Month: March 2020

Within These Walls

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in The C-Word, Work

I’ve been sent home from work!

I was sent home from school once, when the nit nurse told me and my little friends that we had to leave. And over the years I’ve left work unexpectedly for many reasons: accident, power cut, redundancy, childbirth. (Is it me, or did I go a bit ‘Tom Baker’s speech in The Ark of Space’ there?)

But it’s none of those this time (especially not childbirth!) It is of course the dreaded virus.

I don’t have it, I hasten to add before you leap the statutory two metres back from your computer screens – but after Monday’s blunt “work from home if it is at all possible” speech from number ten I went into the office on Tuesday morning to be told that it is (possible).

I needed a little bit of training on how to access work’s computer from home, but luckily my colleague is much, much smarter than me on that score, clever enough that he could talk an idiot through it in five minutes – and so five minutes later, with a big wad of paperwork under my arm, I left. I have to admit, I felt unexpectedly emotional as I drove slowly back down the road with Let It Be echoing in my ears. (They were playing it on the radio you understand, my colleagues didn’t spontaneously pipe me off with a haunting acappella version).

I’ve never worked from home before, but I knew instinctively that in order to avoid it becoming an excuse to be lazy (and I don’t always need that good of an excuse, frankly) I would need to establish a clear schedule for myself.

At the risk of sounding smug, in just a few days I think I’ve settled into a pretty strong routine. First thing in the morning I check for new emails in my dressing-gown (yes I know, strange place to have… well, you can see where that’s going). Then there’s the board-meeting with the dogs. Following a bit of spreadsheet jiggery-pokery (because frankly, who doesn’t love a spreadsheet) it’s time for the lunchtime video-conferencing with my colleagues in Erinsborough and Weatherfield. And, well, before you know it, it’s time to clock off and have tea.

I jest of course (well, mainly) and in fact it is taking a bit of adjusting to. The flipside of the modern technology that enables me to be working from home is a partly-irrational sense of being constantly ‘visible’. There isn’t a webcam or a phone tracker logging my every move; I’m not expecting to get my payslip next month with a huge chuck of time deducted for every time I’ve walked over to the biscuit tin; and frankly, lockdown or not, I’m not convinced my boss would have ever suggested I work from home if he didn’t think I’d actually do any work. But at the same time, there’s a constant sense of needing to demonstrate that I am taking the instruction to work at home seriously, and not just interpreting it as meaning ‘Upstairs Downstairs marathon’.

Despite that, though, I suspect the usual distinction between home and work time will become blurred for the duration. As a rule it’s clearly defined by the ten mile journey between the two but now that’s meaningless. I don’t normally work Fridays (I know that sounds a bit like the old “How many people work here?” “About half of them” joke; what I mean is, I don’t normally go to work on a Friday) but today I’ve been able to do just an hour in the morning and another hour late this afternoon. In the normal course of events that would be impossible, unless I swanned in partway through the day in an “It’s only Sonia!” kind of way. Keying in or crunching numbers, even replying to emails, doesn’t actually require office hours, or even daylight – and I suspect I may end up doing an hour or two in the evenings instead.

Frankly I could stay up till 1am and do all my work then couldn’t I – I mean, it’s not like I need to get up to go to work in the morning!!

Keep safe. X

Going Viral

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Family, Little Bit Of Politics, The C-Word, TV

Coronavirus is a bit like Kennedy’s assassination.

I don’t mean that everyone remembers where they were when they caught it; and unlike certain corners of the Chinese administration, I’m not blaming it on the CIA either. No, in fact I’m recalling David Frost being interviewed about how they’d put together TW3 the weekend of Kennedy’s assassination.

As a big news story, they couldn’t just ignore it, but equally it hardly screamed ‘comedy gold’. So, he said, they decided they would deal with JFK’s death for the first five or ten minutes, and then get back to ‘business as usual’ with the rest of the news.

It quickly became apparent, he went on, there wasn’t any other news.*

And that (a mere hundred or so words later) is what I meant, when comparing the two at the top of the page.

