The PCR test I did as part of Oxford's surge testing for all adults was, unsurprisingly, negative, so my hayfever is indeed just hayfever, despite my paranoia.

Given the way case numbers are going, though, I'm disinclined to do anything very social any time soon. I know so many people who have been pinged to self-isolate in the last week or so (or, in the case of T's BFF who he was supposed to be having lunch with today, phoned at 7am by the person he sat next to in a work meeting yesterday), and I'm pretty sure that ten days of not being able to leave the house would be terrible for my mental health, even without getting COVID.

I suspect I probably shouldn't be spending too much time worrying about how to implement our post-COVID "new ways of working" just yet. Or getting too attached to being back in the office. (I was in for three days this week, and it was lovely. But maybe working from home will be a bit better with new glasses I can actually see with?)

I have two weeks off at the start of September. We hadn't booked anything yet, because neither of us wanted to make plans that might have to be cancelled. Given how many more people are taking UK holidays this year, this meant there was always quite a strong possibility we wouldn't be able to find anything last-minute, but it's now also looking entirely possible that we'll be back in lockdown. Oh well, I can always spend the time getting a head start on my autumn/winter wardrobe.

I can't decide whether I actually find work more stressful and anxiety-provoking when I'm working from home in general, or if it's just that my two working from home days this week were the first day back after a week off and a meeting-heavy day before my three-day summer weekend where I was stressing about how to get things done before finishing for the week, and the office days were Tuesday and Wednesday and had neither start-of-week pressure nor end-of-week pressure.

Anyway, I'm quite enjoying working in the office, which surprises me given how reluctant I initially was to go back. It's nice to have distance between work and home, though. And not to have work taking over my craft room. (I have taken a screenshot of the picture from my office webcam, so I can use it as a Teams background when I'm working from home and confuse people.)

But now it's the weekend, and I am planning to attempt to make a swimsuit.

Current state of the me: very much wishing I didn't have to go back to work tomorrow. I'm not sure I actually feel appreciably less tired than I did a week and a bit ago (not helped by being woken up at 6am by a peculiar flapping noise and having to get out of bed to check whether a pigeon had somehow got trapped inside the window, though I think it was just flapping very loudly outside), and none of the things that were difficult and stressful the week before last will be any less difficult or stressful now.

I'm also feeling very apprehensive about the suggestion that, despite rapidly rising case numbers (cases in central Oxford rose by nearly 1000% in the week to 29 June) the government will go ahead and lift all restrictions in two weeks' time, leaving it up to people's common sense whether they continue to wear face coverings, maintain social distancing etc. Apart from the fact that I have very little faith in people's common sense, that ignores the whole point that wearing a mask primarily protects other people from any germs the wearer might be carrying, so essentially non-mask-wearers will be able to completely exclude people who are still worried about the virus from public spaces. I really hope the university will continue to require face coverings indoors, or I'm going to feel a lot less comfortable about being in the office, and I'm also wondering whether my plan to start using the bus again soon is really a sensible one.

As of about 8:55 this morning, I have had two doses of Oxford/AstraZeneca.

This one was at Boots in Cornmarket, which had a little vaccination centre-ette (one person at a time being jabbed, probably about 5 or 6 booked in for each 15-minute slot) which all seemed to be running very smoothly. It was the first time I'd been in the city centre since March 2020; I knew that Boswells and Debenhams had both closed, but it was still strange to see it. I considered celebrating my second jab by popping into Waterstones and buying an actual book, but they still hadn't opened when I walked back and I didn't want to hang around, so I bought an overpriced iced latte from the cafe in our building instead.

So far I don't seem to have much in the way of side effects - my arm is starting to feel a bit sore now, and I'm feeling really tired, but that might just be warm weather and lack of sleep!

I don't agree with everything in this article, but it makes some interesting points and I was glad oracne linked to it yesterday, given that I am currently grappling with the question of what the working patterns of my team might look like when (if) things return to "normal".

It does strike me, though, that an awful lot of these thinkpieces about how hybrid or fully remote working is the way to go and the days of working full-time in offices are over turn out to have been written by people who were freelance and/or remote workers before the pandemic; people whose jobs really don't involve directly supporting other people or collaborating closely with a team, who are nevertheless that those things can be done just as well remotely as in-person.

Even for a team who are directly supporting an academic department, like mine, there are surprisingly few core tasks that can't be done remotely. The argument for coming back to the office is mostly based on intangibles: creating an environment that feels like a vibrant, busy department where students and academics want to spend time rather than just coming in for lectures and then going their separate ways; supporting newer and more junior members of the team to learn from their colleagues and develop in their roles. Managing a team remotely, making sure that everyone is supported and that at least some communication between individuals remains instead of everything going up and down the hierarchy, has taken an enormous amount of work and is a big part of why this year has been so very exhausting (not that I think that managers' preference should really be driving decision-making). Lots of people have said that they prefer working at home because there are fewer interruptions, without realising that those interruptions are often actually a key part of their job, even if they aren't specified in their job descriptions, or don't feel as important as the bigger tasks.

I think we'll end up with a hybrid arrangement (probably most people in the office 60%-80% of their contracted hours, and some who prefer being in full time), but I'm also finding that a lot of people (including me) are realising once they go back to the office that they do enjoy being there, and maybe even prefer it to working from home. Yes, commuting is a downside, but even apart from the possibility of in-person interactions instead of more bloody Teams calls, very few people have as good a setup at home as at work. (My working from home setup is pretty good; I brought my work chair home at the start of the pandemic, I have a big monitor as well as my laptop screen, a separate keyboard and mouse and a separate room to work in, but a desk that is a good size for a sewing machine is not a good size to work at.) It'll probably all be quite straightforward to implement, really; it's just taking an awful lot of planning.

