You're on mute!

It was during yesterday's 10 Downing Street coronavirus press conference that I was suddenly restored to the corporate life I left behind a few months ago. If you've been watching these 'pressers', as they're known in the trade, you'll have seen them alter in a matter of days. At first there would be a No.10 stateroom packed with the nation's political editors (Kuenssberg, Peston, Rigby, et al) throwing questions at the prime minister, the UK's chief medical officer and its chief science officer, each standing side-by-side like The Three Amigos. Now, it's a sparse chamber, with the spokespeople du jour spaced the requisite two metres apart, fielding questions via video from journalists bunkered in their home offices and no doubt hoping that an errant child doesn't suddenly burst in.

Yesterday's update from Chancellor Rishi Sunak and deputy CMO Jennie Harries took me back to almost every corporate conference call I've ever been on: the Daily Telegraph's political correspondent commenced her question without unmuting her microphone, prompting Sunak to utter the immortal words of every virtual meeting host: "I think you're on mute." ITV's ever-languid Robert Peston went further by not fully hearing Sunak's invitation to speak, responding with "Oh shit! Er...hello...". We've all done it. Watch any amount of television now and news programming has now become a replica of corporate life. News studios are now virtually empty as anchors conduct interviews via FaceTime or Skype. No wonder those working in the TV industry are fearing for their long term futures as viewers grow used to the sight and sound of talking heads coming through laptop, tablet and smartphone cameras, just as simply as they did when sat across the studio set. Broadcasters have too much professional pride to consider this to be the future, however. TV in the HD era relies on sharp images and that can only be achieved in a studio with state-of-the-art imaging technology and participants appearing on camera properly lit and made up for the medium.

The rapid conversion to video conferencing to keep a nation in lockdown informed and entertained has, though, been interesting. Sky News even went as far the other day as running a Q&A segment on coronavirus maternity health in which all three participants - presenter Sarah-Jane Mee, who is 26 weeks pregnant, Dr. Zoe Williams and Sharon Gamon of Private Midwives - appeared from home via laptops. As crude and as sometimes unpredictable as it can be when home bandwidth wobbles, it was remarkably effective. I just know how trepidatious it must be for producers normally used to rock-solid studio connections who don't have to deal with the vagaries of network coverage.

This week, for the first time, millions of people in Britain will be trying out video conferencing for the first time. For some, it will be an amusing novelty as the family gathers virtually on a Houseparty screen or socially distanced by Zoom's 'gallery mode', which turns the session into The Brady Bunch title sequence. For those of us used to corporate meetings over Webex, Skype or Microsoft Teams, it'll be second nature. In my last company, where the HQ team was often spread over substantial distances of the San Francisco Bay Area by flexible working arrangements, it was simply the norm for some to be in the office with others in their kitchens or wherever they did their work from home.

But, whether for carrying on with work or simply having a family gathering, virtual meetings do require etiquette. The biggest bugbear I've experienced on business calls is people forgetting that they're not in the same room. Even with galleried platforms like Zoom it's important for everyone to remain in vision so that you know when a current speaker has stopped, and you can interject without crashing the latency that sometimes makes these systems cacophonous. That also requires everyone to remember that you're dealing with home broadband connections and, usually, WiFi, which can be compromised by a fellow dweller zapping a jacket potato in the microwave, or a child killing the boredom by playing Fortnite online. I have been on conference calls where reception quality for some participants has meant everyone saying "over" after they've said their piece. I'm not kidding.

There are simple rules for making video conferencing both effective and not the weird experience it might seem at first. The first is to make sure your equipment is properly set-up. With many business users now finding that their working day, which would otherwise be a mixture of formal and informal meetings and encounters, is now one conference call after another, time efficiency is vital. Nothing truncates an hour-long slot more than connections dropping or speakers cutting out because they weren't tested to begin with. This is especially important with video conferencing, so check that your camera and microphones are working properly. Next, have a planned agenda. Even if you're just 'huddling' with your team to feel the love, you're not in the coffee area hanging out. Time - especially now - is money. As nice as it will be to share experiences of your own life at home under lockdown, keep the social chit-chat to a minimum, so that you can focus, in the limited window you have available, on the priorities to update everyone on. Save the cat news for Facebook.

