I am currently in the grip of a desperate and hopeless craving for Wagamama. Miso-glazed cod ramen with a side of bang bang cauliflower, for preference, but honestly I'd settle for anything on the menu. It's nearly two years since I last ate there, and actually I can count the number of times I've eaten decent East Asian food (as opposed to bog-standard Chinese takeaway) in that time on the fingers of one hand*.

Sadly, I'm not about to go and eat in a crowded noodle bar, and they don't deliver outside the ring road, so I am not going to be able to satisfy this craving any time soon, and somehow home-cooked alternatives aren't the same.

I've almost forgotten what it was like to be able to plan holidays and actually see people in person, and I don't feel like I miss it that much, but my goodness I miss Wagamama.


*Two sushi deliveries from the person locally who does prebooked deliveries on a Saturday evening most weeks; one takeaway sushi in the rain in swimming friend L's garden; one takeaway sushi in town with friends from Glasgow who were visiting last summer; one lunch from Itsu I treated myself to last term** when similar cravings got too much.

**Maybe on one of my office days next week I could do that again, if I have a day with enough time between meetings to walk into town and back as well as eating.

Yesterday one of the people who was supposed to be in the office today mentioned that they'd had lunch with a family member last Friday who had tested positive for covid on Saturday, and they were doing daily lateral flow tests as per the current government advice and had been clear so far, but should they come into the office or would it be better to work from home?

I said that day 6 of 7 felt low enough risk I'd be OK with them coming in, especially as C is working fully remotely for now, so there is no need to worry about protecting her.

This morning they emailed to say that today's lateral flow was positive, so they would work from home. Two hours later, they messaged to say that actually, they felt grotty and were going to log off and go to bed.

I suppose now we know that it can take up to six days from exposure for tests to register a positive and symptoms to develop. Which is useful, especially as early information about omicron suggested the gap was much shorter.

Tomorrow I go back to the office. There are definitely some good things about that (being able to focus on work, getting to walk round the Parks), but I am still a bit nervous. ( Masks )

I remain utterly appalled and depressed by the government's ongoing attempts to pretend there isn't a global pandemic going on, though it appears that (predictably) they have denied that there was any truth in yesterday's rumours that they would stop providing free lateral flow tests. Presumably it was a smokescreen to get something else through without an outcry, possibly a further reduction in self-isolation times.

I am so tired. I could barely manage to get myself out of bed to swim today. Finishing a simple jersey top (I just had to sew in the sleeves, which I'd already pinned and hem them and the bottom) felt like a huge amount of effort. It feels a bit early for my SAD to be this bad; the next few months are obviously going to be very tough going.

I don't think I can face trying to write a review of 2021. While I know my year wasn't anything like as bad as some people's, it was a year spent on the brink of total burnout and it seems likely that 2022 will continue along much the same lines. And unless the government bring in further restrictions, in particular around moving university teaching online, it seems likely that I will end up getting covid at some point soon, which I'd much rather not do.

At least this year I was able to spend New Year's Eve at my parents' in Norfolk, thereby avoiding the midnight re-enactment of the Somme that has become the norm in built-up areas. And I'm very glad to have got to spend time with my parents (we more or less isolated for a couple of weeks beforehand, to try to avoid bringing covid with us - by the time we got there on Thursday, neither of us had been in a building other than our house since the previous Wednesday, and that was the Kassam Stadium when I went for my booster. Though my brother's partner has just tested positive having visited them on Tuesday, so we're all hoping that she picked it up at work on Wednesday or Thursday and wasn't incubating it then), though every time we visit them my dad has visibly declined and that's very difficult.

So I'm not feeling at all optimistic about 2022, even by my normal standards of not liking New Year. I do hope that it treats all of you well, though.

At 6pm today I decided that anything that I hadn't managed to get round to already could just wait until January, shut down my work laptop and put away all of my office equipment until the new year.

(I did, in fact, have a surprisingly productive day, possibly thanks to having an early night last night and an extra hour and a quarter in bed this morning instead of going for a grey twilight walk, and have even managed to draft the paper I've been noodling vaguely about for most of this week without getting very far, so there isn't actually that much left undone after all.)

Also, prompted by (a) the news and (b) talking to someone today who said they'd cancelled their Christmas lunch in accordance with University guidance but someone had brought in some mince pies and a couple of bottles of Prosecco and they'd all gathered in an office to consume them, a poll about parties:

When I left the house this morning, I didn't think that this was going to be my last day in the office until sometime in 2022.

Honestly, when I went for a walk this lunchtime, having spent the morning cancelling our festive lunch and telling the team that anyone who wanted to work from home for the rest of the time until the break was welcome to do so, I still didn't think that I would be back to working from home full time after today.

It wasn't until I got the VC's all-staff email, which was possibly an even more shocking departure from her normal cheery we-got-through-the-Black-Death-and-the-Civil-War tone than the one she sent on 13 March 2020 and said, very emphatically, that anyone who could work from home should do, followed shortly after by a more detailed email which said that people should only work on-site if there were operational requirements to do so or they couldn't work effectively from home, that I realised it probably was going to be my last day in the office for quite some time.

