On Friday I’ll never go back to pre-pandemic travel
IHAD my first face-to-face meeting in six months this week. The last time I left the confines of my home office in anger (and I probably was a little angry, or at least blearyeyed and grumpy at the time) was Tuesday, March 3.
I remember it very well. I hauled myself out of bed at 3.30am, drove an hour-and-a-half to Bristol Airport and flew to Glasgow. I spent the day training new reporters in our Glasgow office, then headed to the airport and flew to London that night. I networked and presented and brainstormed and caught up with colleagues at a conference in Canary Wharf for the whole of the next day, then headed back to the airport to fly back to Glasgow for another day’s training on the Thursday.
Then as soon as I was done, I flew back to Bristol, drove an hour and a half home and collapsed into bed at around midnight.
Crazy trips like that one had become the norm. I was often away three nights a week. I spent hours on trains and I would regularly leave home before anyone woke and arrive back long after my family – and the rest of the world – were in bed. And then, overnight, it stopped.
Lockdown for me was a chance to slow down. Work was busier than ever, but there was no travelling.
I’m often glued to my laptop, but I’ve barely missed a single bedtime and since school returned, I can nip down the road and take the kids and pick them up and take them to clubs and do all the things that I stressed about not being able to do when we were all free to go where we liked.
For the past 26 weeks I’ve not left Totnes for work.
So when I got a call last week to ask if I would meet our three new photographers in person in Bristol, I was a bit taken aback. But it felt like a trip was long overdue.
What I discovered was that my sense of perspective has completely changed. I didn’t exactly leap out of bed when the alarm went off at 6am – I’m used to a slightly more leisurely start before heading into the next door room to start work.
And where once Bristol was pretty much the closest office I could be asked to visit in our network, that trip up the M5 suddenly seemed interminably long.
Our offices remain closed, so our ‘meeting’ was arranged for a coffee shop in Cribbs Causeway. And as a result, I ended up spending the whole day in Pret, my constant video calls interrupted only to get up and buy another coffee to justify my table.
Having never met my three new colleagues before, except on Google hangouts, I immediately shook the hands of the first two before the third ventured an elbow in my direction.
It was only then that I remembered hand shaking was no longer part of social etiquette and awkwardly made my apologies.
But that was the only moment of social awkwardness. In all other ways, it was a tonic to have that face to face contact. It was great to be able to buy colleagues a cup of coffee and be involved in a meeting that didn’t start and end with the click of a button; where everyone was fully engaged because you could see they weren’t tapping away on another screen or checking their phone while someone else was talking; and where the opportunity to talk about nonwork life around business discussions was just easier because we were face to face.
For a moment, I longed to go back to the office, to see other colleagues, to chat ‘offline’ every day.
And then I got in the car to come home and found myself stuck in a traffic jam on the M5 wondering why I’d ever gone anywhere at all.
Given the mixed messages that are still coming out from the Government, it’s virtually impossible to know when we’ll be back in offices again. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the travelling of 2019 – and I imagine that’s the same for most people in offices.
But despite the M5, I do look forward to a time when face to face meetings are restricted only by the ease of video conferencing and not by the fear of a pandemic.
I found myself stuck in a traffic jam on the M5 wondering why I’d ever gone anywhere at all