Category Archives: covid-19

Working at home – top tips

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We’ve been working from home for twenty months now and it will be two years or more before it ends, if not more. For fifteen years before the lockdown, I was a Home Counties commuter up to offices in central London. Over those years, the biggest change I have seen would be that we take for granted today the availability of robust IT technology that enables us to efficiently deliver office-based services remotely from almost anywhere in the world.  

Some years ago I happened to fly to Aberdeen on business. I arrived at LHR and got to the security check: “please put your laptop in a separate tray“…laptop…laptop? LAPTOP? Arghh! My laptop was not present. But we had at that point, cloud-based IT systems that enabled me, without a laptop, to flawlessly deliver what my employer was flying me to Aberdeen to deliver. I was able to do this with no more hassle than logging into some other internet-connected computer. It was literally trivial. Today, changes have been forced over the last two years by the Coronavirus pandemic, that render the physical office itself barely relevant at all.

But we still have to work for a living. Working from home is not straightforward; it’s not obvious how to do it properly, and there are very good reasons why it is not always appropriate. This is something I believe: anything that blurs the distinction between work and rest, plays into the hands of the employer, not the employee. When Dilbert’s “pointy-haired boss” talks about “work-life integration” rather than “work-life balance”, that really is too true to be funny. Two things that blur the distinction between work and rest, both highly thought of by employees, both a potential minefield or poison chalice. Working from home is one of them. The other is the practice of “dress down Friday”, which we won’t go into here.

My top tips for working at home:

  1. GET UP
  • Maintain disciplined hours: get up more or less at the same time as you would have done if you were commuting to the office.
  • Dress properly – whilst slippers or bare feet is fine, for me, my clothes should be smart weekend casual at least – make an effort. I think a good rule of thumb is, if you needed to change to leave the house to go out for lunch, you’re probably not appropriately dressed.

2. START WORK, DO WORK, FINISH WORK

  • As far as possible have set hours for work, and follow them. Put the hours in. Keeping a record of hours to make sure you do, might be worthwhile, but don’t be a slave to the timesheet.
  • Try to avoid blurring work and rest.  Start work at a certain time, take breaks, take a lunch break away from your desk. 
  • As far as possible – and realistically it’s perfectly possible – finish work at a set time.
  • Don’t return to your desk “after hours” in the evening or at weekends – office hours is office hours.  At the end of the day you are the one granting permission to work evenings or weekends. Not your boss, your spouse, not your kids….YOURSELF. 
  • Do work
    • Have a written list of tasks for each day, do those tasks. Put a line through a task when it is done: make your work day about achieving small, discrete objectives, each one of them contributing to the greater objective of doing your job properly.
    • Don’t be afraid to close your door if you’re lucky enough have a door or a separate room to work in, and to make it clear that you’re busy and not to be disturbed.
    • Have breaks: make coffee, hang out the washing, talk to other people in your house, walk the dog, be flexible.
    • Acknowledge that you’ll have good and bad days: Not all days are good storming days; some days are bad days. It happens; roll with it. A storming productive day can often be followed by a slower, less productive day: it all averages out.
  • Finish work
    • Close down your work computer
    • Put your work equipment (laptop, papers etc.) away at the end of the working day – if you have the space, conceal it. Put it in a cupboard or somewhere it can’t be seen.
    • Mark the end of the working week with some small ritual or ceremony. For me this is a walk into town to buy a bottle of beer and a bag of crisps. It could be a take-away, or a movie night, or a longer walk, or whatever.
    • Try to avoid drinking alcohol on week nights – keeping off the alcohol in the week means the weekend becomes something a little more special.

3. LOOK AFTER YOURSELF

  • Create!! Do something different Engage your left brain. Do something that is not analytical, something that is not your work. It might be drawing, gardening, painting, sewing, cooking, learning a language, studying a subject, playing a musical instrument, doing a jigsaw. It might even be ironing! Anything is allowed so long as it’s different.
  • Be outdoors for some of every day. Ideally in daylight though this may be difficult in winter. Ideally alone though this may be tricky for parents! Get yourself some headspace.
  • Get plenty of exercise as clearly distinct from just a walk around the block. This is vigorous aerobic exercise 2-3 times a week.
  • Keep on eye on the calories: Don’t eat and drink more than you body can deal with.  A modern western diet is so high in calories that in a home-based “office” lifestyle if you’re not careful your weight will slowly and inexorably increase.

In all of these rules, don’t be a slave to rules, and do whatever works for you.

A year has gone by – an ongoing story

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A close friend of mine was speaking to me the other day, and he mentioned going from town to town in his work, and finding place after place closed and boarded up, businesses shut, opportunities lost. After a while, he said, it starts to get to grind you down.

