FROM THIS ...TO THIS IT’S TIME TO EMBRACE THE OLD NORMAL

It’s two years to the day since the first UK cases of Covid. As Scotland emerges from the ghastly war on the virus, the vital lessons we’ve learned... and threat we still face

IN January 2020 an unfamiliar medical term was gaining traction on our news bulletins. It was easy to miss in the early part of the month but, by the fourth week, impossible to avoid. Then, on the 29th – two years ago today – two Chinese nationals taken ill in a hotel in York tested positive for the infection whose name was now known to us all.

And so it became official: Britain was at war with coronavirus.

The impact of this information may not have carried quite the thunder of the declaration of war against Germany on September 3, 1939, but we were relative innocents in those early days of 2020.

Looking back over those two years, the seismic effects of this microscopic bug on lives and lifestyles is hard to overestimate. Few of us imagined post-apocalyptic scenes of deserted city centres, shuttered shops and empty office blocks were any more likely in real life than the zombie attacks or alien invasions which precipitated them in the movies. Yet we saw them in our own land. There was a time when many of us rolled our eyes at fusspot eccentrics wandering around public places with surgical masks over their faces to protect them from our very air. This behaviour was the domain of germaphobes, and affected pop stars such as Michael Jackson.

Yet masks became a legal requirement. They are wearing them all day, every day in Scottish schools still.

In years gone by, we associated restricPerhaps tions on freedom of movement, on who we can see, when and where, with bail conditions imposed by courts on volatile or flight-risk offenders.

Yet, for a time, we were all prisoners in our local authority boundaries, banned from seeing our own relatives – except in extremis – if they happened to live across a municipal border.

We imagined a certain impregnability to the strictures of our working lives, yet almost overnight saw them completely turned upside down.

You think your job is officebased? Think again. It is homebased now. Try to make it work. We’re all in the same boat.

And, with magnificent stoicism, Scottish office workers did make it work, many of them while home schooling their children into the bargain.

The phrase current at the time was ‘the new normal’. Our lives were to be lived almost exclusively in our home bunkers, communications were to be electronic, sorties to supermarkets kept to a minimum. And, punctuating the new normal were news reports which had no place in normality.

The heir to the throne had coronavirus and was self-isolating in Birkhall, Aberdeenshire. Then the Prime Minister had it. Now he was in hospital – and now in intensive care. Would he die? It was touch and go.

No, not some breathless movie script – the new normal.

Yet this weekend Scotland stands a socially distanced few feet away from embracing a blast from the past: the old normal. On Monday many of us will be back at our workplace desks for the first time in 22 months.

Nicola Sturgeon – somewhat later than Boris Johnson – advises it is now safe to begin a ‘phased’ return to offices, so long as we do not all pile in at once like Black Friday sales zealots. I will be one of the workers dipping my toe in the waters of my old working life, fiddling with the knobs under my swivel chair to make it just so, for it will surely not be after nearly two years away.

I will be seeing colleagues I have not clapped eyes on since March 2020 and deliberating on the appropriate form of greeting. Is it a handshake? A hug? Do we still do these things? some colleagues will wear Scotland’s new social distance reminder badge – a yellow shield with an arrow design denoting ‘keep away from me’ – but most, I suspect, will rely on the intuition and common sense which served us well over the past two years.

There will be a bit of life about our major city railway stations on Monday morning.

The worry lines, carved like First World War trenches on the face of the sandwich shop owner round the corner from my office, will, perhaps, begin to soften as the early signs of what he used to know as a queue are detected.

Lunchtime will find many of us in cafes whose doors we darkened daily pre-Covid but were forced to abandon to their fate when our own work circumof stances changed. ‘Glad to see you’re still here,’ we may say, like survivors of some prolonged international conflict – which, to an extent, we are.

An element of dread will doubtless colour the thinking of some returning workers as they envision their commutes’ worstcase scenarios – the tailbacks on the M8, the standing room-only trains, the empty hours in transit which office life adds to their days.

But this is for now a phased return, not a wholesale stampede. And besides, our town and city centres are nothing without people. Office blocks are but useless monuments in steel and glass without the buzz of productivity behind their windows.

The effect of Monday and the days that follow will be akin to that of water in the pot of a longignored house plant, bone dry and on the brink of final things.

Urban centres need the water our footfall if they are to avoid becoming commercial deserts and there is no question that office workers are at the core of that footfall.

For many, the return to offices will relieve intolerable pressures on home lives.

These are the ones whose workstation was a commandeered kitchen table or, worse, a desk squeezed into a bedroom.

In some households, both arrangements were in place: young professional couples in their first flat – a one-bedroom affair – fielding calls from bosses, covering for Covid-afflicted workmates, grappling with intermittent wi-fi. Only the most saintly patient will have made it through unscathed.

