seemed like science fiction just a few years ago is now normal – speaking to folk across the world while seeing them.

I worried back when we first started that we’d run out of things to talk about but it’s turned out quite the opposite – we actually tend to run on beyond the allotted hour. We all know each other’s houses so there’s often a conducted tour to show what’s been happening, holiday decorations and such. Our cats and dogs usually make an appearance as well. Some of us eat breakfast while we talk and others drink coffee, although the five hour time difference between the US and Scotland makes that weird as well.

Wendy is much more used to Zooming than me and she has a goodly number of different groups that she interacts with, and I occasionally wander past her and say hello. Our good friend Liz in Ireland hosts a massive Zoomed storytelling event every Saturday night and often has thirty or forty folk connecting from all over the world, whereas we just have four lots of two and we only chat.

Of course there are lots of examples of folk wandering into the bathroom with their i-pads while remaining connected, but we’ve managed to avoid that – although only just!

The biggest problem is the latency issue, so there’s a slight delay which makes natural conversation really difficult, and I am sure that the most-used phrase of 2020, besides “Do you have toilet paper?” is “Your mic is on mute.”