On 2/3/20 I wrote this: “God only knows what will happen with COVID-19. One thing I know for sure though, is that the second-order effects of the disease, will be worse than the disease itself. The foundations our world are being shaken, softly, gently, by this COVID-19 plague. It is not close to an apocalyptic vision, but what this respiratory disease brings in it’s train is not the Four Horsemen, but shrunken economies, collapsed markets, lost sales, lost opportunities, missed chances, reduced travel. These second-order effects are worse than the disease.”

This week and recently we have witnessed the spectacle of the Prince Harry and Megan Markle media circus. A media feeding frenzy – over what? Why are these people even in the news? On 13/3/20 I wrote: “It’s quieter now and quieter still it will get. Yet, there is a news frenzy. Information has never been more readily available, yet the news media are like that pack of monkeys in some city in S.E Asia, scrambling and fighting over a single banana. They scramble for the tiniest scrap of news, hyping everything, hyperventilating, creating nothing but hyperbole. It is just extraordinary. And yet, opportunities for writers arguably have never been greater.”

“One who looks forward must see this: that things will not remain as they were” – Tolkien’s character Hurin, speaking the wisdom of the ages to us here and now. On 24/3/20 I wrote: “The first morning of the lockdown. There is a late frost; the sun is shining, there is no cloud in the sky. Notwithstanding the human element, the slow-down, nature continues toward Spring, with her slow, inexorable repair of the ravages of winter. Grey turns to infinite varieties of brown and a hint of green.”

On Easter Saturday last year, 11 April, I wrote: “What with all the clapping, and the endless announcements, and the police overstepping their powers, my heart remains heavy for Merrie England. People will survive, communities will go on, but Merrie England may reel and stagger from dizziness and nausea, before recovering and carrying on.”

On St George’s Day last year, 23 April, I wrote: “It IS the end of the world as we know it, and I DON’T feel fine. It is easy to have bad days in the lockdown, even in this lovely spring weather. Don’t get mad – get ready. Is it slow-motion apocalypse happening around us? It is pointless to mourn for old England for she is gone: to 2019 there is no returning. I don’t believe we shall soon see a soft return to the kind of normality we had. The kind of normality where angst-ridden middle-class environmentalists can assuage their guilt with ethical purchases whilst still taking the car to Waitrose three times a week. I’m talking about shortages of everyday necessities – we’re seeing it with flour just now. It may get worse.”

On 31/5/20 I remarked – as the first lockdown eased – that we could sit on our patio and enjoy socially distanced drinks and nibbles with two friends of ours. Real pleasant. A week later on 6/6/20, someone remarks during prayers for church that “we go in directions we have never been in before.” Arguably that were always true – or ought to be of healthy individuals – but it is doubly and certainly true of us at the moment in the time of Coronavirus. How will I manage to get my priorities right and do what is important before God, when in these times I am full of self-righteous anger and annoyance at what is happening around us? How will we cope with the institutionalisation of social distancing when it is all over? How do we restore ourselves to community in the actual rather than the virtual? Will there be a “roaring Twenties” like last time? One may hope!

On 25/7/20 I wrote: “We sense COVID-19 making a resurgence, and I believe we shall see further lockdowns once Autumn gets underway. This is the time when the government has abruptly required quarantine for travellers from Spain. This has thrown the Spanish Mediterranean holiday market into frenzied disarray , and more importantly to us, rendered impossible a visit from our oldest daughter, who lives in Madrid.”

On 12/8/20 I noted that the very hot weather was continuing. 27 degrees C in our north-facing bedroom at 7a.m. The other day I took both my daughters to two different airports; one to go on holiday, the other, to return to her home after visiting with us. Our son visited at the same time, and there was a day when we went from five adults in the house, to just us two, in a single 24-hour period. I personally don’t find this weather oppressive, though others have. I spent enough time in my last job working outdoors in really hot countries (Ghana, Gabon, Burma, Thailand etc), to not have to be seriously bothered by any hot weather that can occur in England. In fact I’m the other way round – these days I struggle with the cold til mid-April!! A few days later the weather broke – and what rain. Every weak place in our rain-water goods became apparent in less than five minutes downpour.

24/9/20 “When I woke up this morning, I heard a disturbing sound…” (James Brown, in The Blues Brothers). Actually what I heard was the sound of rain lashing down. It had stopped by the time I went for my walk. And that led me to realise that for all English people moan about rain and bad summers and all that kind of stuff, when I look back over the last six months, for there to be falling rain at 7a.m, is actually quite rare. At the moment I’m doing some research into a possible hiking trip to the Lakes. See Wild camping in the Lake District – October 2020 | Plateroom 28.