Others, and I count myself in this category, were lucky to fall on our feet. I have a room for home working and I quite like it. It has a door which closes out the world and technology which works. I have grown used to my bunker and part of me sees the return to a bustling office much as a prisoner might when the gates swing open and he is thrust, blinking, back into the big bad world.

We have, some of us, become so accustomed – institutionalised even – to the new normal that it is the old normal which brings trepidation.

And yet, as the past two years have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, we can handle it. I think of my own industry and the complexities involved in producing a multiple-edition daily newspaper.

The challenge is daunting enough in a newsroom environment. Now empty the newsroom, send everyone home and see how you get on.

The Scottish Daily Mail barely skipped a beat. The same is true across dozens of industries whose product is rooted in the close collaboration we associate with office working.

Committed professionals make it work somehow and if we could do so through that tsunami of change then the future should not faze us.

That is not to say the life we return to will necessarily be exactly the one we left. Making my way out of the place in March 2020, knowing I’d be working

‘A pandemic changes people just as global conf lict did’

from home for a time, I gave a colleague a few bars of ‘We’ll Meet Again’. It was supposed to be ironic. Neither of us imagined we would be away from the place for more than a few weeks. Two summers have passed, two Christmases, two birthdays and the reunion remains two days away.

A global pandemic changes people, just as living through a global conflict clearly did twice in the first half of the last century, and we return to workstations not only older but also wiser to the ways of the world in times of crisis.

I have learned, for example, that a health emergency even as grave as this one boils down to pure politics when it is left on the heat for long enough. There was, if you remember, a rather touching outbreak of cross-party agreement in the teeth of the initial storm.

The SNP, whose raison d’être is winning independence, was suddenly confronted with a more fundamental imperative – saving Scottish lives – and opposition parties were rightly supportive. But Nationalist leopards do not change their spots and the entente cordiale lasted only as long as government decisions remained transparently earnest and free from political point-scoring. That was, at most, two or three months.

Thereafter advice offered and restrictions imposed by Scottish ministers were suspiciously at variance with English ministers.

We were, by summer 2020, bemused witnesses to what looked increasingly like a competition to establish that Scots were the better looked after, the more zealously protected from the virus. Politics was back in the room. Deeper into the crisis many of us learned that our own responses to the coronavirus threat were, to an extent at least, guided by our politics.

On the Right we found impatience with mask-wearing, scepticism of the science behind them and irritation with government interference on our freedoms.

On the Left we found compliance, confidence that government knows best, fastidious finger-wagging and a shop-thy-neighbour approach to rule breakers spied from the kitchen windows.

On the political extremities we found anti-vaxxers spouting conspiracy theories on life-saving jabs with the same swivel-eyed dogma they approach any matter on which sensible minds agree. Some even convinced themselves vaccines were devices injected into arms to allow the state to spy on us. Deeper still in the timeline of our coronavirus experience – indeed as we ready ourselves for putting it all behind us – it turns out the Scottish Government is less keen to relinquish its grip on freedoms than it assured us for the best part of two years.

Its temporary emergency powers to make sweeping interventions in our lives must become permanent, it says. These include the draconian measures we saw in all their oppressiveness at the sharp end of the pandemic: the closure of schools, people forced to stay at home, prisoners freed from jails in response to outbreaks.

Even former SNP minister Alex Neil is horrified by the thought of government wielding such powers other than in ‘very exceptional circumstances’.

Here, rather aptly in the current coronavirus climate, is where the mask slips from the SNP face altogether, revealing the unmistakeable features of brazen politics.

The beginning of the phased return to work on Monday, then, comes long, long after the worst of this crisis when Miss Sturgeon’s task of updating the nation on its daily casualties was surely among the most unenviable in Scotland.

Politics has reverted to type, got back to business as usual while we have been marking time at home.

I will return to the office armed with the knowledge that my time away from it was a good deal more political than I imagined it would be when I left. But I will also make my entrance thanking my lucky stars that I remain healthy enough to do so and that my loved ones, several of whom contracted the virus, all breezed through with no lasting ill-effects.

I will see how it goes with my colleagues. Should they offer a hand, I do not see myself refusing it. We are shipmates, after all.

It will be months or years before a settled perspective arrives on the trauma. Wars are like that. Experiences percolate in the brain at their own speed but we usually make sense of them in the end.

Perhaps, in time, those two years of coronavirus warfare will inform conscious lifestyle changes.

For some, a hybrid office/home working arrangement may prove feasible. For others, the lure of a clean break from the rat race could, by now, be irresistible.

But these are private conversations between employers and their staff after the dust has settled. Miss Sturgeon and her team have no place in them.

The war, for now at least, is won. And government would do well to give us peace.

‘It will be months before a settled perspective arrives on trauma’