Six months in to being back in the office, and City life isn’t quite what any of us could have imagined right now*.

So, some London lockdown updates Chez Maddie:

– The cats are big fans of work from home, especially sitting on my stuff, touching my face, and shouting at me when I’m on a conference call, albeit they sleep a LOT (and snore!).

– Moppet is delighted I have two laptops and a monitor which all have thick and difficult-to-replace cables she can try to chew through when I’m not paying her enough attention.

– Dismantling the WFH set up every evening (see above) is very boring, and if this continues there’s a high chance it will become work-from-bedroom-floor; which is already where the printer/scanner lives as it’s a bugger to move.

– I do not want to put on work clothes or tights ever again, and shall be petitioning to work in gymkit full time from now on.

– My “outside” time has become the most precious part of my day; I plan it meticulously, because I don’t have any outside space or even a window in my flat, so aside from that glorious exercise each day I am truly inside and alone (with the cats).

– There’s a terrifying rumour they may enforce a “camera on” rule for work conference calls; these are all done via an online system to which US participants dial in from their laptop, and us UK ilk dial in from our phones (because phone = camera off….); a companywide laptop “camera on” rule means an entire rethink of my lockdown plan of living in gymkit with dirty hair; as a colleague realised the other day when he gamefully joined in, and remembered too late he was wearing a rugby shirt and hadn’t shaved for a week.

– Work hours no longer exist, since we all live at home and work at home we literally live at work, and can (and I do) work all the time; I joked a couple of months ago, when work got super busy, that we lived at work because we were working evenings and weekends, and my boss joked that he was taking advantage of the flexible work from home policy because he could go home and work…. more fool us.

– I have cat food and cat litter to last me a month, it was a worry for a little bit (the Sainsbury’s with stock caught fire, of all the things right now!) but I’ve sourced enough for two weeks and hopefully have more on the way; if the worst comes to the worst they’ll eat ham and I’ll blend cornflakes into grit for litter.

– Me-wise, I am watching my way through all my boxsets before I start to exhaust Netflix (thank you, sibling!) and Amazon Prime – and may finally have a reason to start opening all that 30th birthday champagne, if lockdown continues past the point at which the wine provisions are depleted….

Making it work, from home, work from home…. I have no real life friends any more. Send help. Don’t send help, send wine in the post! Please.

*Could Hari Seldon have predicted it? Is this part of a larger plan to save the world? We have to hope so.