WE haven’t had a virtual funeral during lockdown, thankfully. But we just had a virtual birthday. And it was 40 minutes of magic, really: a split-screen show of all the humanity we love about extended-family life.

To start with, it was my youngest daughter Eleanor’s 23rd. She’s currently somewhere between Anniesland and Maryhill (an appropriately feminised territory), secluding with two solid male pals.

We’re all chucked about these islands, in various states of repair – but we’ve all been thinking of her. She’s a girl of the theatrical stage, the raucous wee gig, the showstopper at a mad party. And all of those modalities, on which she hoped to build a career and a rich life, have been upended by the coronavirus. For how long, and how endemically, nobody knows.

So maybe that’s why we had such a good Zoom call. Everyone attending wanted to ensure Eleanor got the love and care message. Going by her regular production of tears and snotters, she evidently did.

Various cakes, bought in various cities, were held precariously aloft to the webcam. Her big sister, with her usual sagacity, Amazoned her a “Permaculture For Suburbanites” book. Ellie’s been spending her asocial hours turning the back court into a market garden (proud displays of seed pots marked the run-up of previous calls).

A poet in the family recited a perfect birthday eulogy (“There’s Dusty, Bach & Brel in her/The best of heaven and hell in her/Her passion’s what’s impellin her/So dinnae clype or tell on her/The Lockdoon’s lookin well on her/Big happy birthday Eleanor!”).

And then her mum – undoubtedly well-versed in the management of meetings – urged everyone to line up and wish Ellie their best, beginning with her devoted second family in London. By the time everyone delivered their bit, let’s just say the closing song should have been Cry Me A River.

That evening, the wee yin announced on Facebook she was “so full of joy” that she had to perform for us a heartfelt version of Aretha Franklin’s I Say A Little Prayer. Which, frankly, just kicked off the old collective waterworks once more.

I share this experience because I noted in Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement the other day, when mildly easing the Covid-19 distancing restrictions, that she imagined “there are going to be lots of emotional reunions. You’ll be planning to see family and friends that you haven’t seen for weeks and based on the current forecasts the sun will be shining too”. This shows, as ever, the human touch from Sturgeon that the Westminster gang have signally lacked.

My subtle qualification would be that, due to digital platforms such as Zoom, Skype, FaceTime and various Rooms, many families and friends have managed to maintain their emotional unions.

Whether it’s the young fledgelings prevented from fluttering out to their wider branches, or the elderly and lonely that we suddenly remember (and realise can be contacted, if they at least have a smartphone), we now have a pulsing web of care and connection at our fingertips. It’s not hard now to throw something like an arm around far-off shoulders.

If family can be a verb as much as a noun, then these technologies allow us to “family” – to gather the various distributed beloveds together, in a way that removes the usual objections of travel, expense, busyness. And which potentially includes many more in the circle than strict kin.

Yet will all this love-tech recede, as our usual over-worked, anxiously-consumerist norms whirr back into life? During her press conference, the First Minister continued: “We’ve

all waited a long time for this and I hope you all really enjoy it. But please, please really respect the parameters we’re setting out – respect each other’s space. Make sure things still feel different to normal, because they should still feel different to normal.”

She’s right there. I suggest further that it would be better for our mental health and resilience, indeed our long-term collective survival, if we permanently felt “different to normal” from this point onwards.

THE point I’m stressing about these virtual communities and relationships – feverishly predicted for so many years, now suddenly as banal and expected as a family duty – is that we will have to start valuing them as authentic, not artificial encounters.

There will not only be second waves, but also unpredictable mutations of this class of virus (and others anticipated by epidemiologists and microbiologists). We will inevitably be hustled indoors again, chased out of our touchy-feely, motor-mouthing social spaces.

Contagion is not the only biospheric force that will compel us to live “differently to normal”. If the way we return to work, play, shop and associate generates as many planet-heating externalities and waste products as before, we’re simply storing up disaster.

We will have to start imagining ways of going about our lives that feel as experientially radical as the lockdown has. And then we have to actually live those lives, rather than endlessly postpone the needed shifts.

Much help – in the form of better regulations, new institutions and convincing messaging – will be needed for the Scottish population to make, or even recognise the need for, such a shift. (Keep an eye on Common Weal for strong developments here.)

But as we wait (and wait, and wait) for the top-down to get its governing act together, we all have a part to play as social animals: we can set standards in our own behaviour that others might emulate. What certainly helps that happen is when something becomes a ritual, rather than just a meeting.

My family have been “familying” strongly across their info networks across the last few weeks. I wonder whether that kind of regular check-in is about to become a new and meaningful ritual across these islands.

I’m also much more optimistic than others I know about the effects of “cheering our carers” every Thursday at 8pm. I accept that it’s sentimental; easily manipulated by the tentacles of our establishment; a distraction from the low wages and ill-equipped conditions that care workers endured before this crisis, and are likely to endure after it.

However, I’m still holding out that this new ritual solidifies itself, and becomes one of the pointers to a genuine corona-shift in attitudes.

As usual, on Thursday, I took my wooden spoon and saucepan and bashed away at the window. I noted the exuberant sax playing from the balcony over the road, the babes-in-arms waving at windows, the old ladies cheering from their front steps.

And I marvelled at how different this is from the things we usually do on this archipelago (outwith the usual 90-minute patriotisms). It chimes with what the writer Rebecca Solnit, who has studied community responses to disasters, calls “a carnival of compassion.”

This is something, at least, for cultural activists to build on. (The indy movement, as we know, has been developing that carnivalesque dimension in marches and interventions for years.)

Maybe also (and maybe best) we should let these rituals, habituating us to our next system, emerge organically. Or at least, try to foment them with the requisite modesty and awareness of hubris.

I think those modest attitudes have marked Sturgeon’s tone and approach to managing this crisis (even if the actual precautionary measures haven’t much strayed from a UK-wide approach).

We all need to carefully piece together a new normal, out of the cracked and fractured chunks of the old one. Arrogant exceptionalism hardly cuts it, in such a general meltdown.

Meantime, I’m booking a video-blether with Thing 1 (the earlier version of Thing 2) today, deep in the Midlands as she is.

A father’s love is allowed to be only a few clicks away, surely.