LOCKDOWN

So in case you haven’t heard the UK has gone into Lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic. It has changed the world as we know it and has changed the way we all live our lives. In this week’s blog, I update people on what I’ve been up to behind closed doors and how the break from modern life may actually benefit us in the future.

Coronavirus is a respiratory infection first discovered in Wuhan, China in November of 2019. It spread throughout Hubei province and has become a global pandemic, with death tolls in the thousands for a number of countries. Europe has become the current epicentre of the outbreak, though the U.S. looks to have difficult times ahead and the world is slowly shutting down in order to prevent health services from being overrun.

I was following the outbreak over the Christmas and New Year break and was alarmed to see the spread of the virus in China. At that time I was unaware of the SARS outbreak in 2003 and I don’t really remember much about Swine Flu in 2009, other than it stopped our family from holidaying in Mexico like we were planning. If I had been told that 4 months later over half the world would be living under some kind of restrictions due to the virus, I would have never have believed you, yet here we are. The world feels like it has come to a stop.

It has forced people to make massive changes to their lives in an incredibly short space of time. 3 weeks ago I was in Canterbury desperately trying to help my girlfriend pack her possessions to either fly back home to Singapore or come and stay with my family in the UK. It was an incredibly stressful time for her, with uncertainty over how her lessons and exams would continue and where was the best place for her to go. Her mother was placing a lot of pressure on her to fly back to Singapore, despite the risk of flying. In the end, she did decide to come and stay with my family and we were collected on the morning of the 21st March.

It had already been announced by that point that schools in the UK were to shut to slow the spread of the virus, and my father had been working at home for a week upstairs in our study instead of commuting to London each day. He is struggling hugely to manage a project working from home without being in physical contact with other members of his team and that must be incredibly difficult.

My sister has moved out of her rented house in Brighton to come stay at our family home, feeling that we were all safer to face the lockdown with pooled resources. She has effectively been left without income from either her job or her beauty business and she is unsure what the future holds for her. Both she and my girlfriend have brought their supplies of food, toilet paper, clothes, cleaning products and anything else deemed essential to bolster the shelves and cupboards here. We have brought a second small fridge and put it in our living room which has been one of my mum’s more brilliant ideas of the lockdown so far.

When the lockdown was announced last Monday afternoon, it meant we were all effectively confined to quarters except for essential supplies or one exercise related activity per day. Between my mother and I we have been arranging home schooling for my younger brother and have been trying to replicate his timetable to the best of our ability. It has been a huge challenge and has meant finding whatever tasks we can to try and apply them to a lesson scenario and find engaging and useful jobs to do within a home environment. I have been asked to teach his woodwork, maths and ICT and assist with other pieces of homework and educational support. It takes up a proportion of my working week and has replaced much of the time I would be using towards my ‘ThinkTank’ research and writing.

I am also using my exercise slot to get out and walk the dogs on weekday mornings and have noticed a dramatic shift as road traffic quietens and evening walker, joggers and cyclists have appeared out of nowhere.

But what else are people supposed to do?

I am aware of people spending much more time catching up on housework, painting, paperwork, gardening in between the home schooling and the juggling of a completely new daily routine for almost everyone. Meetings over the Internet are now standard and people are slowly adjusting to working away from offices. Some are unfortunately unemployed or furloughed and for a select few business is booming as they offer services people are able to do in the current climate. I have a close friend who works for Brewers and he has been busier than ever the last couple of weeks as everyone rushes to top up the painting in their front rooms. To contrast, my local pub landlord has opened a pop-up shop with his delivered wholesale produce and is also doing takeaways to generate some sort of income.

