“

Hey Mike. Mike? Mike.

Mike, can you hear me? Cannn youu hearrrr meee.

Yes, I can hear you, but I don’t think you can hear me. No I’m not on mute. Have you got your sound up? Better? Good. No, don’t worry. We’ve all done it.

I think Janice has just jo—ah. Janice. I can—I can hear—dammit—I can hear myself.

Try

Your

Headphones.

Let me try it now.

Yes, that’s better.

Cool. And here’s Ralph and Sally. We’re just waiting for Theresa. Ralph. Your video is futzing. Does anyone else see it? No, it’s just you. Janice and Mike and Sally are just fine. Try—all right, we’ll wait for you—OW. Who’s causing the feedback?

Will everyone—SALLY. It’s no good. Mute your laptop and dial in on the phone. Yeah, we get that sometimes. Don’t worry about it.

Okay, so, I’ve just had an email from Theresa. Her previous call is overrunning. We’re stuck without her though because we need her decision from the internal team meeting. Yeah I wondered that, but she says she doesn’t want to put it in an email. I’m going to have to drop off in another 20 minutes though, so if she’s not done I’ll have to leave it with you, Sally.

Yeah, I had a lovely time off, thanks. Don’t really know where the time went. We had planned to go visit my father-in-law in Colorado, but obviously all the flights were cancelled and he’s like eighty-six or something so would have been too risky anyway.

Did some gardening, fixed a few things up. Tried to stop the foxes getting in. I wanted to do some writing, get into the loft and finish the model off with Joshua, that sort of thing, but the weather was so nice we just hung out in the garden. Yeah, very fortunate.

Hey Ralph. It’s not brilliant but it’s better than it was. Try rebooting your modem when you get a chance.

The model? A scale model of London City Airport. Well, the runway at least. It’s about fifteen feet long.

In the loft. I got into a habit of buying Joshua those little die cast aeroplanes from all the trips I was doing, and decided he needed somewhere to keep them. He loves it, even if it isn’t finished yet.

They’re doing great! Percy seemed to be a bit poorly a couple of weeks ago, but she’s laid an egg every day for eight days on the run now, so I guess she’s fine. We’ve been letting them out for hours at a time when we’re in the garden, they’re very happy. Lots of eggs—fortunate we got them before all this kicked off. Complete coincidence, yeah. We’d been talking about keeping hens for ages, and got them beginning of February. Very lucky, yes.

Hahah. No you can’t.

Man, I know. My legs are killing me. I’ve got muscle pains where I didn’t know there were muscles. Oh, a guy called Joe Wicks. He does these PE lessons every morning, live-streamed on YouTube. Ostensibly for the children out of school but I think lots of parents do them too. Millions of views daily.

You think so? End of May earliest, I’d have thought. Heh, I was reading something by this guy I know on twitter, he’s a VP at a big pharma—no, UK; GlaxoAstraSmithklineBeechamZeneca or whatever it’s called now—and he’s hoping, get this, he’s hoping open plan offices slash hot-desking will be made illegal. I’ll dig the link out after this call.

Seriously, I’m with him. Open plan offices are bad enough but this hot-desking lark? I hate it. Especially after being able to work from home for a month now! I want a little cubicle with my own stuff where I can just sit down and focus. I wrote about this before. And all that horseshit about serendipitous interactions or being close to the people you’re working with so you can talk to them? It’s bollocks.

Hm, sounds like Theresa isn’t going to make it. And I’m going to have to go to the doc’s in a minute.

Haha, like where would I have caught it? Yeah, nothing serious. I was playing hide and seek with Joshua and leapt over a bush that had a fencing spike in it. Got to go back and get the stitches out.

Didn’t hurt that much, to be honest. At least, not until the medic started poking it to see if the local anaesthetic had kicked in yet. It was “Nope, nope; a little pressure, nope, OUCH. Positive control?”

Well, that’s what I was worried about. I rang the minor injuries unit up, they said fine, come in. There was someone masked up on the door, quizzed me about any fever or cough, and nobody else in the waiting room. But the receptionist… so there’s like barbed wire and watchtowers and minefield signs all around her desk, stay six feet away, all that stuff, and she’s wearing a face mask, right? But she’s speaking very quietly, behind the mask, six feet away, and I’m leaning forward feeling a right div ‘cos I have to ask her to repeat everything.

Medic was lovely though. Had a nice chat about her career in IT before becoming a paramedic, her time in Australia, trying to keep the kids sane during the lockdown.

Seriously though, I don’t know what the fuss is all about. I was walking out of the unit about an hour after it happened, six stitches and a steristrip better off. Saw one other patient.

OK, I’ve got to go. Sally, can you align with Theresa please and reschedule if we do need to talk through it?

You’re the best. Catch you guys tomorrow.