BlogOfTheMoon

We’re now into our eighth week of lockdown. And, to be honest, I feel fine. I’m actually surprised by how fine I am about it. Preceding lockdown, I was just back in the office after nearly a month of staggered strike action, so it felt odd to be out of the office again almost immediately.

Work in lockdown

We started working from home the week before full lockdown, when the government was just encouraging us to work from home, and the day before I left the office, I was talking to a colleague, saying how I wasn’t looking forward to working from home and how I’d probably drop into the office a few days a week. And then, bam, we’re all told to stay in our houses, except for essentials.

In just a few weeks, I’ve grown to thoroughly enjoy working from home, especially since I pulled out a second monitor and discovered that (despite what Google says), you can Remote Desktop from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 10 Enterprise Edition and make the RDP session stretch across both monitors. I had been very much missing my second monitor (#FirstWorldProblems, I know) and this resolved that issue (at the expense of a cluttered desk). I am thoroughly enjoying not having to commute into work every day, and I’m also finding that, for the most part, I have fewer meetings as well, which is fantastic. My work are awful for unnecessary meetings (how often have I walked out of a meeting and thought — or, indeed, said out loud — “that could have been an email”), so anything that discourages that can only be a good thing.

I’m lucky in that I can work from home pretty easily. My team quickly adapted to using MS Teams chats to replicate conversations in the office and after some trial and error, I eventually settled on the best way to do video calls (my workstation is a desktop PC so didn’t have a webcam, although I got one later, so video calls were done with a tablet balanced on a pile of books to start with).

I think even after this is over, I’ll try and work from home several times a week, if I can. I don’t know viable that will be; at the moment it works because everyone is doing it, but if most people are in the office and you’re the only one who isn’t, then it might be harder. But I think it’s worth trying.

I do, very much, appreciate that I’m in a very privileged position to think this way. I don’t have any children or dependants. I think my colleagues and my friends who have kids are finding it much harder than I am, and some would welcome a return to the office.

I settled into a routine fairly quickly. After we started working from home, but before lockdown, I was walking as far as the bus stop and back every morning, to get myself going, heading out at lunch time and again in the evening. Lockdown put a stop to that, but I kept a long walk after work, usually along the canal and back (although I did still take a quick spin around the block in the morning to start my day, but don’t tell anyone).

One thing I do still miss is someone else making lunch for me. I’ve always made my own dinners, but for a long time now, I’ve tended to have lunch in cafes and restaurants when I’m at work. I miss that, although I do enjoy sitting to read after lunch and only having a few steps to get back to my desk afterwards, which gives me more time to read.

Play in lockdown

That first week, all my weekly social interactions were canned, but it wasn’t long before we started to use Google Hangouts for a virtual pub meet, and virtual roleplaying, and using Discord and first Vassal and later Tabletop Simulator for Friday board games night. Soon, my regular social life was back in full swing. It was hard not going for dinner with friends and several long-planned theatre-trips were cancelled, but the regular stuff was back.

Initially, though, even that was difficult as every time I had a video call, I was reminded that I was apart from my friends and couldn’t hang out with them. That’s got easier as time as gone on — humans are pretty adaptable — but I still miss just being in the same room as my pals.

Like everyone else, I’ve been baking quite a lot during lockdown. The only problem is that I live on my own, so I have to eat everything I bake on my own. I can’t even give any to my upstairs neighbours (which I did at the start) as they’re Muslim and it’s Ramadan. That hasn’t stopped me though, with bakes including potato and cheese bread, cream-cheese filled banana bread and peanut-butter brownies. I definitely think I’m eating more during lockdown!

Leaving the house in lockdown

Apart from my daily long walk, the only other time I leave the house is to go shopping. I’m not vulnerable or a key worker or anything, so I’m happy to leave the online shopping slots to people who need them and just walk to the supermarket once a week as usual. For the first few weeks, there were long (although fast-moving) queues to get in, and lots of empty shelves. The queues are now much shorter, and almost all the shelves are full again. This is the only time when I’m in close proximity to anything resembling a crowd, and at the start, I was so starved of human contact, I even broke my cardinal rule and chatted to the person at the checkout!

Getting my parents home

The one big thing that I did worry about for a long time was my parents. They went on holiday to visit family and friends in India in February, long before Covid-19 was a major worry. They were due to be back at the start of April, but India closed itself to commercial air travel long before that. For a while, they thought that their commercial flight would just be delayed by a few weeks, but after the second cancellation, I got them registered on the wait list for the British Embassy’s repatriation flights (which only started after a degree of public pressure was put on the Foreign Office). Then there were several weeks of agonised (for my sister and me) waiting. My parents were safe with family and in no danger, but it was stressful at this end.

Eventually, a flight did come up, and the embassy arranged transport to the local airport and I was able to watch them leave the country in real time on Flight Radar. The Foreign Office only arranged for them to come into Heathrow, but there were still some flights back to Northern Ireland, and I got them on to one of those, and arranged for my uncle to collect them from Belfast. Watching the the flight, along with my sister on WhatsApp, was the only thing that kept me going through a dull Zoom meeting that was going on at the same time.

Also, can we take a moment here to appreciate the fact that I can, sitting at my desk in Glasgow, watch pretty much any commercial flight in the world with sensor readings, altitude, direction, current location and much more, in real time. Sometimes living in the future is actually pretty cool.

Human contact in lockdown

So, week eight and I feel fine. At this stage, I think I could work from home indefinitely, but I would really love to see my friends and family again. One issue with living alone is that I haven’t touched another human being in that long. And while I’m not necessarily the most touchy-feely of people anyway, the fact that I can’t pick up my nephlings or hug a friend is emotionally hard, even if in practice I might go weeks or months without doing so.

Politics in lockdown (or why Nicola Sturgeon is still awesome)

Finally, I can’t go through a post about life in a pandemic without talking about the political aspects. While we might applaud the UK government for the largest employment support scheme ever seen in the UK, their handling of issues like PPE for front line staff and the shambles of their handling the end of the lockdown has been disastrous. I’m very glad that in Scotland, we’ve got a consistent and clear message coming from Nicola (not to mention Janey Godley giving us the uncensored version that Nicola’s thinking but isn’t allowed to say 😉 ).