This week proved to be a challenging one at work, but thankfully a longer easter weekend gave us a good chance to recharge. In the rest of the country, Coronavirus is really taking hold with ever-increasing death rates reaching truely terrifying numbers. Worryingly, the media seem to be focusing more on predicting how quickly the lockdown will end rather than how this death toll could've been reduced. As things stand, it seems inevitable that this lockdown has to continue for several more weeks yet.
Work
The last couple of weeks have seen me slowly find a better grove for how to work well at home. I'm making more effort to group meetings together to give me longer meeting-free period for focusing on work, and relying on my personal Trello board for organising where I put my time each day.
Coronavirus is clearly going to have a huge impact on our economy, and this week the first marks of that became visible within work. Some parts of the business are doing better than others, but there is already a visible shift in perspective from our previous 4-year plan to more short-term defensive planning. Measures announced this week are personally impacting everyone in the business in some form, including about 20% of people being temporarily furloughed. Coronavirus isn't going away anytime soon, but this financial impact could be even longer lasting.
Away from the virus, this week also saw a leaving speech for my line-manager (who had handed in his notice well before the lockdown) and other announcements which all lacked the usual community feeling that an in-person session would give.
Luckily, this is just a 4 day week!
Easter
This time last year, we'd celebrated Easter with a picnic in our local park. This year, we did have plans to visit friends and head off on a holiday however those plans all had to be cancelled and instead new plans for a lockdown Easter took their place.
I spent some time last week secretly planning a little Easter Egg hunt around our flat, whilst we also baked and cooked a delicious roast dinner. We've also used the extra free time to focus on a few creative projects. I typically have a long list of jobs I'd like to do, books to read and movies to watch so having some forced quiet time gives me a perfect opportunity to enjoy those. Getting bored isn't something that comes naturally to me!
This weekend has also had some glorious sunshine. Whilst our time outside may be limited right now (particularly without a garden) we have managed some more local walks to take enjoy the sunshine and stretch our legs.
Over the last few weeks one of the more challenging aspects of distancing whilst walking has been sharing the pavement with plenty of runners and cyclers also trying to get their bit of daily exercise. The difference paces of walking, running and cycling seems to result in more close-contact than is comfortable as people attempt to squeeze through small gaps. This weekend, Hammersmith & Fulham introduced restrictions along parts of the river to keep this space for walking to make it easier to maintain a suitable distance. Whilst some people still tried to do anything possible to ignore the restrictions it did definitely make a difference particularly when crossing Hammersmith Bridge. Council staff were on the bridge helping control a one-way system. It would be great to seem them in place beyond just this weekend.
