Author: Simon Pearson

Everything is quite monotonous and relentlessly trying right now, so mixing things up and pretending to start a new term (in my head, I’m not still at school obvs)

? Starting a twelve-week online programme with Fitter Confident You.

? Ordered a jazz piano book to start teaching myself and learning some standards. I’m using Tim Richards’ Exploring Jazz Piano and, after a decent 90-minute flick through, it looks like a good starting place, with a good grounding in the basics of jazz structure and a good tour of the greats. Looking forward to working through it in more detail.

? Reading for at least twenty minutes a day. Recently finished Girl, Woman, Other (good, refreshing); Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race (really eye-opening and necessary reading for me, and outstanding). Next up: a re-read of my friend Laura’s first novel Blood & Sugar.

⌛︎ I’ve decided to try and work maximum four days a week during all this to make sure I don’t end up collapsing in a heap again at my next proper break, and to pick up some other creative stuff. Let’s see how that goes. I realise how privileged I am to have this choice. In work at the moment, I’m spending a lot of time turning a crisis response into sustainable work; weaning folks off the adrenaline of ‘what now!’ and into the wholesome and important work of longer term vision, goals, bets. Given the twists and turns of the virus, this is no mean feat.

? This spotify playlist of African Disco has been rocking the small moments I manage to not be in meetings.

?‍♂️ Really mad dreams of late, including one in which Will Gompertz and Fiona Bruce were on the news to open a new log flume that had been installed in the Barbican, only the person operating the water switch had fallen asleep. AND I keep dreaming up strange songs about prosaic things like out-of-office replies and spinach. There is no reason for dreams to have become more vivid so I am curious about this.

Tommy Turntables passed away, unexpectedly. The king of Popstarz, Ghetto and Trash Palace was single-handedly responsible for virtually all the queer club nights I spent my late teens and twenties in, and was a regular partner in crime to organise fun later in my thirties with the Pink Singers. He improved all of our lives and is gone too soon.

I really really can’t wait to go to Duckie and dance all night.

The things we take for granted.

Dinner is quietly cooking away downstairs, the last virtual Pink Singers rehearsal of the season is done (a day after our would-be concert at Cadogan Hall, which was of course cancelled). Summer flirts outside, tantalisingly. Life continues inside. A set of completely unrelated paragraphs:

Three virtual choir recordings have taken place under this roof since lockdown started. One a bit of fun with the Barberfellas putting a new covid-spin on Go The Distance.

The second, also Barberfellas (and which I sound-edited in a day after a 60 hour week): a socially-distant recording of U2’s MLK as a bed under a poem by the talented Andreena Leeane to reflect on systemic racism in the UK.

The third is Pink Singers and comes out on Wednesday: it is a beautiful cover version of Fix You and, as usual, has surpassed my expectations of what a group of queers who like to sing every Sunday can do when they get themselves together.

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I’ve been trying to deepen my understanding of service design. At work, I am presently occupied with (to force a metaphor) the rapid stitching together of a quilt made out of very different pre-purchased parts – as quickly as possible before the weather gets cold. For what it’s worth, I’m proud of what the team I’m working on is doing: it’s really reducing the impact of coronavirus on a large swathe of the population. When making services and products in a hurry, we make do with what we’re given. But there are definitely simple ways to create services in response to a crisis (as Lou Downe explains). On my programme, the sewing is mostly done, so we do what we can. But never forget to reflect.

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[Ooh, so cryptic]

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I was re-reminded of the best tweet I have seen of late:

Hey boy.
Hey girl.
Summer tog duvet.
Here we go!

— Sweeting aint Fleeting (@SwtngTwtng) May 17, 2020

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Muzzle app, which pauses notifications while screen sharing, has saved me from Slack notification blunders aplenty since I installed it. And it has the best marketing website I’ve ever seen, ever.

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I was sent a Covid-19 test through the post as part of the Imperial College / Ipsos Mori study, and I carried out my duty dutifully. I’m virtually positive I don’t have it, but strongly suspect I have had it, so an antibody test would have been more personally interesting. But still, it’s good to provide a data point. And although the test itself is reasonably unpleasant, the instructions were reasonable (if lengthy), and included a Jamie-oliver style video.

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I’m taking a week off next week – the first since January. I can positively smell the pages of the real, physical books I am absolutely intending to read. Oh and a lot of cycling. Yes please. Basically: I need a really huge screen break, and ideally some very safe, small meetups with lovely people.