The other key point of etiquette is to stay in the call. Unless you're in a listen-only 'virtual town hall meeting', there should be no sneaking out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, or even worse, to the toilet for a pee. This is especially important if you're wearing Airpods and remain connected throughout. Be reassured, I do not speak from personal experience here, but we recently saw Dale Ross, the mayor of Georgetown in Texas, briefly leave a city council meeting for a 'bathroom break' with his microphone still switched on. This doesn't just happen to Frank Drebin. That said, wherever you do your video calls, choose somewhere quiet. Even with laptop or smartphone microphones these days being highly sophisticated, unless you're in a home studio, with sound baffles and a broadcast-grade microphone, background noise will still disrupt the audio. That means not opening the window if you live under a Heathrow flightpath, as I do, or on a busy road...when roads are busier again, of course. The best way to ensure a video conference call runs smoothly is for studious use of the mute button, so that bandwidth is optimised, but as the Telegraph reporter found yesterday, you've got to stay on top of things so that when it's your turn to speak, your fellow conferencers aren't resorting to lip reading.

For the corporate world, ever conscious of social responsibility (as well as dividend-minded shareholders), the COVID-19 lockdown will be disruptive, for sure, but the absence of business travel will be exactly the sort of thing chief financial officers will lap up. Discretionary travel is normally the first casualty of financial cutbacks, and when you add CSR commitments, companies have been imposing travel bans long before the current crisis reared its ugly head. According to the Global Business Travel Association, the coronavirus is expected to impact the business travel sector by $820 billion as corporate travel is pared right back, especially in Asia where at least three out of every four companies have cancelled or suspended all or most travel to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other countries in the continent. Environmentalists will no doubt be rejoicing, too. I spent most of my time in my last company travelling, and I can attest that it really isn't the glamourous life it might seem. Yes, it's nice to have a meeting over lunch in Paris, but not much fun being sealed into an air-conditioned conference room in Dubai for a meeting you could have just as efficiently conducted via Zoom and without a tedious seven-hour flight and all the time zone carnage it causes. When we all return to normal, I wonder whether business travel will ever be the same again.

It's oh so quiet

Serenity is not something you associate with crisis. And, yet, opening the bedroom curtains this morning, that's exactly what I encountered. The sky was poster paint blue, the sunshine bright and inviting, and a pair of postmen traded banter from an appropriate social distance, delivering to opposite sides of the street. The usual hustle and bustle of this London suburb has dropped off a cliff. Our turn-of-the-century street in the "village", as the town is referred to (despite being well within the capital), had almost been returned to its original state, save for the scattering of residents' cars parked up and down it.

Yesterday was the same - the silence only occasionally broken by frantic delivery vans charging over the speed humps, their drivers desperate to make the next dump-and-run as part of their new game of contact-free Knock Down Ginger. Even though we're in the midst of a medical crisis, the urban soundtrack of emergency vehicle sirens around here has also been turned right down. On any given day, living close to a high street and its intersection with another local artery, ambulance, police and fire engine sirens are an almost constant cacophony as they battle their way through choked streets. But not now. It is eerie. People really are staying at home.

The other notable silence is in the air. When Heathrow is running takeoffs from its easterly runways, there is usually a steady stream of planes in their initial climb overhead our part of south-west London. But not any more. Last night the quiet was broken only by a helicopter. It reminds me of Tuesday 11 September, 2001. I was living in Sunnyvale in California, in an area served by three international airports - San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. On any given day there are hundreds of planes in that airspace, including flights making their 180-degree turns over Sunnyvale itself to line up for landing at SFO. 9/11 unfolded in real time for me. Having been awake, unusually, at 6am and watching CNN as I eat breakfast, a report came in of a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. Initially it was assumed to be a light aircraft or one of the many helicopters that fly up and down the Hudson River, delivering banking executives to Manhattan's heliports, or taking tourists on sight-seeing flights. Very quickly it became something else.

By 6.45am my time, the Federal Aviation Authority had grounded all commercial aircraft within the continental United States. It was a full twelve hours later that I emerged from the apartment for some fresh air, having spent the day in my pyjamas, frantically channel-hopping to see if any one broadcaster had more news than the others. My break for freedom was to drive up the 101 freeway, with no particular destination in mind, just a desire to see something other than my living room. It was as I drove that I noticed how clear the skies were, and how clear the freeway was. One of the San Francisco Peninsular's two main motorways was notably free-flowing at a time of day when traffic would normally be solid. On an impulse, I came off the 101 at Millbrae and drove up to Junipero Serra Park, which has a view over to SFO. It was then that I fully realised how silent it was. Nothing overhead, nothing moving on the ground. Planes that had been given the 'All Stop' order appeared to be scattered all over the airport's taxiways, like toys abandoned by a child ordered to the dinner table.