16/10/20 Today I received from a supplier, a Christmas present for my son, which we have still not managed to deliver to him, as another lockdown prevented a meeting and exchange of gifts before Christmas. It will be Lagavulin 17 or even 18 rather than Lagavulin 16, by the time he gets it!! Yesterday to a private medical sorted through my insurance company. It was instructive in that there was no doctor, just a perfectly polite and helpful medical practitioner of considerably less learning that a doctor. I confess I was unimpressed, although he did have a funky machine which enabled all kinds of measurements of my person without me taking my clothes off.

27/10/20 A visit to the Dower House Hotel at Lyme Regis. We have been lucky with travel in 2020. We visited Bergen, and then Lee Abbey in North Devon, before the first lockdown. And now we are visiting this delightful place in the all too brief window during the autumn when actual travel is permitted. A lovely interlude. It is the autumn though: this was the first time I had attacks of Reynauds Syndrome, that condition of frozen fingers. I found myself sitting indoors in a fancy restaurant in the middle of the afternoon, wearing gloves. I have worn gloves outdoors from that day until now. A few days later, there was a remarkable Sunday when we had a pub dinner!! (Now that IS remarkable in 2020) and then went onto church so I could play guitar at the last cafe service before another lockdown.

Twenty weeks of Coronavirus

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We’ve had thirty days of lockdown; let’s review the diary since mid-April.

23/4/20: It IS the end of the world as we know it, and I don’t feel fine. It’s easy to have good and bad days in this lovely springtime lockdown. But don’t get bitter – get ready. The worst is yet to come; the slow-mo apocalypse is happening all around us. It’s pointless to mourn for old England, for she is gone. No use crying over spilt countries, or mooning over past glories. There’s no slow return to normality, where all the angst-ridden environmentalist Guardian readers can assuage their guilt whilst still going to Waitrose three times a week. There will be shortages, there will be privation. This time now, it’s like the “phoney war” in spring of 1940. Ask someone who lived through the cold winter of ’47/48 what they thought about that.

25/4/20: Andrew Marr writes, “The most fundamental thing WWII changed was the political climate. It made democracy fashionable”. What will Coronavirus change? Civil liberties are no longer fashionable, that’s for sure.

28/4/20: It is possible that earlier reports of the demise of Merrie England, may (recalling our Mark Twain) be exaggerated. What is not in doubt is that that classic English quality of understatement, really is dead. And that, my friends, is moderately displeasing…

8/5/20 – VE 75: An action-packed day. We put up bunting, cleaned the house, made some party snacks, and had afternoon tea outside, dressed, so far as was possible, in 1940’s clothes, with red, white and blue in them. An absolutely delightful time of (socially distanced) fellowship all along the street in lovely warm weather.

16/5/20 Reading Margaret Attwood’s apocalyptic novel “Oryx and Crake” which has been a remarkable journey. Shouldn’t have done it really – not really appropriate reading for the current times, at all. Her story-telling draws me along and as an amateur writer, much I ought to learn from her.

18/5/20: The lockdown draws to an end, such as it is. This may be disastrous and cause a resurgence of the disease. Long have I maintained that the lockdown itself will cause more damage in the long run than COVID-19, so “disastrous” is a relative term. Workmen have returned to repairs on the aging railway embankment at the foot of our garden. A piledriver bangs its very necessary but distressingly loud way through the day. I’m informed that this particular embankment, between Croydon and Oxted, is one of the worst examples in the country, of cheap and nasty laissez-faire Victorian private sector railway construction. Who knew?

24/5/20 My latest read was written by my namesake Richard Hough, and is a biography of Captain James Cook. Very interesting reading. I made some oat crackers. We’re making a lot of our stuff bespoke now: bread, muesli, crackers, even pasta sometimes. Chutney when the apples are ready. With my wife to wish happy birthday to an old lovely older gent who lives locally. He has the habit of paying NO attention whatsover to anything you say, and yet he manages to do this without conveying offence.

31/5/20 This evening we had two friends of ours over for socially distanced drinks, at a table on our patio. It was the first social occasion for months other than the VE 75 celebration. Oddly enough, this couple were actually the last people we socialised with in the old times. We enjoyed a pleasant pub lunch with them in the White Hart at Brasted, on the weekend before the lockdown started.

5/6/20: This morning, on my walk, politics and moral philosophy are banging back and forth around in my head like my brain was an empty tin can with a handful of dried peas thrown in to make a rattle. Is it only me that happens to? I read in John Martin’s “Raid over Berlin” “…a long established group of five [prisoners of war] who…to some extent shared things, but not food. This was always individual as it was so precious“. An interesting observation of prisoners.

