Week One lessons learnt

I'm 90% certain that more or less everyone who writes a blog in the UK will be writing something along these lines, having completed their first week of working from home, or children being off school, or both simultaneously. And why should I miss this particular bandwagon? Even if it only occupies thirty people for 3 minutes each, that's another 90 life-minutes occupied out of a potential several months for all 65 million of us. Let's not think about how many life-minutes that is*.

Along with the rest of you, I have now been at home for a week. I haven't been to the shops; I haven't been to the library; I haven't been to work; I haven't run a football training session, or taken my team to a match, or watched a match. I have seen one friend, from the end of her garden path after I deposited groceries outside her house.

So, what are my thoughts at the end of the week?

I must always wear a sports bra when attempting "PE with Joe". This has been the most memorable lesson, and the one that I have learnt from the quickest. This may not be quite so important to other sections of society.

I am immensely fortunate to have a LittleBear who enjoys reading, and who is currently believing wholeheartedly in the continuation of the "school day", even if some of our lessons are watching old David Attenborough programs or completing elements of a 30-day Lego challenge. Having witnessed other people's struggles on social media, the fact that I have got the bulk of a four-and-a-half-hour working day completed every day is nothing short of a miracle.

I am bored of providing three meals a day for three people. I usually get bored with one meal; two is pushing it and three is just deeply tedious.

I wish that the entire family had had radical haircuts before social distancing and isolation kicked in. I already have longer hair than I want, and two somewhat shaggy bears. Soon we will be facing the prospect of Mummy-cuts, which is not something any self-respecting bear needs.

I have rediscovered anxiety. This is probably the least surprising discovery, as I suspect there are a great many people who have little prior experience of anxiety who are now discovering what us regular anxiety-sufferers have been living with for years. The unexpected tears. The panic induced by a total lack of control of one's situtation, creating a life that oscillates between frenzied, yet pointless, activity and paralysing apathy. The obsessive thinking, the sleeplessness, the tightness in the chest that makes you feel you'll never take a deep breath again, the sickness in the pit of the stomach.

In the space of a week I have discovered, and must work to remember, that the highs and lows can come in quick and bewildering succession. On Friday I had a gentle and warm sense that we were OK. We were warm, and fed, and together. We had not simply survived but even managed to enjoy some of our week of working and learning at home. On Sunday I spent much of the day desperately trying not to cry in front of my LittleBear as I looked too far ahead and felt daunted, overwhelmed and frankly terrified at the prospect of this continuing not for days, or weeks, but for months.

I have discovered the enormous blessing that modern technology brings to our lives. I have had video calls with my mother, brother, nephew and in-laws as well as with my colleagues. LittleBear has managed video chats with three of his friends. We have also managed to sit round two dining tables, me and LittleBear here, and Tigger and BoyTigger in The North, playing a board game**. We enjoyed it so much, we played two games, with a pause for a biscuit at half time. It was the simple pleasure of playing a game with friends, with inconsequential chatter, and no health risk. We are an incredibly blessed generation to have that option open to us.

I have decided that routine is important, as it prevents me and my mind spinning wildly out of control. It also provides my anxious and confused LittleBear with some stability and certainty. I have decided to extend this, as much as is reasonable, to the weekend. And we have decided that our new routine weekends will involve making a cake, and having a roast dinner. This second ensures that multiple meals are dealt with in the form of the roast itself, the soup made from the stock and a pie. Because we need pie. The National Flour Shortage may shortly create a Local Pie Crisis however. Ditto a Local Cake Crisis. Before that occurs, we did produce a Battenberg, which is the ultimate Bear Mood Enhancer.

Battenberg makes Happy Bears

And finally laundry. Laundry never ends. Laundry is no respecter of mood. Laundry ignores your anxiety. Laundry does not care about social distance.

* I couldn't help myself. For every month we spend cooped up, assuming we only have to concern ourselves with remaining occupied while we're awake, and assuming we're asleep for eight hours a day and that there are 65 million people in the UK, we have between us 1,934,400,000,000 minutes to occupy. I'm not going to be making much of a dent in it, am I?

** Not technically a board game, as there was no board involved. A card-based strategy game called Dominion. Usually this game dominates our joint summer holidays in the Lake District. It is unusual in having no random feature to it, so unlike Scrabble or cards, we can play the same game simultaneously in two locations.

Old-school engineering

A moment of levity for you.