That night, around 2am, I was woken by the noise of a jet aircraft flying overhead. The nights were warm in California that September, so I'd left a bedroom window open. As the jet - possibly a fighter - approached, I felt myself bracing. No one knew for sure if that morning's attacks had ended, and middle-of-the-night paranoia meant that there was a fair chance that whatever was approaching could be heading for San Francisco, or the heart of Silicon Valley or, frankly, anywhere. The next morning we gathered at the Philips campus in Sunnyvale, everyone numbed by the previous day's events, all trying to get some collective semblance of understanding of what had happened on the other side of the country. Everyone who lived in the South Bay reported the same experience as mine, of being woken by the sound of an aircraft, and wondering where it might go.

That Wednesday morning we all assembled around the campus barbecue pit (about as Silicon Valley as you get) for an impromptu moment of sombre reflection and to sing (or, in my case, attempt to sing) the Star-Spangled Banner, the US national anthem before returning to our desks and try to get on with some work. I remained there for a few minutes longer, still trying to get my head around the lack of noise in the sky. Amid the continuing uncertainty, the calm, the beatific calm, was as unnerving as it was peaceful. Today, outside this house, it is a reassurance that people are paying attention to the instruction to stay at home. Or, at least, they are in this village.

Not going out

So, here we all are. Day 3 of a lockdown (well, partial lockdown). The sun is streaming in through the window to make the living room midwinter toasty. The occasional neighbour scurries past outside, on their way to the supermarket as if popping out for a pint of milk before it pours with rain. Except the forecast is for more spring sunshine. So they'll be making lightning raids on Waitrose, distanced at the front door from fellow desperate shoppers by the two-metre rule, still not knowing whether once inside there will be toilet roll, or anything. Viewed from one angle, there's a post-apocalyptic mood taking over. From another, it's business as usual. Weird times.

Face facts, world, we're in a new reality, something unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. Whereas, once, we may have scoffed at dystopian depictions of contagious invasions, like Danny Boyle's scarily prescient 28 Days Later, Outbreak or even the preposterously watchable Independence Day (conceptually not a million miles from HG Wells' The War Of The Worlds), now we are in it for real. In some respects, this doesn't even compare to the world war my 90-year-old mum lived through, though her humour remains undimmed by the virtual house arrest she now finds herself under. "I keep my stick by the door," she joked when I warned her of a couple of conmen prowling the area claiming to offer doorstep coronavirus tests. It's humour like that that got Britain through the Blitz, albeit with rationing, gas masks, Andersen shelters in the back garden and front gates being melted down to build Spitfires. COVID-19 is testing any national cultural stoicism. And so it should. Barrage balloons and Vera Lynn won't work this time around. Not even a Churchillian prime minister.

To the paranoid and even mildly hypochondriac - me, for example - every contact with the outside world is a potential encounter with the coronavirus, that nasty, spherical bug with the protruding antennae we've seen magnified in the media. Mingling with others in the outside world is one thing, but I'm now looking at objects indoors with suspicion. I'm just counting down the days before Hazmat suits can be bought from Amazon (for vastly inflated prices, obviously). Trust me, fashion followers, the American term "leisurewear" is about to get a radical redefinition. Yesterday I started assembling a home exercise bike with the intention of maintaining my existing health, and came to an abrupt, spine-chilling halt when I'd already removed all the components for assembly, handling the packaging without gloves, and then seeing the sign 'Made In China'. It's a paranoid, borderline racist thought, I know, but I started fretting about where the bike had been packaged, its parts manufactured, and how recently? Irrational, I know, but that's where I am, increasingly.

It's why I now baulk at newspaper pictures of gym bunnies still exercising next to each other at public recreation grounds, or cyclists congregating in Richmond Park to swap stories about rogue gear changes and how motorists are the Devil's work, or whatever it is these Lycra lovers do when they get together. What little micro-biological knowledge I possess (i.e. nothing), I do know that COVID-19 is a tricky little bugger, capable of hiding away in places you wouldn't necessarily find other viruses. We know it can last up to 72 hours on hard surfaces, such as handrails and the poles you find on buses and Tube trains, but precious little understanding on how it lives on fabrics and cardboard boxes. The packaging for that exercise bike is so going up in an almighty pyre, once rules on garden bonfires are relaxed. And they will, as local waste disposal facilities run out of capacity.

You see, COVID-19 is already impacting rational behaviour and thinking. But, then, it is also making normality irrelevant. Crises - and existential crises at that - force everything into the background, but now more than ever. Taken to an extreme, nothing - in the words of Metallica - else matters. The other day Chelsea announced a new player for its women's team and I just thought, 'who cares?'. Why do they even think this is worth tugging our chain for? Good news to otherwise cheer us up? In the space of a month since the coronavirus became so globally prevalent I've become totally disengaged with almost everything, football included, that doesn't involve the health and wellbeing of my family and myself. I really couldn't care less about either the lack of football, when it will start again, who might be playing it and for whom. Indeed, whenever I see tra-la-la tweets from companies puffing what they're still up to, as if the chronically sick elephant in the room doesn't even exist and 'normal' commercial life hasn't changed, I wonder whether reality has actually set in.

