30 March 2020. Difficult to distinguish between work and non-work at the moment. Technically it is the school’s Easter holiday. A time for teaching staff to rest, relax and recover from a grueling term and then start planning again. But all departments have been working desperately hard for weeks. Teachers preparing material for digital teaching in the new term. An entirely new way of interacting with a class, particularly across time zones. The operational teams making sure that all their work is up to date and can be picked up again should they have to work from home or accept a furlough. The only ones who would normally be working really hard in this particular week, the two external exam years, are the only ones who aren’t. Probably. They have been told there is no need to revise for exams which will not happen in the summer. Even more frantic sorting out to help them and put a new programme in place for next term. And all of it this last week done from everybody’s living room. Dozens of zoom conferences and regular updates from the Warden. Even the way our management structures work have been revised for this emergency.

Just one week. It all seems so much longer. I’m not alone in having difficulty remembering what day of the week it is. One little boy was hailed as a Twitter hero because he was wearing day-of-the-week socks. It was Thursday – good to know. Usually this complete breakdown of time happens for a glorious few days in the middle of August. But now there are none of our regular time -keepers. No daily shop for fresh bread with that Friday morning supermarket sweep. No dog-walker ringing the doorbell on Wednesday and Friday mornings to be greeted by an ecstatic dog. No MOTD for husband on Saturday night (although he wasn’t happy about Liverpool’s progress at all). No Sunday morning meeting up with friends for brunch, lunch or church.

Routine is vital for health and sanity. But it is now daily instead of weekly. Long days which seem to fritter away too quickly, broken up by an hour’s exercise walking the dog. He doesn’t know what day it is but he usually knows when it’s time for his walk or supper. Clocks changed on Sunday. Now even the dog is baffled.

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© Clare Sargent

29 March 2020. The fake news vendors claim Northamptonshire police have received more than 300 calls from neighbours snitching on neighbours. And requested that they do not. Interesting that they use the word ‘snitching’. somehow so 1930s public school. Not at all a word for a police state.

Lots of discussion among online groups about how exactly to interpret The Rules. And a lot of demands to ‘make them clearer.’ I like the public school type response from the government saying ‘use commonsense.’ Reminds me of the final (apocryphal) clause in our own school rules: if it is contrary to common courtesy or commonsense then it is against the school rules. It leaves a lot of wiggle room for the discerning pupil or teacher; especially leaves room for context. Not much room for context when the rules are crystal clear.

So to context. Essential shopping has been the subject of a row about rules and interpretation. Is an Easter egg essential? Or is essential shopping only the absolute basic ingredients needed for a sustaining broth or light gruel? I did this week’s essential shop this morning. I popped in an Easter egg (not without a little guilt), then added chocolate mousse, avocados, hummus and other unmentionables. But I was in Waitrose – are ‘essentials’ different there? And I confess I put the egg at the bottom of my shopping bag, just in case the neighbours felt like snitching. Shouldn’t have put the potatoes on top.

Language has been getting polysyllabic all week. BoJo came out with ‘sedulous’ much to everyone’s consternation as they rushed for a dictionary. I can just imagine the Eton school report which complained that he needed ‘to be a bit more sedulous’. And in a row in a Cambridge supermarket over whether a man could buy two types of milk (green and red top) the shop assistant resorted to ‘ontological.’

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© Clare Sargent

28 March 2020. Weddings have to be postponed but babies are born when they are ready. Today was Alfie’s birth-day, the newest member of the community.

Funerals aren’t postponed either. At least not yet. But the conditions surrounding them are becoming harder and harder. Beryl’s funeral was last Monday. The last day before ‘not-quite-lockdown’ but even so it was thought best to have as few there as possible. So in the end, instead of the magnificent send-off for our pioneering dyslexia teacher, just her closest family with three or four colleagues, one of them delivering a eulogy to which we had all contributed. Beryl started teaching dyslexic pupils in 1974 and from 2000 she specialised in SEN for maths. A true pioneer still enthusiastic for her teaching, cricket and the community into her 90s. She retired in 2018.