Unlike many of my friends, I am coming to the sobering realisation that I am not key to anything. I don't work in the probation service, the armed forces, the NHS, a school, the food-supply chain or any element of critical national infrastructure. I'm pretty much useless in fact. Unless you really need to know the composition of gas trapped in the top of a jar of marmalade that's been in the cupboard for seventeen years because it turns out your family don't eat marmalade. Then I might be able to help.

I do, however, work in a small firm occupied largely by men from a previous era of British engineering. An era when going to the pub for a pie and a pint on a Friday was a perfectly normal thing to do. And going back to work after that pint was also perfectly normal.

In a move that is perhaps more representative of my company than anything I have ever seen, the Engineering Manager has brought a vat of chilli to work and the Managing Director has provided bottles of beer*. Nothing will stand between British engineering and its Friday lunchtime "pie" and a pint**.

Keep calm and carry on social-distancing.


* The company handbook states that it is strictly forbidden to bring intoxicating liquor onto the premises without permission of 'The Company'. Fortunately, the Managing Director embodies 'The Company' and is giving permission.

** It is impractical to re-heat any pastry-based object in the work microwave, so we have flexed on the definition of "pie". We take pie seriously here, and prefer no-pie to disappointing-pastry-pie.

Ahead of my time

A little over twenty years ago, BrotherBear gave me a book. Though I've only read it once, it has stayed with me, as has the memory of my own reaction to it. It was called "Into the Forest" and was written by Jean Hegland. It was a post-apocalyptic novel with two sisters attempting to fend for themselves after the total breakdown of society and technology. They lived in a rural area of the US and were accustomed to their family growing their own fruit and vegetables and bottling some at the end of the summer. But then, as food became more and more scarce, and they lacked the seeds or plants to grow everything they needed, they even resorted to making acorn flour to bake bread from.

It was this that tipped me over the edge, and thus it was that I sat sobbing to Piglet that I was going to die because I didn't even know how to turn acorns into flour, and I have no usable survival skills whatsoever. Being a very understanding Piglet, she humoured me in this total meltdown, and we hatched a Cunning Plan.

Our Cunning Plan hinged upon the fact that at that time friend Tigger's parents lived in a rural(ish) area, in a very large house, with very large grounds, and they grew lots of things, and Tigger's mother was one of those immensely competent women who knew how to pickle things, and made her own mayonnaise. So we decided that when the apocalypse came, we'd retreat to Tigger's parents' house and they'd already know how to preserve fruits, and we could work out how to make acorn flour.

And now here we are, more than twenty years later. There's no flour in the shops and I still don't know how to make flour out of acorns. And Tigger's parents have retired, and moved to a smaller and more manageable home. They might not even want me, BigBear, LittleBear, four Piglets, four Tiggers, and their other three children and families to descend upon them. Besides which, that probably wouldn't count as social distancing.

All my deranged plans have fallen apart. Why oh why didn't I learn to make acorn flour in the twenty years I had available to me??

Footnote: this is a joke. I am not worried that I am going to need to make flour out of acorns. Let's be calm and stop buying All The Food.

Everyone can disagree with me

Of course I'm writing a post about Covid-19, you all knew I would didn't you? But this isn't so much about the virus itself, as about that which is swirling around the virus.

It can hardly have escaped your notice that I am not the greatest cheerleader for the Tories, or indeed for the self-interested manoeuverings of most of our elected politicians. I am usually the first to leap to attack incompetence, venality or stupidity. However, and it surprises me to say this, I am becoming increasingly angry with the level of bitching and carping about the government response that I'm seeing on old-fashioned media, and social-media. What purpose does it serve to stoke fear? Whose interests are protected by spreading mis-information? Who are you helping by claiming to know better? There are people who I like and generally respect who I now feel are doing the job of the Daily Mail - spreading fear, distrust and doubt, fanning the flames of panic buying and selfishness.

I am as sick of comment pieces that start, "I am an epidemiologist and I think..." as I am of comment pieces that start, "I am not an epidemiologist, but..." There are as many opinions as there are arseholes in this country at the moment, and very few of them are helpful.

No, our government is not perfect.

No, they don't know what they are doing.

Nobody does.

Not me.

Not you.

This is new, this is scary, but however unpalatable you may find it, the government is trying to do the best that it can. You may or may not believe that its choices are the best, but you do not know any more than I do. The one thing that does seem to be the case is that the government is basing its plans on scientific evidence and modelling. I am heartily in favour of evidence and science.

