24 January 2019, Vienna – Birmingham, was my first flight of 2019. After that, over the course of the year, I went onto another 19. That’s 1.66 trips per month and doesn’t include the multiple train rides I also took, across the UK and Switzerland, into Austria, France, and Italy, the consequence of spreading my life over three European countries, then gathering it all up and moving it to New Zealand. Moving to the other end of the world in December of last year, I was looking forward to slowing down, having things in one place, and taking my time settling into this new home. I hadn’t quite imagined coming to such a grinding halt.
On the day Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the lockdown, I packed up the books and papers I needed from my university office and walked to our little rental flat. My landlady waved at me from her kitchen window as I passed by stating, from a safe distance, ‘you’re coming home then’. Yes, home. As a researcher who mostly works with text – things people and institutions say or write – I am ideally equipped to work from home. All I need is a laptop really, some books and publications (most of which I can access online), and a notebook. I have worked from home for years, in between those plane rides. Yet, now, I find myself at our dining table, and it seems I cannot work from home.
I am nervous and cagey, obsessively checking the news, then Facebook, then Twitter, texting family and friends in Europe who are all asleep at this time. I get up and make coffee, pace the living room and sit back down. I look at my blank Word document – this is the perfect time to work on my publications. No meetings, no seminars, no one walking into my office. I manage a few sentences a day, a paragraph if I am lucky. Mostly, though, it feels like I am shuffling words around. ‘You are not working from home’, an academic colleague tweets, ‘you are at home during a crisis trying to work’. Yes, this is a crisis, but personally I am hardly affected by it, am I? COVID-19 doesn’t pose an existential threat to me or my loved ones, not in health or economic terms, unlike so many others. How then can I claim crisis mode for myself?
Despite seemingly not doing much, I am tired at the end of the day and fall asleep early to wake up feeling groggy still. During one of my trips down the Twitter rabbit hole, I spot a tweet asking, ‘Is anyone else just really, really tired?’. Yes, exhausted, thank you! So I do things that relax me: I knit, I bake, I cook elaborate dinners, and reread Harry Potter rather than that book for work. As the lockdown progresses, my work productivity doesn’t improve, but I change my expectations. I set myself one work goal per day and once achieved I can return to Harry Potter or baking bread. Some of these work goals are valid – review this manuscript or said application – some are pathetic – write one paragraph – but they are a step forward nonetheless. Maybe work is just not the most important thing right now. The Antarctic dishwasher’s recommendations come to mind. He writes ‘Nobody accomplishes a lot during the isolation of Winter. But, if we do little, then that is a lot.’ So, I do a little, and maybe that’s a lot right now.