Well, things got wild there for a bit. A summary:

? I rapidly realised that working round the clock from home, with abundance of crisps to hand, was going to result in some serious weight gain. So I got on my bike, and rediscovered London a bit. Since April I’ve been aiming to cycle at least 60km a week but, without really meaning to, have ended up travelling about 100km. Hardly Boardman, but I’m enjoying the escape from domesticity and discovering a city I thought I knew, but didn’t. And it seemingly works: fitbit scale says I’ve dropped 6% body fat in a couple of months.

☎️ The internet got an upgrade with a 5G hub from Three to cope with the unrelenting video calls. It’s got unlimited data and 100Mbps of pipe-wang. This is a big improvement as there’s (still) no prospect of fibre in our street. Still only 3Mbps up, though – which is rubbish, and I suspect, being throttled. But it’s £34/month and I’ll take it until something better gets dug into the road.

? The work diary continues to be entirely full, which I’m grateful for, but a break is sorely needed. Hoping for that in July, to keep up with the giant pile of books I’m amassing to help me understand the history of the black community in the UK. I’ve nearly finished listening to Reni Eddo-Lodge‘s book and there are plenty more to come.

? Gardening mate. I’m trying to do ten minutes of looking at flowers for every sixty of looking at zoom. It works!

?️‍? Should have been at Glastonbury / Pride in London this weekend. Instead of pounding the streets or fields in brightest colours, we installed a new bin under the sink. Literally rubbish. On the plus side, there was rhubarb flavoured cider.

? So much great watching, at the moment. Tunes for Tyrants was a fascinating if slightly anglo-german-obsessed look at musical pomp and (tragic) circumstance; National Theatre at Home has had two towering productions on in two weeks: Small Island, and a v queer version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (til Wednesday); I May Destroy You which is basically required (if painful) viewing for everyone [although not, as we rapidly discovered, suitable for watching with mother]

? Photopea does everything that photoshop does in a browser and it’s great. I am still benefitting from student discount on adobe products but once this runs out I won’t be able to justify the cost, so tools like this are welcome.

? Obviously the backdrop is this little blighter, turning everything upside down. I’m starting to think, without paralysis, of what kinds of world we may have after the crisis, and what that means for life and plans. Nothing firm yet, but allowing the thought process is a start.

And now some pictures from cycles around the city.

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This week I have mostly been in zoom.

Otherwise, I have been evolving through the stages of lockdown like a basic middle-class London gay, it seems.

The stages as I understand them:

Stage 1: bring it on ✅

• Start baking bread (technically this happened in January so ner)
• Take pictures of empty local streets on lockdown walk
• Hunt toilet roll like a sport
• Set work level to 150%
• Zoom quizzes with friends seem like a great idea
• What will I achieve will all this extra lockdown time?
• Watch the peak with fascination

Stage 2: this is fine… ✅

• Photos of bread good enough to share on instagram stories for cheap likes
• Sorry, your zoom call can’t be longer than 40 minutes
• Drink more cider than usual, talk about this with everyone
• Hunt flour and gardening materials only to find everyone else did this already

Stage 3: oh. ✅

• Feel pangs of guilt about photos of bread due to medium thinkpiece bread outrage and lack of originality
• Fight to stay in any kind of Duolingo league
• Sorry, your zoom calls can’t total more than 100 hours in one week
• Stop calling friends in the evenings
• Argue with people on nextdoor saying people walking dogs in parks should be arrested for doing so too much

Stage 4: oh no. ✅

• Weight panic
• Track and post exercise activities for cheap likes
• Zoom pilates, inexplicably
• Rationing crisps to every other day
• Wishing the house clearout had really finished before all this.

Stage 5: oh dear. ⬅

• Feel guilty about photos of exercise
• Really discovering the nuance and detail and depth in the neighbourhood
• Hair in eyes
• Talking to the neighbours for the first time in over ten years – properly
• All kinds of culinary inventions, cravings and soothings: risottos, bakes, roasts, all with a little more time and chance to repeat
• Fume about dishwasher breaking
• Humble and thankful that fuming about the dishwasher breaking is the worst thing happening
• Chug through some more Netflix to escape a bit (Unorthodox: good; Better Call Saul: I Can’t Believe This Isn’t The End; Tiger King: how are these people not AI creations)
• How did we live before and why?
• No longer watching the virus peak but wondering about the complexity of it all
• Need break from work
• Make a meta blogpost about the stages of lockdown to procrastinate from the mechanics of having a break

Where to start.