Is our government making the same decisions as every other government? No, not exactly the same decisions, but the broad thrust remains the same, no matter the strategy used. And there will be no way of knowing which strategy is most effective until a long way down the line. Declaring that it's "nonsense" or "obvious" or "stupid" on social media is just... arrogant, futile, thoughtless and dangerous. There is enough anxiety, enough fear, enough misunderstanding.

To return to my old hobbyhorse of Brexit for a moment... a great many Leave-supporters made a habit of hurling accusations at Remain-voters that we just needed to get behind the plan and it would all be fine, it was our negativity about the outcome that was dragging the plan down. To my mind, that was arrant nonsense - my opinion on Brexit was clearly never going to have an impact on the negotiating stance of the US in trade talks, or the willingness of Nissan to make cars in Sunderland. This situation however, is quite different. Every time you talk down the government; every time you say it's making the wrong decisions; every time you say you know better, you contribute to undermining the possibility that people will follow government instructions. You contribute to fear, to panic-buying, to social unrest. You are society. You make the world around you. No matter what plan the government opts for, it will only work if they can take the people with them. Take you with them. Take the people who listen to you with them.

The modelling that our government is basing its advice on is available from Imperial College and makes genuinely interesting, and sobering, reading.

Among the many, many interesting statistics and forecasts in that model was the fact that it assumes only 70% of people will follow the instructions. Be that 70%. Encourage others to be that 70%. The smaller the percentage uptake of advice to isolate and distance, the more people die.

There is no simple solution.

There is no path through this that does not cause social disruption.

Sadly, there is no path that does not lead to people dying.

But there are paths that don't lead to the breakdown of the fabric of society. And I hope and believe that there are paths that lead to us being able to minimise the number of deaths. And that isn't just deaths from Covid-19. We need the health service to function to serve all those who are ill with everything other than Covid-19. We need businesses to stay afloat so we are not forced into another decade of austerity, because austerity kills - not as fast or as demonstrably as a virus does, but it still kills.

So wash your hands; distance yourself from your fellow citizens; isolate if you are vulnerable; isolate if you develop symptoms; isolate if someone in your household develops symptoms.

But don't insist that you know best about when or whether schools should close. The knock-on effects of closing schools in terms of both viral spread, impact on key-workers and economic-induced hardship further down the line may be worse than the effect of keeping schools open. Or it may not be. Nobody knows. Not me. Not you.

Don't insist that everyone should stop going to work. Those who can work from home should do so, but no companies are being told to close (as of government advice on 18th March) so don't bully or shame your friends into thinking they should stay away from work if the nature of their work isn't compatible with working from home, and they can maintain sensible precautions at work*. A functioning economy is necessary for the health and wellbeing of the people of this country after this outbreak. Insisting that everything must stop only breeds fear, and panic, and risks further social breakdown and hardship.

I am not, as I said, a cheerleader for the government. But I don't believe, however much I loathe them, that the Tories want us to die.

For once in our lives, we are in positions of power. For once, our actions are going to dictate how the situation unfolds. It is within us to help our fellow man. You may get sick; your loved ones may get sick but most of us will weather that with few problems. It is our duty to protect those who can't weather this virus. It is our duty to support every measure put in place to limit the risks to the vulnerable, and if that means supporting the government in word and deed, then that's what we need to do.

I can still think Brexit is a shit idea though.


* I will hold myself up as an example here. We currently have 7 people at work. We have 3 people self-isolating and 2 people working from home. Each of us at work is in a separate office. When we use communal areas, we all wash our hands with soap and water before and after entering the area. We wear single-use gloves when handling the scientific equipment that we make. No, mass-spectrometers probably don't count as critical national infrastructure at the moment, but if the company folds, it would never re-form and that would have surprisingly wide-ranging knock-on effects on R&D in this country, as well as putting twelve people out of work. We are following government advice, and if that advice changes, our actions will change.  

Uncommon sense

Most of us, most of the time, make use of five main senses - sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste. I have already mentioned previously that I have a somewhat compromised sense of smell. The rest of my senses are completely normal. Except my eyesight, which is buggered*. Despite this buggered-ness, my eyesight is my single most important sense. For most of my life, I hadn't really appreciated how much vision dominates my world, particularly compared to hearing. It was only when I started to talk to other people a little more about their interactions with the world that it began to dawn on me that I might not be in the middle of the bell curve.

