Small world, wide roads

Yesterday at the Children's Centre, a kid's Spanish group linked up with a group in California to sing Spanish songs and dance together in hyperspace. In California, their day was just beginning, ours was almost ending. But it made no difference to the chaotic fun, breakfast time or dinner time, kids know how to hop, skip and twirl through days!   The world has become a small place where we can almost touch hands across oceans. Yet I watch Betty,  who lives opposite us as she opens her front door to collect her milk. Wrapped in a cornflower  blue dressing-gown, her white hair slightly more dishevelled each morning, I realise how rarely I reach out across the road to touch her life. The distance from one side of the world to the other can seem so small and the distance from one side of the road to the other, so vast.
Last Summer we had a Diamond Jubilee street party. We thought it would be hard to organise, the few of us who met over tea and beer to organise it.  But on the day, the street was hung with fluttering bunting ( made by our neighbour ) parked cars disappeared and by 1 pm tables, covered in colourful table -cloths ran the length of the street. And from every house people began emerging with plates piled high with cakes and sandwiches ( some with the crusts cut off! ) and drinks and crisps. And the party began.  And for an afternoon neighbours forgot their quarrels, children played in the middle of the road, young and old sat laughing together and for just a few hours, we understood what if felt like to be part of a community.  And outside her house, Betty sat, cup of tea in hand, smiling. It has made the distance from one side of the road to the other seem shorter and now we know most of the people who walk past our window and smile at our neighbours.  But the truth is, it's still easier to come home, close the door, switch on the computer and skype someone on the other side of the world than it is to walk normally across the road.

A while ago I met up with one of my friends who is a head teacher. At the end of the school day he was called by one of the class teachers to deal with a problem.  She had handed out a page of homework to the children and one of her pupils had eaten his!   My friend went to talk to the child.
" How are you going to do your homework if it is in your tummy?" he asked.  " Are you going to swallow a pencil too?"   " Miss said our homework was so easy today it was a piece of cake." replied the boy " and I was hungry."