I didn't actually mean to stop posting here, I just...kept not getting round to it. And here I am three months later. Ooops.

I suspect that was mostly because term was busy and exhausting. The UCU marking and assessment boycott has been the crisis we really didn't need to round off the first "normal" academic year after three years of pandemic disruption and it has all been a bit much, really.

I haven't been swimming nearly enough, largely due to the A34 having been closed for roadworks almost every weekend since mid-May, meaning that the 20-minute drive to the river was taking an hour each way. I have been swimming regularly in the chlorine tank but that's just depressing, especially the utterly grim state of the changing rooms.

I haven't been walking much, either, even though I finally cracked and bought a DSLR and it does take great photos.

I am (obviously) quite depressed again but I'm not really sure what to do about that.

I had last week off work. We went to visit my parents (father: possibly a bit more mobile than last time but sleepy and confused and mildly cantankerous; mother: just tired) and were planning to have a day at the seaside, but the weather wasn't great and while you'd think that they're much closer to the sea than we are, it actually takes a good hour each way to get to the nearest coast, and that's just Great Yarmouth, and that felt like too much effort, especially as I'd managed to give myself food poisoning by eating bad hummus, missing the last day before my break (including saying farewell to my brilliant office manager, and the faculty garden party), and was still feeling a bit wobbly and occasionally nauseous at that point.

I am very tired. Which might also be the lingering effects of the food poisoning, or just life.

This is how today went:

8:05 arrive at office. Unpack bag, switch on computer, make tea.
8:20 sit at desk with tea. Read emails.
8:45 decide I should probably stop ignoring the emails telling me my password is about to expire. Spend ten minutes trying to think of a new password that conforms to the rules but that I can also (a) remember and (b) type.
9:00 multiple apps pop up notifications saying I need to log in again. Try new password. New password refuses to work. Give up and go to buy coffee.
9:15 get back with coffee. Drink coffee. Log in to multiple apps with new password which now works.
9:30 ring someone for brief chat about potential temp.
9:45 go to say hello to team. Spend 15 minutes talking to new office manager about various things.
10:10 stop on the way back from saying hello to team to ask most vulnerable colleague if she wants people to wear masks in in-person meeting. Spend 15 minutes catching up about various things.
10:30 regular senior staff meeting.
11:30 go and make more tea
11:40 sit down and start working through email. Remember I need to read papers for meeting at 2. Skim-read papers while also keeping an eye on inbox.
12:45 go and have lunch. Manage brief walk in parks.
1:45 get back from lunch. Answer teams message.
2:00 committee meeting.
3:15 committee meeting ends, teams call with another person who was in the meeting because we had arranged to talk afterwards.
3:30 look at email.
3:45 realise I need a wee. Decide to make tea while I'm up.
4:00 get back to desk with tea, contemplate actual work that needs to be done. Also contemplate state of utter exhaustion which I have already reached.
4:10 person turns up wanting a quick word about something. By the time they go, tea is cold.
4:30 drink cold tea. Have several parallel teams message conversations about various things while trying to write an email.
4:45 send email. Start reviewing documents which have to be submitted by tomorrow.
5:15 submit documents. Write and send another email. Start reading papers for meeting tomorrow morning.
5:30 person sticks head round door to say goodbye and catch up quickly on stuff that's happened today.
5:35 go back to meeting papers.
6:10 finish skim reading 153 pages of meeting papers for 10am tomorrow. Realise I'm not going to catch 6:20 bus. Spend 20 minutes on email.
6:30 stagger out of door and in direction of bus stop.

And this is not actually an atypical day...

As of this evening, I am officially On Leave, and we are off to the Lake District tomorrow morning for a week. I really hope that will be enough to get some of my energy back.

I thought I'd try working from home today to try to tidy up some loose ends before going away. By 9am I was fairly sure this hadn't been a great idea. By 10am I knew that I would not be able to make it through a full day, so I shuffled meetings around to allow me to catch up with the key people before logging off just before 1pm and spending the afternoon resting.

I suppose if I don't feel rested by the time I get back I will need to get my GP to sign me off...

I am currently feeling exactly as exhausted as I did a few weeks ago, just before collapsing with what tests suggested wasn't actually covid.

I also have the same on and off headaches, brain fog and general malaise. Last lateral flow test was this morning, and was negative (though I have had more contact with people this week than I have done since pre-Omicron this week - half an hour or so unmasked at a coffee morning to remember the former colleague who was killed last week, an hour and a half unmasked in an in-person meeting yesterday, and someone I had a masked meeting with yesterday morning's spouse has just tested positive).