Evidence does, however, suggest that the new reality has. We live very close to a major commuter railway station. Street parking spaces start filling up from 6am as people from more expensive rail zones leave their cars here for free before returning to collect them later in the day. Last week, there were one or two spaces left vacant. This week could be the middle of August, and a particularly good August for the travel industry at that. And, yet, still we see images of crowded Tube trains. I'm a tad claustrophobic at the best of times, but the sight of human sardines on the Central Line travelling to construction jobs out of sheer economic necessity fills me with dread, especially when you see the infection models various epidemiological institutes have published, depicting both the virulence of COVID-19 and how even the simplest removals of human moments of content can impair its progress. The sight of those poor workers on the Tube reminds me of one of the grimmest stories of 'normal' life in Britain during World War Two: even as Goering's Luftwaffe was bombing Britain's towns and cities people went to work. The buses and trains ran on time and milkmen delivered the daily pint. Amidst the bombsite rubble, life carried on. Indeed, one of the more horrible illustrations of normality occurred barely a four-minute walk from the sofa where I write these words. On 16 August, 1940, a German aircraft that had been bombing the London-Portsmouth railway that runs through this town, returned to strafe commuters as they disgorged from a train from Waterloo. That didn't stop people going back to work the next day, or for the following five years.

Brits are reputed to thrive on an unflappable stoicism, and humour. The "Keep calm and..." meme you see on this page is based on a motivational poster produced in 1939 Britain as the storm clouds of war gathered over Europe. COVID-19 is no less deadly than the war that was brought to these very streets, but is proving even more indiscriminate. Whereas at first we feared for those over 70 or with the ambiguous "underlying health conditions", now it is taking the young, even those with no known existing health issues. Tin hats and even gas masks won't protect us this time (though a bomb shelter in the garden might). The message is clear: stay at home. Just stay at home. When I read in The Times on Monday of three middle-aged men who met up in Richmond Park on Sunday for "a lunchtime sprint" on their bikes, I actually flinched. "In many ways it's the best time to be out," said one who asked to remain anonymous. "I'm very aware that we're all supposed to be social distancing," he added, "but we're on our bikes, wearing Lycra and pollution masks. I think we'd have to be incredibly unlucky to catch it." That's not carrying on as normal. That's carrying on as one of the most lethal contagions in human history is on the loose, and infecting people with alarming rigour and equally alarming spread before anyone's even realised they've got it.

I've spent the last few months on virtual lockdown, myself, having left my last place of employment in September. Staying in and not going out has been pretty much the norm for me, so perhaps I'm better prepared, psychologically, for the conditions we're all now being forced to adopt. Not that I've lived hermit-like, of course. In those months I've managed to move in with my other half and work on a few projects to keep me busy and my noggin active. That will be the challenge facing everyone now. When my girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter was sent home from school last week due to a teacher shortage, she inevitably treated it as what Americans call a 'snow day'. Others must be treating their first week - possibly ever - of 'working from home' as a bit of a holiday. Some will be bunkered in, worrying about how their mortgage will be paid, or even their grocery bills. If that doesn't highlight the existential nature of this crisis, then hopefully the starker warnings from almost every authority figure that public compliance with the lockdown is only about one thing: saving lives.

"Life," Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, said the other day, "should not be going on as normal". Normality was so last month. Normal, now, is staying indoors, venturing out only when there is a supermarket to visit, briefly, or perhaps for a brisk walk on your own. Normal is remaining within our familial caves. Strange as it may seem, as winter finally gives way to spring, there's a nuclear winter going on out there. The stuff of my childhood nightmares, when I was told that Heathrow Airport would be a target for Soviet nuclear missiles in the event of World War Three, and with a westward-facing bedroom window, I'd struggle to get sleep at night for fear of seeing a mushroom cloud. Now, I'm looking out of our living room window, wondering - no, worrying - what lies beyond it. And when it's going to get me. For now, lockdown means wading through that mountain of music biographies and those DVD box sets put into storage almost immediately after getting unwrapped at Christmas. My compulsive record buying disorder will continue to be served as I crack through the crates of still-in-their-packaging LPs while engaging the good people of my local music shop who've now fully converted to a home delivery service (by bike). Even if I use that exercise bike wearing surgical scrubs, I'll need it to work off the demons of social distancing. Who knows how long this will go on for, or how bad it will get. We're only even now at the start. See you on the other side.