(Apparently the university is a hotspot right now. They are offering asymptomatic PCR tests to staff and students, and maybe I should have gone for one, because I'm a bit worried about the department we share our building with having a social event for students in a shared foyer area on Tuesday and then emailing us yesterday to say that two of the attendees had tested positive, but I couldn't face trekking into town in the rain while lugging two extra bags with my office plant and the "extra" gifts I'd bought in case anyone had to self-isolate and couldn't make our secret Santa on Monday and which T and I will now eat.)

I think we all felt very down this afternoon. While pretty much everyone has been doing some form of hybrid working, it's been nice to be in the office again and be able to catch up in person, and after being back for a whole term it felt like we had just got to the point where all the creases were ironed out and the new people were much more integrated into the team and we could even plan fun things like the lunch and the secret Santa, and now it's back to working in isolation and only communicating electronically again. And I certainly haven't forgotten how much more exhausting and less rewarding managing a team remotely is to doing it in person. And, more than anything, none of us really have much hope that we'll be back together any time soon.

PCR test came back negative this morning, so probably not COVID given that I had also had a negative LFD on Sunday evening. (Though I am not actually particularly confident in my ability actually swab usable material from my tonsils, rather than just waving the swab vaguely around the back of my mouth and trying not to trigger my gag reflex and throw up all over my car.) I worked from home today anyway, which meant getting to sleep until 7:30 instead of getting up at 5:45, and am generally feeling a lot better than I was, though I'm currently not sure whether to go into work tomorrow or spend another day working from home. Maybe I'll wait and see how I feel in the morning. (Or maybe I should take not being enthusiastic and gung-ho about being back in the office as a sign I should work from home for another day?)

Meanwhile, I think I might go to bed at 8pm when T goes off to do a quiz, and watch something undemanding on my tablet. Possibly Elementary, which a friend has been insisting I need to watch...

I am on holiday after tomorrow until 13 September.

The university announced today that we would be removing most COVID restrictions from 6 September, including planning for all teaching to be in-person and staff to return to working on-site rather than from home. (I had been aware that this was coming, and got an advance view of the guidance yesterday afternoon.) This meant that most of today was spent in meetings about how we go about implementing this, writing emails explaining how we've agreed to implement this, and updating risk assessments and building guidance.

I had also arranged a team meeting to talk about the proposals for increased flexible working, post-pandemic, which ended up taking place half an hour after the all-staff email about the changes went out. This turned out not to be entirely a bad thing, but it made a slightly nerve-wracking meeting rather more nerve-wracking.

It has definitely been A Day.

(As for how I feel about the changed guidance? Resigned to the fact that it had to happen, attracted by the possibility of not being in pandemic mode any more, but also really quite worried about how it's actually going to pan out.)

One of the surprising delights of the last year and a bit has been the friendship that's developed between me and my two swimming friends, L (a longstanding friend who I rarely saw, even though we live in the same city) and B (a much newer friend, who I'd met a few times as part of a group and had a couple of lunchtime coffees and walks in the months between C's cancer diagnosis and the start of lockdown, as we worked near each other). What started as principally a swimming arrangement has morphed, over the course of 13 months, two lockdowns and various physical and mental health wobbles, into a close friendship and essential source of support for all of us.

I've also developed closer friendships with some of my fellow departmental administrators, as we've made use of both Teams calls and chat to share our frustrations and help each other through an incredibly tough time, workwise.

My core existing friendships, many of which date back to LJ days, are, I think, still what they always were, and if I'm sorry to have gone so long without seeing people, the online interaction is always there.

The thing I do regret, rather, is the friendships that were very much based around seeing each other, even if infrequently, at yarn shows or conventions, and which have waned without that connection. And the newish friendships, the people I'd met and liked and looked forward to seeing again and building a deeper connection with, which probably won't now happen because we've all been changed by the last eighteen months and we can't just pick up from where we left off because that place, and those people, don't exist any more, and where we are now is much further apart than we were back then. (Though who knows but that we might not come back into step again, in another few years, when the ability to meet in person remains? Perhaps this is only a temporary halt, and not the loss of an opportunity which will never return.)

I had another day's leave today, so I slept until 8am (when my alarm woke me up from a dream where my boss was announcing a divisional watchalong of Twin Peaks: The Return, which is one of the more inexplicable things my subconscious has ever presented me with), went for a swim and then came home to spend the rest of the day sewing the elastic onto a set of mermaid-scale print underwear and listening to podcasts. It was a perfectly pleasant day, but it was also an awful lot like a great many other days over the last fifteen months or so, and right now I am finding the Groundhog Day-ishness of the pandemic is getting to me a bit. I would like to do something different, go somewhere different, and I don't think it's going to happen any time soon because we are both too risk-averse to break out of our lockdown pattern of existence, even if holiday accommodation wasn't so scarce this year. (And what would be the point of going on holiday just to stay indoors somewhere with fewer things to do than we have at home? We stopped going on cottage holidays for several years because that was all we were doing, and we haven't done any proper walking for nearly two years now so are horribly out of practice.)

It doesn't help that I can't have a meeting at the moment without someone asking "Are you getting a holiday?", or that other people keep posting photos of seasides and hills and lakes on Facebook and Instagram. Or that today has been wet and not particularly warm and feels like autumn is here already, which just adds to the feeling of another missed summer.