We hear that in Spain the eldest are taken off respirators so they can be given to younger patients. Patients with ‘more life to live’. Not only cruel but so short-sighted. Beryl did some of her most innovative work in her 80s. Making this judgement call is devastating for medics and for families and it pits generations against each other. I saw a quote supposedly from the anthropologist Margaret Mead the other day: she was asked what is the earliest sign of human civilization? Expecting the answer art, pottery, fire. She replied ‘a healed broken leg.’ Why? Because in nature a broken femur means death to any animal. That healed break means somebody carried the injured person to safety, cleaned and bound the wound, cared for and fed the sick person, for a long time. A time devoted only to the other person’s survival not to survival of the group.

Above us tonight the crescent moon and Venus shining very brightly. With the International Space Station due to pass between them later on.

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© Clare Sargent

27 March 2020. Today news from two different friends about postponing their weddings until next year. And from brother-in-law, the link to view his friends’ wedding brought forward by a month and live-streamed to 100 guests, with just the vicar and witnesses at the wedding itself.

A reminder about a team pub lunch popped up on my work calendar. So we plan a fantasy lunch by email. Think I’ll go for the whopping great burger with sweet potato fries, followed by salted caramel and pecan ice cream. With a really good beer since I won’t be driving. Next week, by Zoom.

Daily updates from the Warden have kept us all up to date with the situation at school. Our first attempt at an All Staff Zoom conference. 59 of us there all flicking in and out, and trying out fancy backgrounds. Outer space was popular, but San Francisco deemed just boasting. Personally, I did my hair. Then forgot and switched off the camera. Also forgot to register my name beforehand so just came up by device. But I WAS THERE.

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© Clare Sargent

26 March 2020. When I opened the curtains this morning the first thing to catch my eye was a child’s drawing of a rainbow in the window of the house across the road. Walking the dog I spotted more and more about town. Now searching the house for some coloured pencils to add our rainbow to the nationwide symbol of hope. Think I’ll put it in the front door to cheer up the postman.

A lot of time trawling Twitter. Too much time really. But sometimes there are gems. Today spotted a tweet by a school who are sending their science department’s unused masks and goggles to their local hospital. Retweeted it to our own biology, chemistry and physics depts, who replied that they are already on the case. Thought they would be.

And in the evening sitting at dinner suddenly whooping, cheering and clapping all along the street. Abandoned dinner, threw open our window and joined in. Everywhere across the country people stopped, opened their doors and windows, stood outside and just cheered. Cheered the NHS. A tweet from E Social Tutor – standing on his doorstep clapping and cheering though no one could hear. F Social Tutor responding. A message from someone out in the country ‘we clapped as loud as we could and then, in the distance, we heard someone cheering.’ A film from a sheep farmer, just him and 500 ewes in the lambing shed, all baa-ing for the NHS. And here, at the end of it, just the church bells ringing out.

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© Clare Sargent

25 March 2020. Today was for essential shopping. A tricky thing to define. Yesterday I popped round to the supermarket but when I saw the long line of people patiently waiting my short list of bread, milk and cake didn’t seem so necessary after all. Today a more thought-out plan. I joined the long line, all politely and calmly waiting, carefully maintaining a distance of 2 metres. A lovely sunny day. I do feel sorry for the elderly who also stood for a long time. And I was seriously bothered by the man just ahead vaping. Suddenly the sight of how far the cloud of vapour spread seemed more irritating than just the smell. A lot of jumping around to avoid where it had been until the masked man behind me asked whether I was in the queue at all. At the door a staff member, equally politely and calmly, offered a newly sanitised trolley and invited me to take a bunch of daffodils.

Inside the shop was total relief. Stocked shelves. Everything needed still there at 11.30 am. I passed a colleague shopping for someone in the village and perplexed by the hunt for Vegan ingredients. He, too, had waited 20 minutes in the line just to help someone else.

Later I put up a joke on Facebook – what is your weapon of choice to maintain social distancing? After falling over the dog’s bowl and having to mop up the kitchen, I’ve decided a wet mop will do me. A friend replied with a poster – the corpse of your family member. So that finished that joke off before it started.

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This is an important time in our history as we become a virtual school during the COVID-19 pandemic. We will probably never operate in quite the same way again. The Archive is about us now.

This is my personal Mass Observation blog.

© Clare Sargent

This is an important time in our history as we become a virtual school during the COVID-19 pandemic. We will probably never operate in quite the same way again. The Archive is about us now.

This is my personal Mass Observation blog.

This blog was written as a daily diary during the first lockdown in England during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

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© Clare Sargent