This week, for instance, I was chatting to a friend, who asked what podcasts I listen to. Podcasts? Listen? Why would I do that? I read things, I don't listen to them. "But what about while you're cooking?" No, nope, that doesn't make any sense. If I'm cooking, I like silence. How else can I listen to the voices in my head?** I even find the sizzling sounds in a frying pan irritatingly noisy and distracting. I can genuinely think of few occasions, other than when I'm driving, that I would choose to listen to something rather than read it. (I don't read while driving. I have standards.)

The same friend also expressed bemusement that one of her other acquaintances would be happy to write and text her about mental health struggles, but will never speak about it in person, out loud. This strikes me as perfectly normal and sane. Writing is soooo much easier than speaking. Who would choose to actually talk about their feelings if they could write it down instead? You don't think I actually say most of the stuff I write here do you? Trying to talk about feelings gets me quite flustered and confused and I'm liable to go pink, fall over my words and/or start crying. That, admittedly, might be more about my psyche than my preference for the visual over the audible.

Leaving my inability to talk about my feelings to one side for now, it has only been in the last year that I have discovered that not everyone remembers things visually. How do other people know the way from place A to place B without being able to see it in their head? Unless I can picture the route as I've seen it on previous occasions, or picture the map of a new route, I can't imagine finding my way. As for spelling, if I couldn't see the word on the page in my mind's eye, I'm not quite sure I'd ever be able to spell anything that had more than five letters. And then I discovered that BigBear has almost no mind's eye at all, and appears capable of spelling, navigating and thinking without any recourse to a facility that seems utterly fundamental in all three to me.

As I said, I'm beginning to suspect that I may not be entirely representative of the rest of the population.

You might suppose that, depending as I do entirely on my eyesight, I would be particularly sensitive to lights, and find excessive visual stimulus A Bit Much. But in fact, it's completely the opposite. I like bright lights, clear illumination, and strong contrast. The more my eyesight degrades, the more I want everything to be bright and well lit. I hate the growing need to wear glasses for everything. I hate struggling to pick out fine details, or subtle shades of colour. I need to see everything, at all times, in crisp, clear detail. I can't think straight if I can't see properly. I am reminded at this point of GrannyBear, who claimed not to be able to have a phone conversation unless she had her contact lenses in. Like me, if she can't see clearly, she can't think clearly.

On the other hand, my relationship with my hearing is very different. I don't know if not wanting or needing to listen to things constantly is related, but I simply find sound very difficult. It's not something that I can put my finger on, but I'll try. I dislike intensely too many different sounds occurring at once, so a crowded room with multiple conversations makes me anxious and uncomfortable - not because of the people, but because of the cacophony. Even thinking about it is making my scalp tingle and itch in discomfort. Collecting LittleBear from school the other day was horrific. There were children running around and shrieking, as children do. I was unable to make any sense of the words my friends were saying to me. I could hear them, and I knew what the words were, but I couldn't do anything with them. The random extraneous noises overrode any processing my brain attempted, and the voices I wanted to hear just became more noise, my ears and brain feeling congested with a surfeit of stuff coming in.

The sound of clattering cutlery, or metal pan lids clanging against their pans can make me feel overwhelmed and filled with rage. The sound seems too big for my head, stretching my capacity to hold my own thoughts in place, as it inserts itself into every gap, squeezing everything else out. My ears feel engorged, ready to burst with excess noise. I become flustered and unable to process the rest of the world around me, or my own thoughts. It isn't physical pain, but noise is emotionally painful. That's as close as I can get to an explanation, and even then I feel as though I'm missing something essential about my experience.

In essence, I'd like to live in a brightly-lit, but very quiet house. Which is somewhat unfortunate, as BigBear is more or less the diametric opposite of me, and he'd like to live in a dimly-lit world with a soothing hum of voices or music accompanying him at all times. Fortunately we love each other and are able to compromise. I follow BigBear through the house, turning lights on and the radio off. He hasn't strangled me yet. Of these things are happy marriages made.


* This is something of an exaggeration, but I have early signs of glaucoma in one eye, gradually detaching vitreous coagulating into cloudy lumps that obscure patches of vision, plus the usual loss of accommodation that accompanies aging resulting in now owning four pairs of glasses (distance and reading, at home and at work). No, before you ask, none of this can be fixed with laser surgery. The "best" surgical option would involve removing the jelly of my eye and replacing it with saline. I would then develop cataracts and need cataract surgery as well. "Best" option. Ha.

** I have a near-constant internal monologue. I hold long conversations, debates and expositions in my head all the time. I never shut up. My internal monologue is quite capable of adopting other accents too. I was surprised when I first discovered this was not necessarily true of other people.