The Lockdown-Furlough Blues

I was furloughed from my job at the start of April. Since then, I’ve worked a grand total of about 15 days in over three months.

For the first time in 30+ years, I wasn’t working... but I wasn’t on holiday either. My partner was still working and, for the first couple of months, guidelines said you shouldn’t go out more than once a day to exercise, other trips should be for essential shopping only – well, you know how it goes, right?

I don’t doubt for a second that millions of people have had/are having a very similar experience to me. A Covid-19 emotional roller-coaster:

Initial response: WOW! Look at all this free time! I’m going to get all the odd jobs done, decorate, read, watch TV, write, better myself... the possibilities are endless. My God – what an opportunity!

About a week later: Huh. This isn’t nearly as much fun as I thought it was going to be.

Since then: F*** me, this is boring.

I like a routine, so I’ve wound up with new ones, which just a few months ago would have seemed enormously slight and mundane. After some prescribed work-related training time, I scroll through Twitter, then a selection of websites (which includes a much more in-depth look than would ever have been previously considered healthy). After that? Depending on the weather - cut the grass, clean the car, odd DIY jobs (hampered by a lack of funds due to furloughed pay at 80%), listen to a podcast, watch TV, listen to music... sell some bits on ebay... um...

I really have no idea how I’ve managed to fill my days. That’s not true, actually. They haven’t been filled – that would imply some level of productive use. Mostly, they’ve been frittered away on the trivial. Ask me what I did this time last week and I wouldn’t have a clue. Question me on what I achieved in the last month and I’d probably go all squirmy and embarrassed, as the answer would be “approximately bugger all”.

I’m not more intellectually complete. Definitely not happier. Not fulfilled. Not refreshed. Not relaxed. Barely more knowledgeable – not about useful stuff anyway.

Attempting to put a thinner-than-a-wafer positive spin on things, I’ve read more, listened to my vinyl record collection and watched some great TV shows. Updated my CV (as my job situation looked precarious), not had a haircut since February, and walked more in my local area than I would ever had done otherwise.

Not great though, is it? For starters I’m feeling anxious, depressed, deflated and angry. Main course features over-cooked feelings of self-doubt, accompanied by being fearful, nervous and worried. Dessert is a rich layered cake of boredom, angst and an overwhelming sense that I’ve ballsed-up my life. Best accompanied with a large glass of the ’67 “Stop being a miserable git and find the positives, do something to change your situation, be positive!” Unfortunately, we’re out of stock of that one, but I did uncork an acceptable bottle of “Ah well, there’s sod all you can do and the sooner you accept it the better” this week, so things might be looking up. Fractionally. Up is a long way above, though.

When I started writing this half an hour ago, I hadn’t intended it to be some kind of depressing confessional. Sorry about that – I’m sure you’ve got enough crap going on without me adding to it with my own massive-downer.

The plan was to talk a bit about the books I have read and TV box sets I’ve watched, along with some music collection reminiscences. Because (and this will surprise no-one) I kept a list and it feels like I ought to do something with it.

I guess I’ve got a topic for the next blog, then.

(Surprising lockdown discovery: Seems I don’t really need an alarm clock. I just wake up around 7am anyway. Oh, the money I could have saved.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

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