14/6/20: Last night I dreamed of writing a screenplay for John Wyndham’s classic novel about telepathy, “The Chrysalids“. I woke up and started fleshing it out from my recollection of the chapters. I ended up re-reading the whole book. Would anybody go to see such a film? Or watch it on Netflix?

21/6/20 Father’s Day. I receive some cards and a crate of beer. A good day. “…patiently with invisible structures he builds, and as patiently we must pray, surrendering the ordering of the ingredients to a wisdom that is beyond our own” – R.S Thomas, “Adjustments”, writing of a greater Father than I.

27/6/20 Today I made a cash purchase! I bought some shoelaces from the guy near the station. The first cash purchase since sometime in March. Later on my son and his girlfriend came to visit for socially distanced lunch and supper, and we had a feast of delightful food made by our middle daughter.

8/7/20 A morning of heavy rain. This is the first morning since all this began, that my early morning routine has been disrupted by the weather. So I’m sat in the bower at the end of our garden, listening to the pleasing and refreshing sound of rain on the roof. Looking out across the lawn, I can see it has prospered wildly from the rather smelly lawn-food I spread on it the other day. It is clear however that I did not spread it in an even way, for the prosperance is blotchy. A bit like all our lives!

A review of “21 lessons for the 21st century”, by Yuval Noah Harari

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A review of “21 lessons for the 21st century”, by Yuval Noah Harari

“If you can’t afford to waste time, you will never find the truth”. When you think about that, it’s either nonsense, or it’s the deepest profundity. Yuval Noah Harari’s book contains a handful of similar memorable quotes – another is “the problem with evil is that in real life, it is not necessarily ugly. It can look very beautiful”.

Overall I found this work rather negative, much harder to read than his excellent “Sapiens”, reviewed here. Today we rightly go to some length not to notice or to judge the characteristics, background or ethnicity of people. It really ought not matter, and of course it doesn’t. Now, with some writers you have little idea who they are, or what their politics are. The author is invisible; the story, the writing, is all. John le Carre is one such. But Yuval Noah Harari is not. The reality is that when reading him, it is impossible to ignore the fact that he is gay, very secular, and a Jewish left-leaning university professor. He seems to have a very low view of the human race, which may be partly understandable, but it is not a view I share. I have no time for that depressing but popular school of thought that sees humankind as a Bad Thing.

An important point he does make is that this is not a timeless age, these are very changeable times. He notes that a man in 1020 A.D would have been able to predict, with a reasonable degree of confidence, that things in 1060 A.D would be pretty much the same. That would be true through much of human history perhaps, until the 20th century. Then the pace of change really does start to pick up. Exactly why that was, would be the subject of more debate still.

Harari argues that today, in 2020, NO-ONE really knows what 2060 will look like – and this was written before COVID-19. How much less now? I can’t even see what the state of civil society will be in six months from now, much less forty years. In 1920 you might have dared to predict 1960 with some degree of success. But he suggests that to dare to predict 2060 would be pointless. (Actually, there are a number of writers and philosophers who do make just such predictions, though Yuval Noah Harari, as someone working in this area of thought, seems oddly unfamiliar with their work.)

He argues that the central skill that our young people need today, is not (only) the traditional “three R’s” or even STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths), but the ability to deal with change. And that our schools – us in effect, we elders – have failed to deliver this. Resilience – the ability to adapt, to be open to change. To recreate oneself, to re-engineer who and what we are. As someone once said to me, “the jobs of the future are the jobs of the imagination”. How do we recreate ourselves, not once, but again and again and again over the course of a career? How do we earn a crust in a world we can’t even imagine now?

But for all Harari noting that the pace of change may be accelerating, it is worth recalling that developing technology rendered it ever thus. There are not many fletchers, thatchers, archers, or ostlers around today. When trains were invented in the mid-19th century, coachmen, coach drivers, owners of coaching inns and so forth fought long and hard to restrict or prevent the spread of railways. They knew – they knew! Their jobs were going to disappear. But new jobs emerged. New trades became necessary. Harari argues that new jobs will cease to emerge as technology develops and as machine learning and AI improves, but again, I don’t share that view.

Dealing with constant change is just one of a number of important themes and ideas emerging in Yuval Noah Harari’s book covering some of the great philosophical questions of our time. Overall, his analysis of dramatic and unknowable change for the next 40 years, is somewhat despondent and a little overstated. Rather like George Orwell does in “1984“, he underestimates the power of cynicism, inertia and idleness, to say nothing of snobbishness, pride and vested interest. It’s a bit like when classic mid-20th century science-fiction predicted that we’d be on Mars by the end of the century. It never happened – not because we couldn’t, but because we didn’t. We couldn’t be bothered, or because other matters (the Vietnam War for example) were more important.