After nearly 15 months of lockdown or semi-lockdown, there are so many things from the Before Times that feel like they belong to someone else's life.

I haven't worn any of my coats since March 2020. When I go out, it's either in the car, in which case I don't need a coat, or I'm walking, and wear a waterproof jacket instead.

I used to wear necklaces for work, but I haven't worn any jewellery apart from my wedding and engagement rings and watch since March 2020.

My office is full of my work shoes and boots, which I obviously haven't been able to wear while I've been working from home, but I look at them now and can't imagine wanting to wear any of them again. The main reason why they are in my office in the first place is because they're not comfortable enough to walk to and from work in, and most of them were bought when I was still someone who wore skirts and dresses. And now I have an office full of shoes I may never wear again.

I'd pretty much stopped using shoulder bags before the pandemic, because they always hurt to carry, but unless I have a backpack full of work stuff (or a bag full of swimming kit) I mostly just have my phone and keys with me these days. (My phone case has a slot for my debit card; I haven't been carrying my wallet, with my other cards, and haven't used cash at all since last March.)

In anticipation of visiting my parents! and spending time with a friend who's going to be holidaying near Oxford! I thought that possibly I needed something in between Massive Work Backpack and what I can fit in my pockets, looked at all the bags I currently own, decided that they definitely belonged to someone else's life, and ordered a small sling backpack. I apologise in advance if doing this turns out to jinx the reopening and we all have to spend another six months in lockdown.

Today I sat in a room and ate lunch at the same time as two other people, neither of whom was T. I hadn't eaten in the same room as other people for 14 months, though I had a couple of outdoor meals with my parents last September and takeaway sushi in a friend's garden in December. I was really quite anxious about doing it, but it was nice to get the chance to chat to people in my team, and I hate eating at my desk and my office smelling of food all afternoon.

Then, on the way home, I went to a supermarket for only the second time in 14 months, because T had realised we didn't have enough eggs and I was going to be near one.

I have also now booked all but three days of my annual leave; my normal week straight after the end of term and two weeks in early September, and every Friday in July and August.

This morning started off grumpily, not so much about the continuing impossibility of booking a vaccine appointment nearer than Milton Keynes as about the fact that when I posted on Facebook asking if anyone else was getting the same error message I was getting saying that I had missed my first appointment lots of people commented to say I really should take the time to go to Milton Keynes rather than waiting for a nearer appointment.

I stayed grumpy all morning (despite ordering a new pen to distract myself), but a swim at lunchtime calmed me down (and thanks to the time tracking spreadsheet I've made myself, I knew I didn't have to feel guilty about taking the time, because I was still on track to clock in at about 44 hours this week. For my next trick, I should try working on not feeling that I need to be working 44 hours per week anyway).

I settled back to work after knitting, picked up my phone for a brief brain break after a meeting and discovered that a knitting friend of mine died very suddenly on Monday night. While we mostly knew each other online, through Ravelry and then Twitter, we'd met in person several times, at knitting shows and group meet-ups and when one of us happened to find herself in the same place as the other one. She was an incredibly generous person, and there are lots of cards on my pinboards that she sent me with various things - some fibre she'd carded when I first got my spinning wheel, a set of buttons that she thought might work when I mentioned that I'd bought a jacket which had horrible buttons and I wanted to change them - and I will really miss her presence on Twitter.

An hour later, an email of the kind that you would really rather never get, but definitely don't want to get at ten to five on a Friday afternoon, popped into my inbox, and I spent the next hour making calls to get more information and alert various people who needed to know what was going on.

And then, after I'd given up on attempting to get the business case I'd hoped to finish writing done and logged off for the day, I spotted a friend mentioning on Twitter that she'd just booked her vaccine in Oxford, tried the site for the nth time since Tuesday and discovered that I could get appointments any time next week, so I've booked my first jab for next Friday and my second for July, and am very glad I didn't just book Milton Keynes instead.

I woke up this morning to find that it was snowing heavily, and when I went for my walk all the blossom was blanketed in snow.



I can only assume that Nature was blowing a massive raspberry at Boris Johnson's Grand Reopening of outdoor drinking and dining.

It's a year today since I last went to the cinema. The last time I travelled by train will be a year ago sometime in the nebulous space between Sunday and Monday, because it was on the 29th, and it turns out that the last time I had a meal in a restaurant, which I thought was early March, was actually on the 21st of February, so that's already more than a year ago. It's strange, looking back. I know I was already worrying about COVID by then, but I had absolutely no idea (how could I have done?) just how quickly things would escalate from there.

At this stage, I feel quite ambivalent about the prospect of lockdown easing. I'm very much looking forward to being able to swim as a three again, and it would be nice to be able to go for walks somewhere different. And I really want to see my parents again. But I don't want to go to shops, or the hairdressers, and even though working from home has its downsides I don't miss the commute. And it no longer feels like "going back to normal". This is normal now, and while it would definitely be improved by occasionally going to different places and having a wider choice of takeaway options*, I've got used to it, and I'm quite worried that I've actually forgotten how to exist in spaces with lots of people in them and that it's going to be hard to relearn that.


*if we want delivery, and who wouldn't, it's curry, Chinese, kebabs or Dominos, because none of the Oxford restaurants will deliver outside the ring road. I am very jealous of friends who can get sushi and Wagamama and pub lunches delivered.