On home… adjusting to life at home is harder than I’d expected, despite working at home a lot before. On the one hand I am lucky to be fully booked stretching out into the future. On the downside: the work is relentless. Until the easter weekend I’d had about three days off in a month.

On the work… work itself has been super interesting if busy and at times grinding. Coaching during a crisis is a surprising thing. Having an outside view I can often see the extent to which Covid-19 can up-end underlying assumptions underpinning product development plans and team organisation – like being able to see the frog boiling. On the other hand, on the ground, the need to rapidly re-strategise and re-organise is causing lots of obvious organisational pain. In my main current context with client Britten, Lou Downe’s principles for service design in a crisis – and the underlying notes – have been useful and comforting, even if it hasn’t been politically possible yet to implement all of them.

On technology… Twelve hours of zoom calls a day on a creaky old computer made me finally snap and buy a replacement. Farewell, Lewis, you temperamental 2011 Macbook Pro that saw me through BERG (and BERGCloud), starting FutureLearn, about sixteen Pink Singers arrangements, days upon days of video editing. A few upgrades here or there, and a final bit of invasive surgery to remove a resistor to disable the broken graphics card once and for all, but all in all with nine years of pretty relentless service, I’m happy with my strategy of buying big and delaying replacement as long as possible. It is still just about functional, albeit without software updates or the ability to sleep, so I will try and give it a final life in some way (or find a way donate it to a child who needs a device to continue learning while schools are closed). Here’s hoping the replacement lasts another 9 years.

On being social… after the 70/80-hour work weeks on Skype for business, Microsoft teams, Slack calls, Zoom, Whereby… weeks, I think I’ve been somehow more social than before: zoom quizzes on offer every night; group exercise classes; always-on drop-in rooms; Facetime with the niece and nephew, WhatsApp chat with selfie-sticks with mum and dad. No wonder I’m totally exhausted. Thankfully T has moved in and is making us delicious dinners most nights to take some of the strain.

On delivering… I never wanted to be an easter Bunny but this weekend has seen us zoom all over London hand-delivering orders after the overwhelming demand for Paul A Young Fine Chocolates overwhelmed Royal Mail’s current capacity to do, well, anything, it seems. The shop filled up with parcels and, consequently, so did our lounge. The shop is paused while the team figure out how to operationalise this for realsies; on the other hand it’s been admirable to see how quickly a nimble retail business can pivot to online while keeping the wheels just about on the rails. The route4me app has a terrible user interface but once you get past fighting that, it is pretty great and seemingly integrates with Shopify.

One of the other things you realise as a delivery driver is a) how many people don’t answer the door; b) or their phone, c) how typically neutral people are to receive deliveries; d) the address system is basically a nightmare. I will be taking this on board and being nicer to all delivery people.

On getting fat and sad… to conquer the middle-aged-spread and existential-dread combo, I’ve realised I need some more alone time and exercise, so I’m going to try and kill two birds with one stone and go out for some early-morning bike rides (within government guidelines of course). I’ll be on my trusty, knackered, cheapo 11-year-old road bike. It’s not about speed: it’s about tranquility. Tips welcome.

Obviously I’m still making bread although getting hold of flour is still a challenge. Got grains m8?

Finally, the question facing millions of men across the globe: shave your head or rock a man bun?

A few fun outings in the last couple of weeks.

Firstly, to Charlton Athletic Football Club for my first football game in 26 years, singing for Charlton vs Homophobia, where I had to rapidly learn and then lead a crowd of about 18,000 into the club song, Valley Floyd Road.

The event was quite surreal, and we received a surprisingly warm and friendly response. For me, football is entwined with feelings of being bullied and my brain doesn’t want to engage with it at all. On a personal level, Saturday’s experience restored my faith a fair bit.

Also made a visit to the Irish Embassy for a really fascinating look at the relationship between Britain and Ireland in 2020 given the topsy-turvy changes in the societal and political landscapes. The set of essays is high on my list to peruse.

Universal Credit inside the welfare state should be required viewing for anyone developing policy or services for actual humans. No easy answers but the results of austerity are laid bare for all to see here.

Work continues in a busy but slightly less intense fashion: back to a healthy work/life balance for the foreseeable. Long may that continue. Good catch ups with former colleagues and new people have been giving me energy too.