"This is the really real world, there ain't no goin' back!" - This Week's #ReadItTorial

It's been tough to devote time to #ReadItTorials recently, mostly because I've been working from home and sitting in front of a computer screen to type stuff in my spare time feels like an extension of the working day even more than it did before.

So this week my mind has been occupied with the 'happy ever after' - to quote a  book cliche - the world returning to normal.

Only I don't think I know what 'normal' is any more.

I won't pretend every aspect of the lockdown has been fun. Missing friends and family is the obvious toughest part of all this, and it's been particularly tough on C's grandparents who now don't get to see her because of the risks (and the sensible measures to ensure folk stay at home).

But we're weirdly adaptive, we humans. It's amazing how it's taken a few weeks to get used to working from home (something I had done before a fair bit but on odd days here and there, not for weeks at a time) and it's also amazing how adaptive kids are to their new way of life and their new way of schooling. I've watched C doing what millions of other kids around the globe are probably doing too - engaging with virtual learning, making use of the internet for the purpose it was originally intended for - to help us learn, to be more productive, and to do this wherever we might find ourselves.

I've been around way too long in IT - so I remember the first time I saw Mosaic (the ancient original browser that most of us old goats first encountered the Internet on) and I remember back then falling hopelessly in love with the idea of creating web pages (ugh, some of them probably still exist out there too from that era via the WayBack machine - embarrassing soul-bearing that's worse than finding one of your old teenage diaries).

Of course now the Internet has massively changed and I doubt anyone back in the early 90s would have imagined the things we'd do with it now. I mean CATS sure, but the things that have made the lockdown bearable, the many ways it's become something that constantly shifts the balance of our love / hate relationship with the world online.

But this week I can't stop thinking about what I'm going to feel like when my employer calls us all to return to work. It'll be weird and there will be good and bad things about it. Seeing colleagues again, seeing who got older, fatter, balder (that's just me) but also hearing people's stories first hand rather than via a Teams or Zoom meeting, or a couple of lines in an email.

But for me I'll be returning with a heavy heart. The current situation has made me realise just how much of our lives we devote to the worst parts of being humans in someone else's employ. The commute, the sheer stress of it (for us it begins with the school run, then a car or bus journey to work in shitty traffic). Then there's the business of sitting in an office (with an increasingly shorter break for lunch each year) for 7 and a half hours each working weekday, staring at a screen and (for me at least) doing a job I am actually more productive, more inspired and motivated to do while sitting in the comfort of my own home connected to all the systems I would at work.

I've spoken to colleagues who agree and disagree with me, and it's funny that most of the ones who agree are folk with kids - who have become closer to their kids, and heck, their spouses / partners too (though I'm sure there are an equal number who are at the point where their other halves are secretly plotting their demise, or at least daydreaming about it!)

What the heck has this got to do with books? Nothing really, suffice to say that the stories - and god help us - the kids books that are going to come out of this are going to flood the market, I bet. Suddenly a million dystopian novels or dark kids books are going to feel slightly whimsical in the face of 2020 - the year we were served a lesson in who the top dog on the planet is, and sadly it ain't us humans any more. It's a fellow virus, and I sincerely hope that we walking talking two-legged viruses learn something from that weird little purple spiky git.

I don't wanna go back to normal. There are things I do want to go back to but damn, I really hope the way we work changes for the better. Surely it has to.