Do I have covid this time? Do I have something else? Am I actually just suffering from Proper Burnout and am back at collapse point after rallying briefly due to sick leave? (I have been managing to stick to 40-hour-ish weeks, though this is awful for my ability to actually keep on top of my inbox and probably doesn't really work well with my tendency to struggle to actually get down to anything major until all of my meetings are out of the way.)

Meanwhile I am stockpiling lateral flow tests in anticipation of the government deciding to stop providing them, and have been being vocal in meetings about thinking that it would be a jolly good idea if the university strongly encouraged people not to come to work with covid, or indeed any kind of infectious illnesses, even if self-isolation is no longer a legal requirement. (I got quite irate with the chair of the health measures advisory group who said we couldn't tell people they had to stay at home, and pointed out that actually, if we employ them, we bloody well can.)

I am working from home tomorrow, and find myself idly thinking that maybe if Storm Eunice knocks out our wifi so I can't make any of my meetings it would be quite nice, really.

Lateral flow tests still negative. I also ordered a postal PCR test yesterday after I found myself wondering if my expensive Dorset Cereals muesli always tasted like sawdust and I'd never noticed it, but I'm not actually expecting it to come back positive.

I didn't get up until about 4pm yesterday, after spending most of the day dozing. At about 10am the postman rang the doorbell with a parcel of fabric, which T brought upstairs and put next to me on the bed, where it lay until about 1pm when I finally managed to summon the energy to open it.

Today when T brought another parcel of fabric upstairs I opened it straight away, and was able to get up at lunchtime and sit on the sofa without a quilt over me. I am taking this as a sign that things are moving in the direction, though I have a tightness around the chest which I didn't have yesterday.

I'm not sure whether I should try to work from home tomorrow or take another day off. At the moment doing almost anything at all seems to leave me feeling wiped out, so maybe I should take another day even if that feels like indulgence rather than risk tiring myself out by trying to work?

While COVID case numbers are still looking absolutely terrifying, I am really glad to be back in the office, at least some of the time; I just find it so much easier to get things done there. Partly that's having a better setup (PC with two big high-resolution monitors plus laptop for note-taking rather than laptop plus external monitor which has a much lower resolution than my office monitors, meaning much more scrolling and difficulty taking things in at a glance), but a lot of it is just that it feels like at home my brain is getting awful reception - hiss, crackling, random drop-outs and snatches of pirate stations - and in the office it's clear as a bell*. I have got so much more done in the last couple of days than I did last week, and I'm actually starting to feel vaguely competent again.

It also turns out that an unexpected bonus of the recent "consolidation" (reduction) in our bus services is that when I know that if I'm not out of the office by 5:45 I probably won't get to Summertown for the 6:27 and will either have to play bus chicken to try to walk as far as I can while not having it sail past me when I'm in between stops or be half an hour later getting home it suddenly gets much easier to stop succumbing to "just one more thing" than it was when I knew the longest I'd have to wait for a bus was 10 minutes.

*Ironically, my office has appalling actual reception for both wifi and mobile signal. I'm not sure anyone's ever been foolish enough to try radio.

I spent most of my four days of work last week trying to work out how to manage the tension between the university being open and teaching going ahead in person and the government advice to "work from home if you can", when my team aren't completely back-office (we are responsible for teaching support, and also deal with general queries from academics and students which can be in-person as well as by email or phone) but most people's jobs can largely be done remotely (apart from dealing with in-person queries, though I think a lot of people don't necessarily see that as the core part of their jobs that I think it actually is). I ended up deciding that it didn't seem fair to try to pick and choose between people's jobs and say "this person supports teaching, and should come in; that one doesn't, and can work from home", especially as that would have ended up with the most junior people having to come in while more senior staff were able to work remotely, and have said that everyone should be in one or two days a week apart from the people who are clinically vulnerable. (I'm planning to be in three days, but might end up increasing that to four; I find it so much easier to focus in the office.) But I can't help worrying that that was the wrong decision, and I shouldn't be asking anyone to work on-site with case numbers as high as they are. And I miss last term when things had started to feel almost normal again. And mostly, I hate living through a pandemic and having to risk assess everything and make judgements I'm not remotely qualified to make. And I may have just had two and a bit weeks off, but after four days back I'm already utterly exhausted.

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.

Today felt like it was a shockingly unproductive day, but reflecting on it as I walked home I decided that was just because my brain was refusing to acknowledge spending two and a half hours in a committee meeting as work. Though it definitely wasn't fun.

More cheerfully, I have booked my COVID booster for 22 December, exactly six months after my second jab.

And it is exactly a quarter of a century since I first met T. Which is entirely ridiculous because I'm sure I'm still not much more than 30.