Because there isn’t any other news at the moment. The race for the Democratic nomination is now, what candidate Biden said about the coronavirus; the debate about whether Trump is fit for office or not, has become criticism over his response to the coronavirus; even our dear old friend Brexit has been reduced to, should the negotiations be delayed because of (you guessed it) the coronavirus.

It’s a global story – but one with the potential to become a very personal one in an instant. It’s difficult to get one’s head around statements like “another 133 dead”. But it’s very easy to imagine (indeed, to dwell on) what might happen if my Gran gets it, say, or Bernard next door who has had lung cancer.

I’ve chosen those examples very carefully, in that my grandparents all passed away some years ago; and I don’t know anybody called Bernard. But that’s really only an avoidance technique because less abstractly, my parents are both in their seventies (and, although I suspect he still thinks we don’t know, actually we DO know that when Dad pops to the garage it’s for a cigarette); and my brother in his early fifties is both asthmatic and diabetic.

In other words, all three of them are in what the media has given the less than comforting tag of “the high-risk category.” The regular comment that fatalities seem to be confined to the elderly or those with pre-existing medical conditions is all very well, but it’s hardly reassuring if you’re elderly or have a pre-existing medical condition…

At time of writing at least, none of them are reporting any illness, and as yet I’m not aware of any cases in our area at all. But that entire sentence is, as they say, subject to change – and things seem to be changing so rapidly.

For all that though, if it wasn’t for the constant news bulletins, and the newspaper headlines, and my colleague at work who is almost obsessively fascinated by the information available on the spread of the disease (which is fine, but only up to a point – it’s good to be informed, not always nice to be reminded); if it wasn’t for all that, in day-to-day life I don’t think I’d be aware that anything was going on.

The British have a reputation for ‘keeping calm and carrying on’ – although before we get too cocky about that, it’s not always been on show this past week. Loo roll was the first (inexplicable) thing to suffer panic-buying followed, at least based on local observation, by stockpiling of dried pasta and onions. I have to say, a diet consisting of just that is a horror which none of the many entries into the ‘post-apocalyptic’ movie genre has ever dwelled on, but it would certainly explain why Max was so Mad.

In general, though, at ground level we are, if not keeping entirely calm, at least carrying on. Other than a great deal more attention to handwashing this week, I’m not aware of anybody having made much of a lifestyle change. And I was in an odd way filled with a little flush of patriotic fervour when ‘variations on a theme’ of the government-issue handwash poster appeared online, with the default ‘Happy Birthday’ replaced with everything from ‘Ooh Ahh Just A Little Bit’ to ‘God Save The Queen’.**

My own particular favourite, incidentally, was the version set not to a song but to Davros’ “such power would set me up amongst the Gods” rant from part 5 of Genesis of the Daleks. Given the somewhat megalomaniacal edge to it, I’ve not had the nerve to adopt it, so instead I’ve been washing to Colin Baker’s character-defining “Ten billion years of absolute power” tirade from The Trial of a Time Lord part 13, which I’m clocking in at around 22 seconds.

I don’t know of (m)any other countries where this would happen. Obviously in some it would be considered insurrectionist to interfere with Government documentation, but even in, say, the US and other lands of the free where you wouldn’t be shot for it, I’m not sure the national psyche is quite so attuned to that sort of small-scale irreverence.

At least it’s made us all very aware of the need for cleanliness, even if it’s a shame that there’s not much more we can do apart from wash our hands. Well, wash our hands, bin our tissues, avoid excessive contact, keep our loved ones safe – and wait. As the token ‘not too old, and irritatingly healthy’ one in the family, I’ve offered to shop for my parents if it gets to the stage where they’d prefer (or are told!) not to go out; and at the other end of the scale I gather that the Queen has cancelled her forthcoming appointments. So it seems, on this occasion at least, that we really are all in it together.

Because, I suppose, we all breathe the same air – and we are all mortal.

Stay safe. X

*Which is why the programme was different that week to any other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Was_the_Week_That_Was#Kennedy_tribute The whole thing is well worth a read if you have time, the bit about The Third Man is especially entertaining.

**Credit where it’s due, the genius behind the hand-washing poster variants is a teenager from Northamptonshire: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-51823214  We salute you, sir.