Goldilocks and the three chairs (Anne Rooney)

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin...

Once upon a time there was a little blonde woman who wrote books. Everyday she went to the University Library and wrote her books. Then one evening, the Library sent her an email saying it would be closed in the morning and for the forseeable future. No, she could not take her things out of her locker or cross the threshhold for any other reason. We've all been in this story, one way or another, for more than a year now. The stuff is still in the locker, but this is about a different bit of furniture.

The week before the library closed, the finance director of one of my publishers cancelled all commissioning. Another cancelled two books I was writing for them. Otheres went AWOL silently. This meant not going to the Library wasn't a particularly big  problem. I spent the summer gardening, moping and writing a few bits for which commissions did still come through, including You Wouldn't Want to be in a Virus Pandemic. The minor backache I'd had for a while slowly cleared up to be replaced by a few gardening aches and strains.

 

Then, around October, bits of work trickled in. Some was immediately cancelled again with the November lockdown, but I was working about half-time and it was still warm so I was doing it in the sunroom, a light, airy, but cold-in-winter room where I have my best desk and office chair, a fine Herman Miller specimen because when you work from home (as I did for years before settling in the University Library) you know money spent on a good chair is well spent. But you forget.

The weather got colder and the sunroom was too cold to work in without turning the heating up to planet- and finance-destroying levels, so I moved upstairs to a desk and chair abandoned by a long-moved-out daughter.  With the early spring, work came back properly. Publishers came out of hibernation, blinked in the strange light of the new world, and went on a commissioning binge, presumably realising they had nothing to sell after all that cancelling. I started to get hip pains, just in one hip. At first I thought it was another gardening injury, or at least a tree-felling injury as I'd been climbing in one tree to cut bits of a neighbouring tree blown down in a storm. Through March, the hip got worse rather than better. I feared I'd become old and would be needing a hip replacement. Perhaps I shouldn't have cut my walking down over the winter. But, well, it was cold. And pandemicky still. Maybe I should age gracefully and buy a patterned stick. Maybe if the shops ever opened...

Then it was Easter. I wanted to go on holiday, but that's not allowed. Part of my house is usually let to a lodger and he'd moved out two days before. This would do: a home from home. I moved in (that is, walked through the connecting door) and started working on a small desk and old office chair. After a few days I had shoulder pains, but the hip was slightly better. The internet connection was dodgy this far from the router, though, so I moved to a folding chair at the dining table. Then I had childcare duties for a few days and stopped working. 

Suddenly, the pieces fell into place. Chairs. Or at least, chair-and-desk combos. The chairs at the University Library had given me backache. The chair in the bedroom hurt my hip. The chair in the annexe hurt my shoulder (wrong height for the desk — it had been adjusted by my tall lodger and got jammed at its new height). The dining table hurt everything.  But the Herman Miller chair is Just Right. As the weather gets warmer, I'll move back to the sunroom. Problem solved, I hope, for now. And if we're still doing this next winter I'll move the chair upstairs.

The moral is if you're working from home and have new aches and pains, look at where you're working. I would have noticed if this had followed straight after Library closed, but because I didn't have any work then it didn't materialise until much later. There's a good reason that employers who have people working at home are supposed to check the safety and suitability of their equipment. Those of us who employ ourselves shouldn't neglect it. Do an audit of your body and your workspace. A few months of aches and pains is a nuisance, but if it goes on for too long, perhaps we could do permanent damage. So don't settle in the chair that is too big, too soft or too small — look for the one that's Just Right.

 Anne Rooney

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Working from Home - Ciaran Murtagh

Over the past few months I've come to a realisation, I work from home but I don't necessarily work at home. Trust a writer to get bogged down by semantics in 'week infinity + 1' of lock down and how typical of them to obsess over the difference between two very small words. But there is a difference and frankly it's huge.

Working from home never looked like this - who compartmentalises their own breakfast?

Now you might argue there are many more important things to worry about at this stage in the shit show currently masquerading as 2020, or perhaps it's precisely because of the times we find ourselves in that navel gazing about the difference between 'from' and 'at' seems like a useful waste of my time.

