Back to Normal

I have started commuting again. I live in Cambridge and work in London. Between March 2020 and July 2021 I worked at home and never once ventured on to the train to London. For the past few weeks I have been coming in to London one day a week. While it is good to be back and see workmates face to face, it has reminded me that commuting is a pain in the neck, and has strengthened my resolve never to return to the five days per week commute. There is a two-mile cycle to the station, a fifty-minute train journey to Kings Cross, and a half hour walk from there to my office in Charterhouse Square, near Barts Hospital. I will work up to two days a week in London, but there it stops, until I retire in a couple of years and never have to do it again.

I remember one summer Sunday around ten years ago being invited for lunch by our good friends the Tripps (of whom one member, very sadly, is no longer with us), who lived just the other side of  Histon, a village just to the north of Cambridge. As we cycled along, I remarked to Linda, ‘This is what bicycles were invented for, bowling along through a village on a summer afternoon. Not slogging away, head down, through the belting rain to the railway station first thing in the morning.’

When I stopped commuting in spring of 2020, I realised that there was a document I needed, which was still in my desk in the office. I telephoned a colleague who was still bravely coming in to the workplace every day, and asked her to scan the document and email it to me. I added, ‘In the same drawer of my desk, there is a packet of Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, almost full. You should requisition them as I won’t be back to eat them for some time.’

After a couple of hours, I emailed her a gentle reminder. Almost by return, she sent the scanned document as requested, with the covering email: ‘Sorry, I was so excited by the chocolate fingers that I forgot about the piece of paper.’

Working at home during the summer of 2020 was actually quite productive, although also a little frustrating. I and my son Tom sat side by side in what was the dining room (although actually not a lot of dining ever went on there, as we prefer to eat in the kitchen), but was now our shared office, with the table turned to right angles in front of the French doors to the garden. Over the top of my computer screen I could see the garden resplendent in summer sunshine, all day as I worked on reports, administration, and so on. I could feel it destroying my soul, minute by minute. When I retire, I am going to spend a lot of time out of doors.

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Digression. The business of a dining room in which little dining took place reminded me of something from my childhood. In 1968, when I was aged eleven, going on twelve, we moved from our council house to a big, rambling, ugly (in terms of décor) semi-detached house, with a basement and a 200-foot long garden. This move to a ‘bought’ house was a source of great pride to my dad. Anyway, there was a little room on the ground floor at the side of the house which for much of the time of our occupation contained a rocking horse, a desk and a storage heater. It also had a big window through which one could make excellent one’s escape if there was trouble brewing. We referred to this room as the study, but precious little studying took place there.

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When I first returned to commuting a few weeks back, I expected my office, having been derelict for almost a year and half, to be like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake, all cobwebs and rats. In fact, it seemed relatively clean. That said, when I cleared a top shelf as part of a short-lived resolution to declutter, the dust which I dislodged stimulated a coughing fit which caused some alarm down the corridor.

Some things will never return. I have mentioned before that for many years, my great friend from school Kevin Connelly worked only a mile or so from my office, and we used to meet in the pub for lunch at least once a month. Kevin retired a couple of years before the pandemic. These regular meetings will not come back. However, we also used to have a major, all-afternoon event, taking a half day’s annual leave from work in the run-up to Christmas, and I hope this can resume. These events would take the form of a quick drink, followed by a substantial meal in a quality restaurant, then a leisurely walk to the nearest tube station, stopping for another pint on the way, before I went northward and Kevin southward, to our respective homes.

On one such occasion, we were strolling along an old residential (but not posh) street near Bunhill Fields. Leaning against a doorway there was a wrecked ironing board. As we passed it, two old ladies, both perfectly spherical and dressed in black, each looking like the granny in the Giles cartoons (google it if you are too young) were walking in the other direction. One turned to me with a beatific smile in a big round face which looked like what Billy Connolly would have characterised as ‘a city baker’s Halloween cake’, and cackled in perfect cockney, ‘You can do the oironing, Har har har har.’ I gave a polite giggle at her pleasantry, and once we were out of earshot, said to Kevin, ‘That’s me pulled. What about you?’

On another Christmas binge, we were just outside Liverpool Street station, again as the afternoon’s fun was drawing to its close, when as some sort of promotion we were each handed a large cylindrical box of Tic-Tac mints. Kevin looked at his in delight and remarked to me, ‘That’s Christmas sorted.’

Another work tradition that I hope we can start again, this December if possible, is the jolly boys outing. I used to always take my team out for a leisurely lunch just before Christmas and just before the summer holidays. I have had a lot of luck over the years with research publications, grants and so on. This is largely due to the people who work in the team. You know who you are, but for the record, the current members are Daniel, Amanda, Dharmishta, Jonathan, Sammy, Oley, Naomi and Joy. Thank you all.