Abnormal new normal

It is amazing the things you can get used to. You do something often enough, no matter how odd and impossible it seemed at the beginning, and with repetition, the strange and the abnormal begins to grow on you.

The best example of this must be when you summon the courage to try Marmite and with time, it becomes one of your favourite spreads.

You can say all you want about it being sophisticated, the first time you taste Marmite, your reaction would be yuk! Or when you are not brought up on Kako, and you try it as an adult, you would have to persevere with it and discover that Kako is not just tolerable, but it becomes a delicacy you crave.

I remember my first virtual funeral. Everything about it seemed strange, a funeral means crowds and a lot of noise, or so it had been until COVID. It was back in April, my friend Mike Adjei had died in London.

COVID-19 was new and raging, the borders were closed and there was my Abyna Ansaa, all by herself in London and she had arranged his funeral, and the rest of us in different parts of the world were able to join thanks to technology.

At the time, I worried about wearing a T-shirt to sit in my bedroom, in front of a laptop, to be part of a funeral.

I have since then attended quite a number of COVID era funerals; in person, where I was one of the carefully enumerated 100 people allowed to be at the funeral service, and many more as part of a Zoom audience.

Funeral tech

Two Saturdays ago, we buried Dela, a good friend. At the church service we struggled to keep to the protocols, the numbers were overwhelming. Dela liked to sing and dance during her life and we felt she ought to be seen off in appropriate style.

What stayed with me was just how sophisticated the funeral technology had become. Live streaming is now part of every funeral service and it was from the recordings made by the two, out of her three children who were stuck in London and by my son in Texas that I got a clear idea of the ceremony I had attended in Accra.

I have this feeling that long after COVID is no longer in the headlines, funerals will never be the same again. The airports might be opened, and we might be able to travel, but it will become acceptable practice to join in the funeral from whichever part of the world you are and not make the journey to Ghana.

And if you can join a funeral in Accra from London, what would be strange about joining from Kumasi, a funeral being held in Takoradi and not making the journey? Sounds strange now but after a while, it will be the normal way for funerals.

Zoom wedding

Last Saturday there was a very posh wedding in Accra. In the church itself where the ceremony was held, they observed strict COVID protocols with rigid social distancing and masks, and the number of guests was kept to a minimum.

But the majority of the wedding guests were encouraged to stay at home and take part in the wedding service by Zoom. There was no question of joining in the service dressed in your everyday clothes.

Indeed, once you had been invited to the wedding ceremony, you were expected to and everybody dressed in the clothes one would wear to a wedding, complete with all the accessories imaginable.

In my previous life, we would have called it, all dressed up with nowhere to go, but this time around, you were supposed to dress up and sit in front of your laptop and join a wedding by Zoom.

My Doris wore a spectacular kente, matching jewellery and a dramatic hat, matching high heels and handbag, beautiful makeup and I suspect there was a liberal spray of some expensive perfume.

Apart from being encouraged to dress up for the occasion, the guests who joined online were guided on the protocols: you keep your video on and your sound off for the best experience.

I have this suspicion nobody is going to be spending money on designing and printing expensive programmes to be handed out at weddings anymore.

The programme for the ceremony is on the screen and why limit that to only those joining online when the few people inside the church can also have the programmes beamed onto the screens in the church.

The group photo would take in those who participated in the service from their homes. Offertory is of course online, courtesy of Mo-Mo. Presents for the newly married couple would have been already purchased from the list displayed online.

I am not quite sure how the little problem of guests not being able to attend the wedding reception would be dealt with, but it seems to me a small price to pay to be able to attend a wedding without going through all the traffic.

Virtual

I have never been able to reconcile with the virtual champagne and virtual cakes that well-wishers send online on birthdays and other celebratory occasions, and I doubt I would ever find a suitable virtual replacement for the wedding cake cutting ceremony or the champagne toast.

It might well be one of the conversation points for the elderly to bore young people with about how things used to be in their time.
Now that weddings and funerals are firmly online, it is not surprising that virtual ways have been found to enable us attend baby showers, outdoorings and christenings.

I won’t be surprised that the day will soon arrive when you would attend the online christening of a baby, born to a couple whose wedding you attended online and who you have

not seen, face to face, (or would it be mask to mask?) nor touched and you might even be asked to be a godparent to this child, all in this virtual world.
I used to be a great fan of science fiction books, but I doubt that anyone had imagined the world that we are now being asked to see and accept as normal.