Every day for the past few months I've been heading to my shed to do my work, just like I have done for the past decade or so. I get the work done, but recently I've been finding it harder and harder, and I've been trying to figure out why. Now of course, the chaotic nature of the world - and in particular our country - at the moment doesn't help. But even putting that to one side, something's changed, and that's where those two little words come in.

Home sweet home

People often tell me that I'm very lucky to work at home. And I am. But the truth is -  I really don't. Maybe 30% of my working life is spent at home. A lot of the time I'll be working in cafes or pubs, on trains, in hotels, in libraries, the top floor of the Royal Festival Hall, in airport departure lounges, or in one memorable deadline crazed fever, a bench in the Whitgift Centre Croydon.

Scene of some of my greatest triumphs

It's easy to say I work at home. But given a choice I work anywhere but! I'm not conditioned to spend four months writing in the same place.  I like to mix it up. I thrive on the energy of busy places. I write about life and characters and people and I like to surround myself with them. It's hard to be inspired by a funny incident or something someone said when you're not interacting. I'm not made to be locked in my shed. I might long for the solitude from time to time, but in reality I want life and I want my words to be conceived in the hubbub of conversation and lives being lived.

Come back. I miss you guys... 

So that's what I've learned. My office might be at home, but I work in the bustling streets that surround me and it can't come back soon enough.

Pretending not to work from home - Anne Rooney

Old normal: in the UL

Most writers work from home all the time, so lockdown shouldn't make any difference, right?

Wrong. Apart from all the additional complications many of us face, from partners and children being around all day to the mental and emotional impact of total isolation, there is one important difference between now and Before All This: working FROM home has become working AT home. It's a very different kettle of fish.

New normal: actually at home

Although I officially work from home, for the last few years I've been working almost entirely in the University Library, which is a three-mile cycle ride away. I also like to work in cafes and on trains. I concentrate best when there is some bustle, and some noise I need to block out. Working from home actually *at* home is too quiet. I used to have Radio 4 on for background natter, but that's been too annoying and depressing for a long time, its gloom and doom too hard to ignore. Radio 4 leaches any residual calmness you might have retained and saturates you in misery; it's become a form of self-abuse.


Silence is too distracting, though. For the first few weeks, I'd leap to the window every time a bus came (there's a bus stop right outside), just so I could see some human beings. Usually, one human being — the driver. I listen too carefully for the birds — was that a cuckoo I just heard? The drone of traffic has been replaced by the almost-constant buzz of emergency helicopters (I live a mile from the largest hospital in Europe).

But last week I saw a link to a website that plays cafe background noise constantly. You can adjust the levels of chatter, kitchen noise, etc to suit your preferred cafe environment. My productivity has shot up since I've found this. It's cheaper than going to a cafe, too, at a cost of £0. But you do have to make your own coffee. Still, if you are finding that you can't work from home if you can't work in a cafe, this might help. I need someone to make a University Library simulator now.

Anne Rooney
Latest book, possibly, but who knows any more?
How to be an Eco-Hero

 

Hachette, 2020

Welcome to working from home, everyone! by Tracy Darnton

Authors are no strangers to self-isolation and working from home. We can offer pearls of wisdom about changing out of your jimjams, getting fresh air, using a standing desk, how to structure your coffee breaks and how to live without an IT department, HR or accounts department. 

Some of us will be having to share our already limited workspaces with partners exiled from their rapidly closing offices. I’m working on some induction training to outlaw excessively loud telephone calls and a whole loud of etiquette around use of the big desk and dining table. Special training will be required for my new co-worker about how to clear all the washing and ironing without breaking concentration. 

My fantasy workspace - not my rather messy actual one

I know that compromise will be required so I’m prepared to bring in a tea rota, a water cooler for casual conversation and dress-up Friday. However, only I can use any of my bookshop mug collection. No one touches my pencil cases but me.

I suppose we’ll have to form a committee and hold some pointless meetings just for the hell of it.

Please let this all be back to normal before the office Christmas party. Avoiding an office Christmas party is one of the few benefits of freelancing. 

Good luck everyone. See you all on the other side. 

Tracy Darnton is the author of The Truth About Lies. Her next novel, The Rules, is out in July. The Rules is about a girl on the run from her prepper father and the effects of continually preparing for disaster. She is not enjoying this period of unexpected immersive research.