Working from home

I have been working from home since mid March 2020. I took the decision to do this before the countrywide lock down in late March and was allowed to do so. On work days I wake up around 7.30am, I no longer have get up so early to commute into the office. I tune in to the news headlines using the BBC Sounds app on my phone, drink some coffee and get ready to start the day.

I check in remotely my the rest of my team at around 9am. I might have meetings via Zoom or Teams with colleagues in the same organisation. Otherwise I am focused on doing my work remotely, not travelling in to the office has not affected my work too greatly. I keep in touch with colleagues via Slack, IRC or Teams, and we often share photos of how our days are going.

At noon I take my lunch break for an hour, we have online grocery deliveries, so I normally reheat something that I've made earlier from our recipe box. Whilst eating I usually watch some of the national news, which tends to be the Scottish Government's daily press briefing (on all news channels just after 12) and then switch to something more diverting on BBC iPlayer or Netflix. My afternoon working pattern is similar to the morning.

I finish work around 5pm, at which time I will check the news online and then either do some online training (I am trying to learn some new skills), or do some indoor exercise or yoga using an app on my phone. When my partner also finishes work for the day, we go for a walk close to our home (the government allows us 1 hour of our door exercise per day). Some evenings we also chat with friends or family via WhatsApp or FaceTime video chat. Almost every evening we will cook something from our recipe box and watch some TV. After that it's normally time to load the dishwasher, make some coffee for the morning, go to bed and prepare to do the same again tomorrow.

Hopefully, we made it through. At the moment we do not know how many more days will have like this, but we are very grateful to all the key workers who are working to keep the country running. On the day that I write this, the UK had the most Covid-19 related deaths in Europe and the second highest in the world. I hope that if you are reading this in the future, that it is known just how badly the UK government let down its people and that they failed to keep them as safe as they could have. However, I hope that as you are reading this, the world has recovered and that you live in safer and healthier times.

2020-04 See all items with this value

North Hinksey, Oxford, UK

Hinksey Exile

I have chosen these photos from the camera roll on my phone. Two themes seem to emerge looking at them; food and technology. They include various food deliveries, home baking, a computer programme for analysing Covid-19 data (and helping to find a cure), and playing with AR technology with colleagues (a virtual panda).