It’s better, much better, this time round. As a result of the government’s bad decision not to allow collective worship during lockdown 2.0, we can’t go to Mass. On the bright side, we can sit in church; mine took the excellent decision on Sunday to put the Blessed Sacrament on the altar. So we sat companionably, spaced apart, in front of the host. Where two or three are gathered together … it can be wonderful.

What was good too was the experience of collective silence. You could say that the Church is channelling its inner Quakerdom … except the tradition of devout silence has obvious monastic roots. On the one occasion I attended a Quaker service, it was the silence that was the most impressive thing about it; without wanting to be rude, the moment the congregation started talking things went downhill a bit. I could see how silence might be the counterintuitive engine behind the Quakers’ extraordinary record of social action.

Collective silence in church makes you feel like you’re on retreat, in a good way – the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts. Which isn’t to say that worship is better in proportion to the numbers involved. The best Masses I ever attended were in a potting shed at the bottom of a garden in Cambridge, where an elderly Benedictine said Mass every morning. It was just him and me. He was so deaf, he had to leave a pause for responses. and would carry on regardless of whether I’d said my bit. But I always felt lighter and happier afterwards.