Giving this thing a sporting chance

The first case of Covid-19, The Guardian reported today, citing a South China Morning Post story, can be traced back to 17 November. Evidently, a 55-year-old from Hubei province is believed to have been the first in China to contract the coronavirus, with five new cases being registered daily thereafter in the following month. In the four months since almost 130,000 people around the world have contracted it. At the time of writing it has killed 4,702. It has been classified by the World Health Organization as a pandemic. But you didn’t need to know that, since Covid-19 is now unavoidable as a news story or on your social media timelines. It is the only thing people are talking about when they meet - should they meet - and, frankly, it’s got everyone spooked. As it should be.

Britain, being the island that we love identifying as, is perhaps behind the curve when it comes to responding to the global crisis. As infection rates and deaths have spiralled elsewhere - most notably in Italy - the UK has appeared to have fallen into its default Blitz spirit. “My grandparents lived through two world wars, and we’re not going to let this get us now.” Admirably stoic, but utterly pointless. Not even Herman Goering’s Luftwaffe had a weapon as dangerous, as unpredictable and as undetectable as Covid-19. And yet. At risk of falling into my own default, I can’t help looking at this pandemic through the lens of football. Last Saturday at Stamford Bridge the usual gallows humour was in play. Week-in, week-out neighbours still greeted each other with handshakes, and even Frank Lampard awkwardly opted for an embrace of former boss Carlo Ancelotti rather than an elbow bump - or nothing - as they met at the beginning of proceedings between Chelsea and Everton. Up in the East Stand, the row in front of us was half empty, a whole swathe of seats unoccupied. This could be, of course, just coincidence, but with other gaps visible around the ground, the inevitable conclusion was that a few of the usual 42,000 gave it a swerve due to the outbreak.

Football support is notorious for its machismo. “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” was the confrontational refrain in the days when football violence was conducted with mob force. You’ll recall that during the London Bridge terror attack of June 2017, football fan Roy Larner, who was drinking in the Black & Blue pub when knife-wielding terrorists burst in, decided to have a go, apparently declaring “I’m Millwall!”. Sadly, such bravado will not work against Covid-19. It’s a nasty, sneaky disease, infecting people long before they know it and long after it has been passed on. Which means that since last Saturday, I’ve been just waiting for that first dry cough, that spike in temperature, that unexplained ache.

My paranoia, however, is not being helped by the apparent house of cards that Covid-19 is turning sport into. At first there were mere adjustments: in January, the IOC rescheduled and relocated Olympic boxing and football qualifiers that had been due to take place in China’s outbreak epicentre, Wuhan. By the end of the month China had suspended all domestic football. As February unfolded, sporting events throughout Asia came to be cancelled or postponed, while towards the end of the month, a virus outbreak in northern Italy led to selected Serie-A games being postponed. Almost a month on, and things are dramatically different. Italy is now under national lockdown, and the list of sporting events being cancelled or postponed throughout the world is growing daily. Well, until today, mostly throughout the world. Just not here.

On Wednesday night I saw the stark contrast of approaches. One BT Sport channel was carrying the Champions League round-of-16 second leg between Liverpool and Atlético Madrid. Another BT channel was showing Paris Saint-Germain versus Borussia Dortmund. The difference between the two was startling: Anfield in full voice, the Parc des Princes, where the game was being played behind closed doors, absolutely sterile. The $64,000 question, then, is at what risk were those 52,000 spectators at Anfield put at? Even if the 3,000 Madrid fans went home happy after their dramatic 3-2 win on the night, what else did they go home with? And, given that Spain is starting to show a similar Covid-19 trajectory as Italy, what did they leave behind?