But one premise does keep me thinking: what if you were ruined tomorrow? What if – as Harari wonders – everything changes and your livelihood completely disappears? What are the steps to reinventing yourself? How do we deal with ultimate change? We’re all going to die eventually, so ultimate change really ought not, at least for Christians, be too hard to deal with. But the post-Christian mind, or the un-Christian mind, has less training to deal with that, perhaps. How do you deal with constant change in life? Not once but again and again and again?

Emily Barker at St. Peter’s, Tandridge – flashback to 2018

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This is a remix…since nobody is going anywhere right now, I consider it legit to repost earlier blogs about travels and events, the better to cheer us up in these days. There follows an account of a pop concert at St Peter’s church, Tandridge, in October 2018.

Earlier this year we attended the first pop concert in 800 years, at St. Peter’s church, Tandridge village. It was an unseasonably cold night in March, and late snow lay on the ground. Tonight, we returned, in mid-October, on what was another unseasonable night. This time, however, the weather was very warm. To be able to walk around on a mid-October night in shirt-sleeves is most unusual.

This event, like it’s predecessor, was a benefit gig aimed at raising money for the fabric of this wonderful and ancient church.  In this case, money is sought to install a much-needed loo: prosaic, but a vital human need.  And this evening was both human and prosaic, warm and uplifting, but friendly and community-oriented.  The Rector, Andrew Rumsey, introduced the evening with a warm-up act of a brace of autumnal songs that might have even been written for the occasion.

The actual support act for Emily Barker were two gents called Roy Hill and Ty Watling. These gents looked and sounded like characters from Mark Knopfler’s “Sultans of Swing”

…Check out guitar George
He knows all the chords…

Mind, Ty Watling did indeed know how to make his guitar cry and sing, and that he went on to do.  Roy Hill was of indeterminate age, and was in good voice, and made banter with the audience about how much better this was than their usual pub gig.  They started dark, with a song about pain beginning, and finished with a deeply moving number about failing mental health, yet, they were always somehow encouraging, humane, and uplifting.

Emily Barker came on and immediately impressed everyone with her beautiful clear voice and her guitar playing.  This evening has seen a series of guitarists bringing great joy and beauty into the world through their playing, song-writing and singing, like Chet Atkins:

…Money don’t matter as long as I scatter a little bit of happiness around
If people keep a grinnin’ I figure I’m a winnin’…

In between the numbers she told us stories of her early life with a discernable Aussie twang.  It is always engaging when pop stars do that – you want to know that they do go to the shops, that they were once kids in the back of a car going on holiday, singing along to cassettes.  She performed an old Bruce Springsteen number – “Tunnel of love” – to illustrate this story.

Somehow, the fact that she is a supremely skilled professional guitarist and pianist, a powerful and gifted singer and a talented songwriter did not discourage or demotivate. After the concert I was speaking to a lady in the audience who has Downs Syndrome.  She wants to write songs – and she was saying, by no means demotivated, how high the bar has been set by Emily Barker.  The lesson is, everything is possible; anyone can do anything if they set themselves to it.  A lady you might pass in the street, wearing blue jeans and a cardigan, has a voice like Aretha Franklin, a solo voice so beautiful, so powerful, as to carry an entire church in stunned silence.

“To one, he gave five bags of gold, to another, two, to another, one bag, each according to his ability” – Matthew 25:15.  It’s what you do with what you’ve got that matters, not how much you’ve got.

There’s a pattern emerging here with these concerts: Not so much inspiring, as inspirational.  Do new things. Dare to create, dare to do something new with your bag of gold.

Thirty days of lockdown

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Have I traded the muse of the poet, the heart of a prophet, the freedom of a writer, for the mess of pottage we call a regular income? Maybe not: everyday things like a regular income have a higher value than we imagine, at any time, and particularly in these times. Others have been and are being blessed, in many ways, because I keep on keeping on.

Thirty years ago a band called The Lilac Time released a song called “Return to yesterday”. It is a delightful song, but the words have told a story ever since and are apposite for today, more than ever before. As I’ve written elsewhere, there’s no going back to yesterday – though we none of us, not one of us, have quite realized it yet. They sang We’ll face this new England like we always have / In a fury of denial / We’ll go out dancing on the tiles…

There follows some personal reflections from the first month of living in this new England.

16/3: “The road ahead gleams in the rain like a silver ribbon. It holds endless possibilities”… I’m sure this date will live for a long time – the day when the closed-in living began. I dislike the expression “lockdown”. Today an old man fell over and I helped him home. I missed the PM’s broadcast when he told us all to stay indoors.

