Living in lockdown for the past month, we have been searching out things to do. With my youngest son, we raided our childhood games shelves and brought out a few old favourites. I’m sorry to say he defeated me at Snakes & Ladders, although I managed a narrow victory in Ludo! We also dug out Boggle and our second-hand Connect 4 game. This was a big hit and all three of my children ended up involved in a competitive tournament, trying to outsmart each other to join up lines of four yellow or red tokens in the drop-in grid (pro-tip: sneaky reverse diagonals were the most effective strategy!)

As I watched the game, I thought about the connections they were making, trying to join up the dots into groups – and connecting with one another at the same time. I remembered watching Churchill students battling with one another over the same grids (we have a couple of Connect 4 sets in the new Hive social area for Year 7). I remembered playing with my brother as a child – I bet there’s a Connect 4 set back in the family home somewhere! And I wondered how we would have coped with lockdown if it had happened when I was at school in the late 1980s. We had four television channels and a video recorder. There was one landline phone in the house. Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the world wide web until 1990.

What I am finding most difficult in lockdown is the separation from people. I am lucky to have my family around me, and I cherish that real human contact. But out in the world, as I wrote last week, we keep two metres away from other people. We can’t see our friends, we can’t hug our relatives. That human contact is so important to us – we need it.

And yet, in this connected world, we are lucky. This week alone I have Zoomed, FaceTimed, and WhatsApp video called for work and with my family. Parents and students have shared photos, videos and documents showing their work and activities whilst the Academy has closed. At a touch of a button, I can instantly send messages and letters to all the students at the Academy, or all the parents, and they can receive them as good as instantly. With this blog, I can type on my laptop, press publish, and my words are instantly visible to anyone, anywhere, who cares to look. It’s easy to take this connected world for granted, but we are so fortunate to live in a time where this technology enables us to be together virtually, when we can’t be together actually.

Yet, as I watched my children playing Connect 4, there was a different kind of connection happening. Something real, something tangible, something that you don’t get through a laptop, phone or tablet screen. After a long day of Zoom meetings on Tuesday, my eldest two children and I went for a walk in the rain. We discovered a patch of woodland near our house which we didn’t even know was there. A stream flowed through the trees, and the rain pattered on a rich carpet of flowering wild garlic and bluebells. We could hear every raindrop, the birdsong in the trees, the rush of the water. The children were already planning hide and seek spots, the best tree to rig a rope swing from, and where we could picnic when the sun came back.

“Grandad would love this,” they said. “We must show him when we’re allowed to see him again.”

I’m grateful that the internet allows us to connect, but I will be even more grateful when we can see each other again – for real.