Two Whole Years, Really? 

It was, I freely admit, a strange time to retire. Only 3 weeks after the WHO announced that COVID-19 was now a pandemic I left The Company (no, NOT the CIA!) after 32 years. Things, of course, had already started getting weird. Any time someone coughed or sneezed EVERYONE in the office (or on my bus home) stared at them and people – including me – were washing their hands almost obsessively at every opportunity. Management had supplied anti-bacterial wipes for each set of desks (as we were already ‘hot-desking’ then) so we could wipe down our workstation when we left for the day. It was, honestly, quite surreal at times. We all remember the lack of toilet paper in the stores but I had already stocked up on that in advance plus I still had my post-Brexit stock that I was backfilling so I wasn’t worried about that aspect of things. The empty shelves of pasta was a bit annoying and I couldn’t help but wonder at the constant lack of hand sanitiser, anti-bacterial soap (helping with a virus how exactly) as well as ANYTHING else even vaguely associated with hygiene.  

Then, with only a few weeks to go before I finally walked out the door I got ill. This was, of course, before Covid tests became easily available. It ‘felt’ like a cold but late March wasn’t that common a time to have one. Not completely unusual, but not that common so I phoned in sick and told work that I was self-isolating. Now, to be honest I’m not one of those ‘troopers’ (or as I like to call them: inconsiderate idiots) who come into work ill and give whatever disease they’ve picked up from their kids to the rest of the office. The only time I’d be in work sneezing regularly was during the hay fever season. If I had a cold, even a reasonably mild one, I’d stay off for a few days and kill it where it sleeps. Of course, not exactly knowing WHAT I had this time I wasn’t going to take the risk. My ‘cold’ or whatever it was turned out not to be that debilitating – just annoying in its timing more than anything else. With everything else going on, and with me being the only person that knew certain things and had certain skills my plan was to spend the last 2-3 weeks at work writing briefing papers for my successor when they got one. Fortunately, our team had been ‘mobile’ for a while. This meant that when we arrived in the office in the morning, we took whatever desk was available (if there was one!). What it in effect meant was that the early birds had the pick of the desks (and normally sat in the same desk every day until senior management told them off for doing so – which made no sense to anyone) and latecomers like me played desk ping-pong. On any given day I had no idea where I would be sitting or who I would be sitting with. Mostly it was with my team, nearly always it was on the same floor but very occasionally I’d be sitting on my own in another team's area and in a different building. It was interesting both to discover how territorial I was and how adaptable I could be. After a few months I actually ‘liked’ not knowing where I was sitting that day – plus it made me harder to physically find and bother, especially when reading in my lunch break. But, the point of all that was that I was mobile with a work laptop and iPhone. So, being at home, even being ill at home, didn’t mean I had to stop working.  

As my last day approached my leaving meal was cancelled (very soon after that, restaurants stopped taking bookings) as well as my leaving drinks – all those people in confined spaces breathing on each other [presumably with the occasional hug] wigged people out too much. I had some leave to take so I actually ‘left’ about a week before my official date of 8th April (cunningly one day after my 60th birthday) and I transitioned from full-time work to retirement at home just as the first lockdowns shut almost everything down. We all know how weird the first 6 months of Covid was and it was easy to imagine myself as someone looking forward to an active retirement only to find themselves in the middle of an apocalypse. Seeing how people sprang away from strangers was like living through the first 30 minutes of an end of the world movie to be honest and, again to be honest, totally fascinated me. Like many people no doubt, I had grown up on end of the world narratives from the 1960’s onwards and I found it really interesting to see how the whole thing played out in ‘real life’.  

Overall, it was interesting (to say the least!) to enter the post-retirement arena during a global pandemic. It has meant that some of my plans had to be put on hold for a year or more. It did also mean that I have had lots of time to read – as was a major part of my plan – and at least I didn’t have to spend time and resources fighting off zombies or worrying about asteroid impacts. Isolation during an ongoing viral outbreak probably affected my mental health in some ways – mostly low-level anxiety I suspect – but generally I think I coped with it pretty well. It was frustrating that I couldn’t go places and do things but Amazon still delivered and the lights (and the Internet!) stayed on, so the impact on me, personally, wasn’t too bad. Two years later things are almost back to ‘normal’ or some sort of new normal. Most people aren’t wearing masks anymore and people don’t seem to mind crowds as much as they did at the beginning. Events are back on and people tend to stand a LOT closer than they did 24 months ago – it's actually quite strange in a way. Of course, Covid is still around and people are still catching it (and dying from it) but with vaccinations, the new anti-virials and LOTS of experience in the NHS the odds of getting it, getting really ill or dying from it are vastly lower that when the whole thing started. With luck and a fair wind, the NEXT two years should be a lot less interesting – although with the Ukraine war likely to go on for at least another 6 months impacting on oil and wheat production (to say nothing of the global fertiliser trade!) and all of the other shit happening in the global background who knows? I guess we’ll see when we get there.