18/3: Each day, writing for ten minutes on one single subject. Today – weariness. The variety of weariness is not thin: it falls from the sky in many forms. I have known it in many ways, some good, some bad. Waves of sleepiness. An alert, diamond-like wakefulness. The unwillingness to talk; the irascibility. The pleasant weariness of a job well done.

20/3: “Revolution, slow time coming” – Buck 65 – Blood of a Young Wolf. Today it feels like defeat being snatched from the jaws of victory. We need to find a way, in this time of sameness, when many of us are living AND working at home, to mark the beginning of the weekend – which otherwise seems to be just the same as the week.

22/3: Listened to a heart-warming Youtube address from our friend Bishop Andrew Rumsey, in which we’re encouraged to “plant seeds and stay grounded”. In the garden, fantastic, delicate patterns of filigree, in the skeletons of last year’s leaves. Friendly robins come close – and when I find a piece of flint, I am drawn to reflect on wealth. What is wealth?

25/3: Today is my wife’s birthday. We had tea together in the morning and she opened her presents. Dinner out will have to wait, perhaps. A good day at the office, although I found it literally, not metaphorically, somewhat tiresome. At 4pm, tired and I’m not going to go for a run. It seems inappropriate. In my object writing I reflect on visiting my grandma by omnibus, in the mid 1970’s.

27/3: Another sunny morn: the light remains beautiful at sunrise, grazing the stalks in a nearby field, highlighting the folds of the land. I am daunted and awed by the compassion and the creativity of others. I feel borne down by endless lecturing on social media – STAY INDOORS they say, and then I block them or hide them. I will be run over yet by the grinding wheels of collectivism. Though I do mostly stay indoors.

28/3: But what do I know of isolation? I fear for those in tower blocks with north-facing windows in a sea of grey tarmac; for those in damp and dingy bedsits. For those crammed in one or two rooms with squalling kids and sullen or angry partners. We have become, perhaps (as a Dutchman I know once said) “a nation of wuss”. We ought not become a people who are perfectly capable of controlling negative thoughts – but don’t…

29/3: Today I built a desk and shelves in the garden shed. It looked just like the image my wife printed – make it like this picture, she suggested. I am no joiner but it looks well enough. Building it did wear me out though – a long physical day in the cold actually made me dizzy. But that was low blood sugar. We dealt with that with some hummus and a very strong Gin and Tonic.

30/3: Today I broke a tooth, upper left molar, Oddly enough I am not the only person who has done so amongst my social media circle. There is no discomfort. Yet. Just as well.

31/3: I do love the early mornings. Never thought I’d be a lark rather than an owl. Heartened to read of pushback against the way the police have interpreted Boris’s Coronavirus Act 2020. I long for the day when it is repealed completely, but I confess I do not find that likely. What really depresses me is that there are people who fully approve of these new restrictions on our civil liberties.

1/4: Though I took a good day “at the office” I am depressed. I read an article in “Wired” about the future, and this has cast me down. I ought not have read it. Lord, fit me to serve You faithfully and set my face like flint to the task ahead.

2/4: I ran 10km in 58 minutes. I read about metaphor – a collision between ideas that don’t belong together. In metaphor, conflict is essential. Later, I read a senior lawyer who reminded us that it is the job of the police to uphold the law, not ministerial preference. The Prime Minister’s word is not law. This seems important to me, though perhaps not to others.

4/4: Weary with my own sense of individualism, my own ostensible lack of interest in what the community thinks. Make a better team player, O Lord! Teach me how to care. And yet, like “Blurry Face” from the American band 21 Pilots? I DO care what you think.

5/4: My birthday and Palm Sunday. Liberty – “it’s my birthday, and I wants it”. Now is not the time to release your inner Gollum, Nick. But what a lovely day; some gifts of railway books and a case for one of my guitars – though this lovely gift will only come into its own later. Technology provides a chance for my wife and I to meet and chat in a virtual space with all three of our kids.

7/4: Milder weather. I feel a tangible sense of guilt that I am less disciplined in the afternoon than in the morning. I’ve done my best work by 10a.m. In the late afternoon, my heart and brain are mush.

8/4: Sat for the first time this year in a little bower we have created at the end of the garden. A neighbours’ daughters are playing. One can hear the inherent bossiness of little girls, and perhaps of the first-born, as the older bosses the younger around. The sound of children playing is one of the greatest sounds. What is your favourite sound?

9/4: I ran 10km in one hour before 0700 and collected a birthday beer from outside the house of a friend. Thanks Paul!

10/4: I come into the kitchen and hear some politician on the radio droning away about how many items of PPE have been made – 325 million items of this or that – and for a weird and unpleasant moment I actually become Winston Smith. This feeling I have to shake off: Dylan writes “if my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d stick my head in a guillotine” and it were true of me on occasion.