Two days on, and the coronavirus juggernaut has been ploughing through world sport. In the last 48 hours, further Champions League games have been postponed (Manchester City's last-16 second leg tie with Real Madrid being one after the Real first team was quarantined); Spain’s premier league, La Liga has been suspended for at least the next two rounds; three Leicester City players are now self-isolating; Juventus has revealed that 121 members of staff, including players, are now self-isolating after defender Daniele Rugani tested positive for the virus; Manchester City’s Benjamin Mendy is self-isolating after one of his family members was taken ill showing signs of the virus; and now Chelsea have revealed that Callum Hudson-Odoi "displayed symptoms similar to a mild cold on Monday morning" and stayed away from the club’s Cobham training ground in Surrey. Since then, other players have been sent home as a precaution while the club carries out a deep clean of the Cobham facility. Last night, at around 9.30pm, the Premier League announced that this weekend's fixtures would go ahead as planned. 45 minutes later Arsenal revealed that its manager Mikel Arteta had tested positive for Covid-19. 15 minutes after that, the league announced that it would hold an "emergency club meeting" this morning to discuss the crisis further. The outcome of that meeting is now known - the suspension of all “elite” professional football in England (Premier League, EFL, Women's Super League, Women's Championship) until 3 April at the earliest. At the same time, the remainder of the Scottish football season has been postponed indefinitely, and domestic football at all levels in Wales suspended until at least 4 April. Too little too late? Or simply, too late? Hard to tell. Some might say that all remains in the stable is a steaming pile of manure being wafted by a swinging stable door. Football, though, can't be blamed for any further spread of Covid-19, but given that, along with rock concerts, it represents one of the largest institutions in the UK where tens of thousands of people congregate, it surely must - unwittingly - have been playing its part.

Here, then, is where leadership comes in. I’m no medical expert. Indeed, the extent of my medical knowledge is firmly limited to keeping an eye on things that might kill me. So I'm not going to question, for now, the Government’s expert view that the second-phase "delay" strategy is the best to ensure the tail of this contagion doesn't reach into the later part of the year, or even resurface next autumn. But the delay in making decisions on things like sporting events troubles me. There are other scientific considerations. This morning, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, told Sky News that 60% of the population would need to become infected with Covid-19 in order for the UK to control its recurring impact, applying the principle of “herd immunity” is to create resistance.  to a contagious disease within a population because enough people have become immune, and so it is harder for it to spread. Covid-19 is, Vallance said, a “nasty disease” but was at pains to stress that most victims would only experience a "mild" illness. Tell that, then, to those who will die due to their age, underlying health conditions. He also admitted that the UK is "a little bit behind" other countries. “We’re trying to keep ahead of it,” he said. “We’re trying to lay out the path so people can see what the actions are that are being advised." Banning mass gatherings - like sporting events -  and isolating entire households were merely the next steps being considered by the government, Vallance revealed. Contrast this with comments this afternoon from the World Health Organization’s plain-speaking executive director, Dr. Michael Ryan. Drawing on his past experience with Ebola, he made a sharply-worded comment on the dangers of slow decision making: "The fear of making a mistake is the greatest error in an emergency like Covid-19. The virus will always get you if you don’t move quickly. If you need to be right before you move, you will never win."

Cancelling or postponing any commercial enterprise en masse will always be financially painful and practically challenging. Pausing the football season temporarily will have a knock-on effect, pushing fixtures further into the early summer, shortening the summer break and preparations for the next season. This year's European Championships might have to be moved to next year. EFL clubs already teetering on the financial brink, who need every last cheeseburger sale for their very survival, might go under. But if football - or any of the other sports that are increasingly announcing cancellations or postponements - has to play its part and pay its part, it is, sadly, something we have to accept. Not wishing to be flippant, but invoking wartime sentiment is, perhaps, necessary. In that, Boris Johnson’s comments yesterday actually, for once, counted. I’m no fan of the prime minister, but his stark - and carefully worded - statement that "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time" was an important piece of expectation management. Just as in a real war - the kind we haven't experienced in my generation - Covid-19 will kill people. Life will have to adjust. And sport will have to play its part in that adustment.

"I'll be working from home today..."

Picture: Microsoft

There was a time when “I’m working from home” was a euphemism for “It’s Friday, it’s a lovely day, and I’m off to the park”. Not me, though, quite obviously. But then we went through a phase of “flexible working”, where technology, corporate economics, a pinch of concern for the environment, and an enlightened approach to work/life balance made the option of working from home a desirable company policy. Companies needing to downsize their palatial corporate offices in pricey parts of capital cities found that by encouraging, enabling or merely tolerating people to make use of their own home broadband connections, if you threw in a laptop and a mobile phone, employees could be engaged, connected and productive, while happy that they’d won back an extra hour or two’s work that they would have otherwise spent on the commute.

It should, however, be noted that this apparent utopia is not for everyone. For a start, you can never work from home if that home is cluttered and full of other people. Including pets. Especially cute ones, like cats, which hog your attention without reciprocating the love. Secondly, hogging a table at Caffè Nero while occasionally ordering a basic Americano and topping up the free tap water is both cheapskate and equally not conducive to productivity, because you'll be staring out the window or at other customers, especially those annoying you with a FaceTime conversation sans headphones. The advice, then, is that you should only work from home if you have a quiet, dedicated space in which to work, as if you were in the office. This point assumes two things: one, that you are suitably well off to own a house with a spare room for such an environment, and two, your job allows for it.