For me, the search for an Architecture placement has effectively evaporated into thin air despite being in talks with numerous practices through a recruitment process just 3 weeks ago. I have found myself working on my website content and research less as priority for family living starts to become more prominent. I spent the first day in ‘Lockdown’ writing a lengthy email to my girlfriend’s parents in Singapore explaining why she had decided to stay in the UK and promising that she was in safe hands. Since then I have instead busied myself throughout the days with a number of other tasks to try and make this lockdown a bit more comfortable and to tidy up our house and garden a bit, as most people have from what I have seen. I have built a football goal with my brother as a woodwork task, fixed our bikes so that we can use them, helped to sort the vegetable beds, repaired and tidied our wood store, helped sort out charity donations, washed and sanded our outdoor dining chairs and best of all: installed a cricket net facility where my brother and I can play and train in. We have also put the tent up in the garden this afternoon for my brother and I stay in over the Easter weekend (plus maybe Eddie!)

He certainly looked very happy in the sunshine this afternoon!!

A gallery of some of the things I've been up to while in 'Lockdown'

Being away from my pursuit of an Architectural career is the biggest blow for me personally and I am just going to have to stay patient and continue to work hard whenever I can. Right now, in the current climate, I know that is not much to ask, when so many people are experiencing far more hardship than I am. I am incredibly grateful I have space to run around in and play and think and de-stress in amongst our new-found confinement. I have also realised the importance of checking in regularly on your friends and relatives and have been calling those I care about far more frequently than I ever would do normally and have enjoyed some long phones calls with friends and cricket team mates.

I have also had to draw on my knowledge of tutoring and coaching and technology to become an almost full time teacher for my brother. I am teaching him woodwork, Maths, ICT and a host of other subjects. I have organised a re-shuffled timetable for him using his existing lesson slots and trying to fit his routine into working from home, working with my Mum to create lesson plans that aid his learning contribute to helping at home at the same time. I am helping to organise media to publish on my Cricket Club Facebook page to try and keep the club (and our large junior section) connected during lockdown. It is unfortunate that this has happened at the beginning of the season, when players were getting ready to transition out of nets and onto the pitch.

I am finding myself busy in other ways than I normally would but am missing working on my ThinkTank project, which is something I would normally be able to do most afternoons during the week. I am considering pushing my personal deadline of May back in order to give myself compensation for the disruption caused by this imposed lockdown.

So far I am also pleased to report that we as a family have got along reasonably well despite the close proximity to each other. There have been a few disagreements but nothing out of the ordinary and nothing that isn’t normal. We are aware that people are stressed and finding things difficult to adjust to and I, as someone who hasn’t had my location changed too much, just need to give everyone space to adjust in their own time.

Of course there has been a change of lifestyle, but in between the chaos the world is experiencing right now there is also a refreshing calmness when compared to the normal constant non-stop action of our 21st century lives. Yes, the News is terrifying and the work healthcare professionals around the world are doing is extraordinary, but the real glimmer of hope for me is that people are noticing the small things in their lives that matter to them far more often than before, which gives me hope that the world will improve in the long run once this crisis is over.

People have been made more aware of the world around them, of the beauty of nature outside their window because they have been made to look. People have noticed the serenity the dawn chorus brings to one’s soul because the traffic has stopped. People have seen spoken about positivity and mental resilience in a far more considered way because they have realised there are things out there that they care about. In times of crisis it is nice that the masses are fighting as a whole to try and get each other through the dark times.

For the world this means great things. Young villagers in India have seen the Himalayas for the first time as global pollution drops. That is a huge thing and proves that we don’t need to make a lot of smoke and noise for something special to be seen. Industry has slowed and people have proved we can work from home, be nice to each other and support the people we love and care about.

I really hope society as a whole learns a few lessons about what it means to be a community and the power we have when we work together to overcome something. Unfortunately, it just so happens to be something as awful as Coronavirus but this may prove to be a pivotal period when the world decides how it wants to rearrange itself.

We will see what happens in terms of trade and business once the dust settles but for now I am just content that people are realising that by slowing life down and appreciating what we have now, that we can feel more satisfied in ourselves and know that we have lived through the most extraordinary times.

I just want to round this off by wishing that everyone out there in this big wide world of ours keeps safe. I know that won’t be the case for everyone and I send my love out to anyone and everyone affected by COVID-19.

Until next time,

RK