12/4: Easter Day: So many others have more positive attitudes than mine. What with the endless bad news, with the police overstepping their powers, with social distancing and the twitching of social media curtains, my heart remains heavy for Merrie England. On the plus side, my daughter recommended Margaret Attwood’s “Oryx and Crake” which I started reading immediately.

13/4: It is now a month since I was at the offices in London SW1! The weather breaks to grey, flat skies and gusting wind. Today I ran 10240m in 56 minutes which is fighting fit.

16/4: We’re all finding ourselves, from time to time, in difficult places. I remember again – or at least try to – those who are less fortunate. I finish work and find I cannot face looking at computer screens anymore. ’twas ever thus perhaps. I want something physical, tangible. I shall practice guitar.

18/4: I’ve finished Anthony Lambert’s “50 great train journeys” and Andrew Martin’s “Night Trains”, and I’m reading Tristram Hunt on the English Civil War. Along with “1984” it is possible that this last may lead me in directions that are not entirely constructive – but I can do no other.

It is fully spring now. Flowers are coming out; seedlings are sprouting. We may hope that such growth is not only horticultural but cultural as well, in the months and years to come.

The Colditz Night Exercise in 2019

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No-one will remember, in years to come, the fact that this year’s Colditz Night Exercise was in fact cancelled due to flooding on some of the country lanes where the hike was due to take place. But already at the point of cancellation I could see that COVID-19 was going to rear its ugly head. No-one would have batted an eyelid had I cancelled the hike due to the Coronavirus.

The Colditz Night Exercise is not unique; any number of similar events take place each year in Scouting up and down the country. When I lived in Derby, there was something called the “Fez Night Hike”, named not for a Turkish hat but for the first names of the three Explorers that started it. The arrangements may differ – but the principle is the same. Young people in Scouts and Explorers gather in teams to conduct some form of initiative hike during the hours of darkness, then sleep on the floor of a hall or Scout hut, have breakfast, followed by a brief award ceremony.

We’re all stuck indoors now: so I looked back in my diary and found a brief account of the 2019 hike, to cheer us up.

I‘m very tired this Sunday afternoon after Colditz. Outside there is an attractive long and slanting summer light, dust-filled and orange, fading to evening as I sit here. Just now there was a brief and somewhat indistinct thunderstorm…This was my third Colditz as District Commissioner. I fretted and worried beforehand. I always do. I organised and administrated my way through the preparations in the weeks beforehand and I had my deep concerns. But it was alright on the night. It all went well. All my concerns were unneedful in the face of the unstinting efforts and tireless contributions of my colleagues and fellow Scouters. A few people stood out; I’ll name them not on a public blog. But everyone contributed something; All played their part – the drivers, the caterers, the spotters, the adult walkers themselves.

We recce’ed the course. In the grey afternoon we put out all the signage at the checkpoints. In the evening we gathered at the school gym. The young people and their elders arrived to the usual organised chaos – an empty hall soon disappeared under a sea of roll mats and sleeping bags. We watched in dismay as the weather deteriorated. The first teams were delivered to the start of their hikes around 9 p.m, in lashing rain and gusting high winds. The rain beat on the tarmac, thundered on the roof of the minibus. Flooded roads, gouts of white water spraying up from the bus.

The last teams got “on the hill” as it were (or onto the North Downs country lanes) at 22:11 – about eleven minutes behind the ambitious and detailed plan created by my ADC (Scouts). So far so good. On events like these there then follows a quiet time. One recalls previous Colditz Night Hikes. Driving along a road sometime after 2a.m through patches of mist. A team of girl Scouts sat in the minibus on the way to their drop-off, singing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” at the top of their lungs. The time the Surrey police called out their helicopter because a suspicious householder thought they’d seen armed men in the woods. Or perhaps it was just Scouts with sticks? The time a group of Explorers went the wrong way through the woods – and found and rescued an old man who’d fallen over on his way home.

A few minor hiccups emerge: a checkpoint at such and such a location has fallen over and can’t be seen – drive out there and fix it. A youngster is poorly and needs pulling out and escorting home. Then, not long before 1 a.m, the fastest team – group of Explorers – calls in to say they have finished. How did we do this before mobile phones? The weather starts to clear, and by 2 a.m it is a cold and bright moonlit night. Up on the North Downs, where this year’s routes are, the temperature starts to fall.

