Its the nervous nineties, and with this incessant seeping torture of a virus comes a real nervousness and lack of motivation for me at work. I’m finding it tricky to get motivated, to give a shit about what I am doing. In fact the very process of getting up makes me realise I’ve a full day to fill, with work that is drying out, and you know whats worse than not having any work to do? Not having any work to do and to pretend to be busy, due to having to fulfil my contractural arrangements. What the hell they are is increasing unclear. Ive one regional manager with 3 production managers under him, each one delivering a different message to us, the staff at the coal face, not literally, i’m not a miner. That ship sailed a long time ago.

So to rescue me from boredom I have taken to Twitter and this week sometime I’ve entered myself into a beer bottle championship, of which the above is my entry. I am more excited about this than what I will be doing tomorrow at work. 10am Ive got a really uninspirational awkward Microsoft teams meeting which will last for an hour or so, then I’ll have another coffee, some biscuits and wait for the postman to come. Then I’ll get in the car and drive out to somewhere in Herefordshire to do what I do, take some photos, write some bullshit report and then hope some more work has come in, or i’ll be back to sorting out my filing cabinet or photocopying.

My company has been more than generous in keeping us on full time but not expecting u to do a fraction of the work as it is outside and going outside wasn’t an option for us in a travail capacity up until a few weeks ago. My company will take it’s lead, as many others will, I expect, from the government. If they can’t be seen to be acting with authority then what hope has anyone else? Strong leadership, a talisman to follow is needed more than ever, and our PM’s arrogant refusal to believe that things will not get back to normal within the blink of an eye is flabbergasting. His levels of how out of touch he really is with the normal population was shown to devastating effect with the u-turn on a policy to provide free school meals to the most vulnerable children over the summer holidays, brought on by a 22 year old English footballer, hero to Manchester United, Marcus Rashford, activist; man of the people. The Dominic Cummings affair, the refusal to compare the Covid stats with the rest of the world having previously done so on a daily basis until we started winning, erm, leading the most abhorrent race of number of deaths. His refusal to lockdown early enough, the various other leg ups it seems which have been given to companies of friends of friends. Then Brexit, fucking hell, what’s going to happen there?

My country seems to have imploded over the last 4 or 5 years, the furloughing of 9 million workers has been excellent and looks to be keeping the economy on a knife edge until it stops and tons of folk get made redundant. We’re a service economy, having sold all our manufacturing down the river and so the aim to please customers is our primary raison d’être. Well the news is that no one’s going to have any money to go out, we’re all doomed, apart form the politicians who can always pull up the drawbridge, whip their butler into life and sit counting their sterilised covid stained money.