Picture: Slack

Now the Covid-19 coronavirus is taking a hold, more and more companies - especially in the US and particularly in California's Silicon Valley - are telling their employees to work from home in a bid to prevent the contagion from wreaking havoc on corporate campuses. These companies and, indeed, employees, are then the lucky ones. Collaboration technologies like video conferencing and workplace social media apps will enable them to function almost like normal. I speak, here, from personal experience of companies where ‘virtual’ working means that only rarely do you sit in the same space as your teammates. In Silicon Valley, for example, where insane property prices spread workers far and wide into the region's ever-expanding hinterland, avoiding the clogged freeways by not having to commute every day is enormously popular. At my last company, when visiting the HQ in San Jose, there was very little pattern to who would be occupying a desk from one day to the next, such was the spread of people throughout the region, from family members living in rural areas south of the city, to younger colleagues living in San Francisco, more than 50 miles to the north.

Closing down such campuses, then, in the face of Covid-19, might well be beneficial in limiting the spread of the virus, while at the same time enabling the giants of technology to continue functioning. That is, of course, unless functions like R&D and engineering are reliant on workspaces, labs and face-to-face collaboration. Here in the UK, we’ve not yet reached the stage of companies telling their employees to work from home, but it will surely come. Clearly, digital technologies have evolved to the extent that productivity and collaboration is almost like the real thing. And companies cutting down on the insane waste of unnecessary business travel is surely sensible, for the environment, for costs and the individual wellbeing of the employees concerned. However - medical advice encouraging homeworking is all well and good if employees can ‘telework’, to use an arcane expression, but plenty will not.

Bus drivers, supermarket workers, warehouse employees, delivery drivers - the list is endless - don't have the luxury of firing up a laptop while still in their pyjamas. Other companies, who don't yet have widespread teleworking practices, won't suddenly be able to dish out laptops or tablets just like that, especially if it requires a fundamental rethink of IT strategy (including concerns about cybersecurity). Which begs the question (and I’m no medical expert), if some employers adopt homeworking while others can't, will that mean Covid-19 still spreads amongst those who can't stay at home and continue working? And are we condemning those who will still have to take trains and buses to their places of work, or who work in jobs where interaction with the public is unavoidable to exposure to the virus and all its potential consequences? I don't want to be flippant here, and suggest that we're heading for some zombie nightmare, with the streets filled with the sick and Ocado drivers wearing full hazmat suits, but I am struggling to get my head around what the increasingly dystopian world is looking like with this virus. It's bad enough that people have been panic buying toilet paper for a condition not known to have any unpleasant symptoms in the lower reaches of the alimentary canal.

What we do know, it would seem, is that it will get worse. The British government's deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Jenny Harries, told Sky News this morning that the UK should be bracing for a major increase in Covid-19 infections over the next couple of weeks. "We will see many thousands of people infected by coronavirus," she told Kay Burley. "That’s what we’re seeing in other countries and the important thing for us is to make sure that we manage those infections." That will probably involve people staying at home for seven days, even with relatively minor symptoms like a runny nose, all with the intention of minimising the epidemic's expected peak (if Italy is anything to go by), and drive the coronavirus into the summer when it could ease up in milder weather.

A shift - even if temporary and only partial in terms of the national workforce - to greater homeworking might well have some impact on the spread of the virus, especially it eases the horror of overcrowded trains and buses at peak hours. "Everyone who can work from home should work from home," William Hanage of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Bosto told The Guardian yesterday. "The most important thing is that even if it won’t protect you entirely, it will delay you getting infected. And if we can 'flatten the curve' we will avoid the worst consequences for healthcare services." That won't come as much comfort for those who still have to get out there. In that respect, it's not unreasonable to conclude that we'll be creating two classes of people - those who can work from home and those who can't. And godspeed to those in that second camp.

And Then There Were Three...again

Picture: Genesis/Patrick Balls

It's the weirdest of coincidences that, on the day that it was announced that Spitting Image is to return, Genesis announce a comeback tour. Phil Collins was, arguably, a deserved target of the show's ribbing back in the mid 1980s when he was, even by his own admission, everywhere. The show's puppeteers even returned the back-handed complement when they provided rubber versions of the band for their Land Of Confusion single's 1986 video. This period was peak Genesis. Peak Collins, too. Even Mike Rutherford was also getting in on the ubiquity with his side project, Mike + The Mechanics, enjoying a string of hits. Former lead singer Peter Gabriel was also in the midst of his own purple patch with the global success of the So album and its hits like Sledgehammer and Don't Give Up, adding to the visibility of the band he co-formed in 1967 and left in 1975.

