Crooked Spire vicar's column: Nowhere’s risk-free – but come into town to support traders

No doubt my fear of heights comes from this experience (I’ve never been all the way up the church tower!) but it underlines the great freedom that children of my generation certainly had, and which seems not to be so easily available to the children of today.

Mind you, those were days in which the dog was out all day and when he came in the cat went out all night, and there were stray sheep on the streets... but I digress.

There are plenty of studies that show children learn by taking risks.

The fact that I’m still here, and not carrying some lifelong injury, is testimony to my learning (very fast) to swallow my fears and take the slow and careful way back down from the roof.

Adults seem to like taking risks by proxy, and the popularity of extreme sports and outback-style reality shows is a witness to that.

With many shops re-opening, and with the church being open too in a limited fashion for personal prayer, I’m not the only one who has been up to the ears with risk assessments in the past week or so.

Having a medieval space that is open for public access means that we have a risk assessment two inches thick already, and anyone who does anything with anyone else on an official or public-facing basis has been awash with the things for some years.

But until now risk assessments have seldom included stuff aimed at reducing the possibilities of infection.

If you caught the flu in the Crooked Spire from someone who had never heard that ‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases’ we would not have been in the line of fire.

But with Covid-19 we are now.

It’s our responsibility (which we have taken seriously) to minimise the risk to people who use the building.

In all the planning for this week, some people have acted as if everything needed to be risk-free, as if life could ever work like that.

The consequences of not looking where you’re going can (in my view regrettably) be pushed on to someone else, but surely there’s enough information out there on Covid-19 to make sure people don’t do things dangerous to their health?

The information is there, but going by the number of people who don’t seem to know how far two metres is, there’s a long way to go before minimising risk can get anywhere near to no risk at all!

Nowhere is risk-free.

Don’t go out if you’ve been told you’re particularly vulnerable.

But if not, take the risk of coming into town where traders have themselves taken the risk of opening up, and where they need your business.

If they lose their livelihoods we in turn will lose our town.

And keep the risk low by keeping your distance, cleaning your hands (looking where you’re going, taking care crossing the road, not getting into a fight...) and not climbing onto the roof of any derelict breweries you may come across.

Keep safe.

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