Category Archives: Lockdown

Gonk, but not forgotten

When he was in lockdown, Alan Sillitoe wrote a book entitled: “The loneliness of the long-time working from homer”; after ten-months, social interaction is almost a thing of the past.

As a commute substitute, I walk each morning and hope to greet other passers-by.  But, because I don’t own a dog, people ignore me.   (It could be the Bayern Munich bobble hat and loudly singing along to various choral works I have on Spotify which puts them off).  After three-months, I crocheted a giant snake-shaped draught excluder and now drag it around local parks telling people it is a Dachshund who suffers from narcolepsy.  Anything to have a brief chat with strangers; something my mother actively discouraged until I was in my mid-twenties.

I am only child and can cope with my own company – as many of my childhood imaginary friends can attest; but there is something about office banter what you don’t get WFH.  I have erected a water-cooler in my Man Cave for me to stand round and talk to myself about the Bundesliga, the latest episode of 24-hours in Police custody and how many toilet rolls are secretly hidden around my house.

When at my desk, and not on a video call, it is important for me to have someone to talk to/at.  So, I have rescued from the loft, my lucky gonk I had on my desk, keeping me company during my O-levels (a 16.6% success rate suggests the gonk was that lucky).  The gonk, like me, needs a decent haircut.

I’m lucky that I sit near a window; together with my Teach Yourself Advertising book and 1847 edition of the Observer Book of Birds (it’s so old, it suggests you might spot the occasional dodo during the summer before it flies to back to Mauritius) I gaze forlornly, in the style of Madame Butterfly, out the window.  Sadly, I haven’t got a giant bird sticker on my window, so I witness the occasional avian fatality.  The only sticker I have says: “Vote Whig” (it’s an old house) and this fails to prevent any accidents.

Before I discovered Sonos, which, before lockdown I thought where Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was set, I’d only got an old transistor radio; it’s quite difficult using a PC while one hand is constantly up at your ear.  Sonos has been my saviour.  Because I am an intellectual snob I have BBC Radio 3 on – everyone needs to be listening to Mahler when you’re creating a media plan and BR-Klassik, a Bavarian classical music station which helps with my German, as I can listen to Mahler (although, Wagner (the 19th century local Bayern boy composer, not the one-time X-Factor star) is played more; weather updates – handy to know if it’s snowing 550-miles away and traffic updates – again, if the Munich to Nuremberg Autobahn is busy, that could have an adverse effect on the congestion on the A3 and then I’d never get to Aldi and back in time for Hollyoaks.

With the radio on it is another inanimate object to whom one can talk and moan about the inclement weather and heavy traffic just outside Augsburg. Because of this lonely existence I have created my own imaginary desert island and provided myself with two books and a luxury item, so, when it’s lunchtime (or February – wherever we are) I have the Bible; the complete works of Shakespeare and a copy, in the original Greek of Where is Spot?  Next week it’s my turn to hide in the laundry basket.   

That’s not my yogurt!

When is a house not a home (as Burt Bacharach asked in 1964)?  When it’s your office.  Since last March, and you’ve been working from home (WTF), the chances are that some of your rooms have blurred into one and the same.

A modern day Cluedo couldn’t cope with WFH, unless Dr Black was battered to death by Miss Scarlett in the Billiard Room with a pile of lever-arch files or was killed by Mrs White in the Conservatory using a calculator with a very sharp point.  Obviously, if Dr Black was on a Zoom call, unless he’d chosen to use some pretend background, you’d be able to see which room he was in and the perpetrator – and the industrial stapler used as a weapon.

In my day your lap was something you ate your tea off and didn’t have a tiny computer on.  These days you could easily mix the two functions up and before you know it, you’ve got egg ‘n’ chips all over your keyboard – while trying to work and watch Pointless.

The kitchen would be the only familiar place which is at home and in the office.  However, you’d not have the arguments over who had stolen your Armenian goat yogurt, which you’d marked with your name writ large on a Post-It note.  Although, sadly, gone are the opportunities of eating something better for lunch than you’d already brought it.

Lunchtime would be the time you’d normally leave the office, but, you’re WFH so, in effect, you’re in prison.  So, sit down with your egg, chips and yogurt and feel at home by watching Porridge; Prisoner: Cell Block H or Sixty Days In (which, if you’ve had to quarantine, is quite apposite – hopefully with less violence or as much making of hallucinatory drugs out of old pay slips).