At last – life is starting to feel normal after the great lockdown

Is today the tipping point? Are we creeping back to normality, whatever that may be? If my household is any guide, the signs are good: on the dot of nine o’clock this morning Rob, our brilliant Mr Fixit, arrived to fix the oven which has been on the blink for months.

Hot on his heels came Warren to deep-clean the kitchen floor – my daughter is having a tiny Covid-style wedding next week so all stops are being pulled out to tidy the place. Minutes later, the lawn mower repair men brought back our mower, which had also packed up.

Tea was made, biscuits brought out and Rob sang, as he always does, while fixing our appliances. Everyone was in the jolliest of moods, a typical blustery Monday September morning. Our neighbour popped by to say hello as she went off to teach her first drama class since March

Then came the clincher that there is after-life after lockdown: our son sent a picture through to the family WhatsApp group of two pairs of smart black shoes hidden under his office desk. “So what?” you might say. Maybe they have a thing about shoes. But no, this was a totemic moment: a reunion of sorts. He last wore the shoes in March, the last day he walked to his City office before work from home (WFH) became the norm. The shoes have been under his desk ever since.

Like so many other City firms, his employer has chosen this week to re-open its offices.  Many of the City’s big investment banking, law firms and insurance companies are opening up on a rationed basis for small groups of staff and under the strictest social distancing rules.

In some companies, employees are being given “survival kits”, including sanitiser and gadgets, to open lift doors and minimise the touching of surfaces. In meeting areas and cafe, many firms have colour-coded their tables and restricted them to two people at a time. Everything is being constantly washed and deep-cleaned. Safety is being taken seriously.

A family friend is also back at his publishing house for the first time this week, for two days a week for now. The publisher is also looking at whether staff should be given the option to work more flexibly, either working from home full time or for a couple of days a week, even when offices open properly again. Many other companies are looking at offering similar flexibility.

For now, the publisher hopes to offer space for workers for a fifth of them in September, and then for half of them by October. Again, the employer is taking rigorous precautions for staff to be and feel as safe as they possibly can while at work.

Safety is the elephant in the room – or, one should say, on the bus, the tube or the train. Feeling safe while travelling to work is appears to be the big deciding factor in whether people are returning to the office or not. A recent poll showed that four out of ten office workers are still working from home despite attempts by their employers and government to persuade them otherwise.

The main reason employees gave in the survey for sticking to WFH is the fear of travelling on public transport, not the fear of working in offices.

Who can blame them? Cramped tubes, bad air flow, sitting on seats and holding onto rails that thousands of other people are also touching is hardly conducive to getting people into the office. Just as employers are showing they are doing everything they can to make people feel good, so should Transport for London and other bus and rail operators.

So, am I premature in suggesting that life is coming back full-circle to how it was pre-pandemic? Let’s see, once the genie is out of the bottle it is difficult to put back in. Confidence is clearly back and, as with most emotions, can rise or fall quickly and exponentially. Reports from the front-line suggest that most nurseries and schools are getting used to the new normal, that pubs and restaurants are filling up again, office workers are bit by bit finding their way back to the water-cooler and journalists are back live in the radio studios.

Which brings me to the Reaction team. We haven’t met since early March and since then have grown considerably: two brilliant young interns and another reporter, who we interviewed and employed over Zoom videos, have joined us.

Our plan is to meet up for the first time over the next week or so in Fleet Street, which sadly looks utterly deserted during the week. Who knows, if the rents come down enough, we may be able to find ourselves back in a Fleet Street office. Now that would be a return to tradition.