Is the coronavirus lock down the rebirth of community?

I live in an extraordinary ordinary community, just like yours. Up and down the country, every hamlet, village, street, borough, estate and block has rallied around its most vulnerable.

This pandemic has made us look more inwards, has forced us to reexamine our relationships with neighbours. The familiar faces over the garden fence or front gate, once only nodding acquaintances, are now our comfort and support.

Online, where most of our public life now happens, I watch seven men in stockings and suspenders dancing in a socially distanced fashion around their wheelie bins in North London. The only purpose of this bin day burlesque is to entertain. These ordinary men are making thousands of people laugh across the world, but their neighbours filming the scene are crying actual tears of mirth.

Here in my tiny hamlet, home to four French Horn players and a number of frontline NHS staff, we make weekly music across the fields as well as applaud.

Your community, like mine, is probably extraordinary. This pandemic has uniquely rekindled the idea of socialising with and relying on neighbours. Your local council has probably stepped into the breach of large public institutions impeded by geography and social distancing measures. Grassroots organisations will have swung into action. People reach out to help people they know are struggling.

If your local community is anything like mine, it will know who needs help with self-isolating, and will have have been providing that help for weeks. If your extraordinary community is anything like mine, notes will have been pushed through the doors of older neighbours offering to pick up shopping or medicines. If your community is anything like mine, the entertainers will be cheering you all up in many astonishing ways.

The last 30 years of the internet have been very unfamiliar to many people, as alternative communities build online -sometimes in ways that can seem quite threatening-, and people never even learn their neighbours' names. This pandemic has rekindled and boosted our relationships with our physical neighbours, people we might not in ordinary times have much in common socially, but at whose sides we now all face the same invisible foe.

Once we reach the end of the crisis phase of this disease, once we can control it more, will we go back to "normal"? Will we go back to seeing our neighbours as part of the landscape, but a passing nod over the bins? After we have shopped for people, chatted over WhatsApp and spread entertaining memes, seen their bakes and cakes, lifted them up when they were down, how could we ever go back to the old "normal"?

Well, in the same way it's not possible to unsee those bin day guys in stockings and suspenders, nor any of the other many quirky ways we've expressed lockdown creativity, I doubt we can ever roll back on the sense of community developed during this pandemic period.

I believe our extraordinary ordinary communities are here to stay.

Written by councillor Eleanor Rylance - parish councillor, district councillor and Liberal Democrat Parliamentary spokesperson for East Devon.