Caroline O'Donoghue: I knew, in a sort of instinctual way, that if I were in Cork we would all be behaving differently
A few days ago, at the end of another long, grey, cold day of lockdown, utterly identical to the one before it, I looked up at the sky and audibly gasped at what I saw. There, in my little south London neighbourhood, were a dozen Chinese lanterns floating into the air. The kind of parachute balloons that are propelled by a single candle, and can go miles and miles before crashing into a tree. A few teenagers stopped to look with me. We stood outside the corner shop and tried in vain to capture the phenomenon on our phones. But, like a full moon or a night filled with stars, it proved impossible to capture properly and in its full splendour. It was just for us, just for now. We stood, stock still, and watched. We saw more lanterns being launched, from some mysterious point a mile away and wondered what it meant. Chinese New Year? No – we were still weeks off.
The teenagers got bored and moved on, but my heartfelt so lifted that I practically danced down the street home. I spotted a woman putting her bins out. “Look!” I said. “The lanterns!” I pointed them out to her. “Why?” She said. I stood there with her for three minutes, talking at her like a Roald Dahl character. “Isn’t it marvellous?” I said, practically hyper. “Aren’t they gorgeous?” She looked suspicious, both of me and of them, for we were both foreign and inexplicable. She just kept asking why. Then, at last: “The council will have to pick those up.” And then she went back indoors.
