I'm sure that, like me, for many contacts and colleagues, working days are running in anything but the usual order, anything but the usual way. For me, business has stopped for the time being, all bar finishing off some vital tasks to conclude a great assignment with a client whose people gave, gave and gave again as I w​orked to help them problem solve and solution find. I am still adjusting to the fact that, the diary being on hold (not closed!) there is, for the first time in my working life, no rush.  No urgency in getting that domestic business done around my business and the people who seek to use it. I can take my time in the kitchen and the garden, at the piano or in my permitted outside exercise a day.  This is not my style, and it makes me a bit jumpy.  It's a struggle to believe it, let alone let my clock run slower than usual.  For former colleague DCSs and their staff and partners, whilst some of the everyday clutter might have set itself aside, their days are very full, their sleeves rolled up and their heroic efforts focused on ensuring the people they serve are as safe as possible, for as long as possible, with as much dignity and support as can be afforded them. I salute them, as ever.  I do remember what single community crises were like when I did the job.  But then there was simply nothing of the scale, or the likely longevity, of the current massive challenge facing them, and society, right now.   

This period of enforced introspection has got me thinking, mostly in the researcher part of my brain.  What I see on a daily basis is that, beyond the muppets who don't think Covid19 is serious or could affect them and won't modify their conduct beyond getting mad and behaving badly, thousands of people are just doing good. Volunteering, offering simple help like dropping off shopping on a neighbour's doorstep, going a LOT further and putting themselves on the line, offering free online support to parents whose children are not at school so everybody may be feeling the strain.  The observer in me is starting to hatch some ideas that would bear scrutiny when this is all over.  Here are some research questions you might help me think about!

Will the economy recover? Or will we have to grow to being, by necessity, a more socially aware nation that seeks out and supports our strugglers rather than blaming them for their own situations then getting on with our own lives?  What will a national workforce look like when we are through the other side?  Will we stay connected, or are we likelier to go back to being frantic, self-absorbed, as our pre-crisis behaviour tended to make us?  Will the memory of when people pulled together, stayed local, formed bonds via Zoom or Skype or WhatsApp linger?  Will we mark when we realised that "We don't need that meeting" was an actual thing?  When people found both altruism and skills they didn't know they had?  When all this is over, can we harness citizen research as well as that done in academia to explore the phenomena we are witnessing as people turn towards others as well as addressing their own concerns?  Or does it take a serious crisis, another Covid19, to make us step into a shared mental and emotional space and capture what it teaches us rather than staying in our own, meaning we will forget? I'm working on some approaches to research bodies on all this, given this is a truly remarkable, as well as a sad, scary, deeply unsettling and uncertain - an "interesting" - time.

If you would like to co-explore what I ruminated on above, or if like me you are watching fascinated as people stop buying what they don't need and concentrate on what they and others do need? Together?  Please get in touch!  

And in the meantime? Stay safe.  Good luck. And if you are in an organisation that's keeping us all going, thank you.