I pop up to the refreshments base at Botley Hill to see how things are going. Everyone is standing around shivering, adults and youngsters. Soup and hot chocolate are flying off the shelf. While I was there, two Saturday night idiots, one of them in a red sports car, arrive and start to show off, drifting and skidding their cars round the tiny Botley Hill roundabout. Scouts and leaders look at this display, shaking their heads. Everyone is somewhat bemused by how crass and stupid it is. These people are supposed to be grown men! What did Shania Twain sing? “OK. So you’ve got a car”.

In deepening cold the last teams were extracted from up near Chelsham Common at the quite late time of 4a.m. But they finished! A big shout out to all for their efforts put in. It really is true to say that it is the taking part that matters, not the winning. A distinctive of these slower teams was that little or no navigational assistance was offered to the young people by their leaders. That is certainly not true of all the teams, whatever the leaders may say…

Running back with the last team, I experienced a deep, almost physically nauseating wave of weariness. Anyone who ever stayed up overnight will understand this – tiredness comes in waves. But you may be sure it was most unwelcome while driving a minibus full of Scouts. Only by a supreme effort of will and opening the driver’s window, did I avoid putting the bus onto the grass verge.

Back at base at the Oxted school gym, I needed a break and a cup of sweet tea. While I was “resting” two of us laboriously cleaned one of the minbuses, removing the protective plastic sheeting we’d installed on the seats earlier in the evening. These buses were rented to us by St Bede’s School in Redhill, and they were almost brand new. They even had that “new car” smell. A shame to let them get dirty, even if they are there to be used. Even the best behaved teenagers are in general very hard on the interior of minibuses.

The Scouts slowly settled to some sleep. The ADC (Scouts) laboured over the sums – who was going to win? A hero (again unnamed) drove round all the routes and removed the signposts at the checkpoints. In the cold blue light of early dawn, a colleague and I drove through to Redhill so I could drop off the cleaned minibus, and he gave me a lift back. A trip from Oxted to Redhill and back – twenty miles round trip – in less than fifty minutes. All but impossible in the day time. Back at base, an hours kip. Then, it’s bacon buttie time and the awards!

Who did win? It doesn’t matter – every youngster who ever took part in a Colditz Night Hike has won. How many people do you know have escaped from Colditz right here in rural East Surrey? How many people do you know have hiked through the night in pouring rain, dove into ditches hiding from cars, enjoyed that camaradie of tiredness, and finally fell asleep in the company of others, on a cold hard floor? #iscout #skillsforlife.

One who looks forward

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“One who looks forward must see this: that things will not remain as they were”

So says J.R.R Tolkien’s character Hurin to his wife Morwen, on the eve of a great battle in the elder days of Middle Earth. On my morning walk today, before starting work-at-home, I could see that things would not remain as they were. The very first thing I saw was that an elderly neighbour, taken to hospital after a fall yesterday, was now back at home. The next thing I noticed was that London’s orbital freeway, the M25 – within six hundred yards of us here – was as noisy and therefore as busy, as on any other day.

But then I heard woodpeckers – their distinctive noise the machine-pistols fired by the advance guard of spring. And I knew that things were going to change. There’s a hint of colour in the air; the depressing grey of winter is slowly fading to green. The birds are singing. Spring is coming.

What will become of us? This is a legitimate question, not defeatist or negative in any way if asked appropriately. Often, dystopian stories portray apocalyptic events as happening suddenly – almost overnight. In a hundred brief minutes in the cinema Hollywood shows us earthquakes, super-storms, wars and plagues, fiery meteor strikes. We see what happens first to the collective, and then, a focus perhaps, on one hero or heroine and their family.

But changes are now afoot that are not so sudden, nor so dramatic – yet, nonetheless profound, deep-rooted and potentially long-lasting. Changes that have the power to affect us all individually as well as collectively. Changes wrought not so much by the disease COVID-19, as by the consequences it brings in it’s train. Our leaders are starting to calculate the human and economic cost of those consequences, and they are, I think, proving to be very difficult sums. There is perhaps a thin, unyielding mathematics to be performed. As yet, most of us have not so much as sat down in front of the maths teacher.

Big events are being postponed – football matches, concerts, gatherings, parties. But there’s an implicit assumption that things will return to normal, that in due course things will be as they were before. I am not so sure. As one who does looks forward, I foresee that things will not remain as they were, nor will they return in the short term to how they were before. To 2019, there is no returning.

Of course we must take care to be positive, upbeat and appropriately encouraging – but at the same time, we must prepare for living differently. Living kinder, living slower, living more locally. A lot of people face financial difficulties in the months ahead as the economy shrinks. There’s potential hardship and ruin for many, except we find a way of sharing what we have, better than we do now. God knows I’m no expert on this…but I think there’s opportunities ahead for us all to demonstrate that we do see that things have changed, and we can do things better and differently.