That, however, Collins, Rutherford and Tony Banks should have, today, announced a tour of the UK and Ireland, 13 years after what appeared to be their farewell tour, is curious. Rumours have been circulating since January of the trio reforming after they were spotted together at a New York Knicks match, a somewhat random event seeing as neither band member had exactly been seen as fans of American basketball. Moreover, a Genesis reunion - even from lifelong fans like me - is hardly something we'd been counting on. Since their 2007 Turn It On Again Tour it had widely been assumed that the band had wound themselves up. Their studio, The Farm, near Dunsfold in Surrey was shut down, Rutherford appeared to be focusing more on his work with the Mechanics, Banks was focusing on his acclaimed classical music work, and Collins...well, he seemed to have been enduring an endless run of ill-health, including his admission of a near-death experience as he succumbed to excessive drinking. Since then, he has appeared increasingly frail, the result of surgery in 2009 on his back, and continued issues with his vertebrae that has rendered him confined to singing from a chair while performing in solo shows as part of his personal own comeback. Sadly, in his most recent TV appearances, he has looked a painful shadow of his impish former self, coming across as increasingly elderly, despite being the younger of the trio (Banks turns 70 later this month, Rutherford catches up in October, Collins next February).

That places questions on the veracity of the tour announced today. For his solo live performances, Collins has drafted in his teenage son, Nicholas, for drumming duties and with eerily authentic effect, too. Collins' haters, while perhaps justifiably knocking his ubiquity in the 80s and 90s, usually forget what an incredible drummer he was, with a unique melodic ability (his signature In The Air Tonight drum fill actually belies his broader talent, first honed in his early days in Genesis, with its influences of jazz and R'n'B drumming). Thankfully, his son has inherited the drum gene, but a Genesis show without Collins Senior and longterm second drummer Chester Thompson doing their mesmerising duets will be somewhat lacking. It's sad, but I guess not everyone goes on forever.

I should, at this point, declare why I'm so defensive of the band, even in the face of whatever music cred I might profess to have. Genesis, to me, are more than some guilty pleasure. They were the first band I saw live (Wembley Arena, 1981); their 1978 album ...And Then There Were Three was the first LP I bought with my own money (MJM Records, New Malden, inevitably no longer there). I even earned my first writing fee reviewing a 1985 Collins gig at the Royal Albert Hall for the NME. They were, along with The Police, Rush, Bowie and Elvis Costello, amongst the first acts I obsessed over, prompting the teenage me to invest in their back catalogue - albums like Nursery Cryme, Selling England By The Pound and Trick Of The Tail, records which would be defined as quintessential prog rock, without anyone - then or still - fully understanding what that term meant. True, some of their songs, like Return Of The Giant Hogweed and Harold The Barrell, were somewhat outré, but in their first true hit, I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), they presented a soulful groove more reflective of Gabriel's R'n'B leanings than of the art rock movement they were seen to be at the vanguard of, along with King Crimson, Yes and Pink Floyd. With The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, Gabriel's swansong as lead singer, they even introduced a punk element, with the double concept album charting the journey of Puerto Rican street tough Rael's journey into a bizarre New York underworld. The appeal of music like that of Genesis in the 1970s was the combination of storytelling and engrossing music that drew you in to another world. This wasn't trite pop, a moment's entertainment, but something more involving. No wonder their core audience was, for many years, intense, long-haired young men wearing army-surplus greatcoats and a noted lack of female company. Here, though, is where people lose Genesis. Until Gabriel and guitarist Steve Hackett left the band, they were characterised by wonderful but sometimes meandering fantasy songs. That said, Seconds Out, their 1977 tour album, remains my favourite live album of all, eclipsing even The Who's Live At Leeds and Humble Pie's legendary Performance - Rockin' The Fillmore for energy.

...And Then There Were Three marked the start of a move away from quintessential prog. The single Follow You, Follow Me brought them a new, pop audience. Notably it also marked a greater prominence of women at their concerts. And this was 1978, when punk was supposed to have done away with such bands (a myth - John Lennon was said to be a fan of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, while The Clash's Topper Headon once rushed up to Phil Collins at an airport to declare his appreciation). With their next album, Duke, they were still storytelling, but Collins' increasing pop influence was already notable, with hits (especially in the US) like Turn It On Again and Misunderstanding sitting alongside distinctly Collins-penned love songs like Please Don't Ask, material that had come out of the same writing for his divorce-inspired breakthrough, Face Value. What followed was the band's transition into a fully-fledged pop band, much like The Police or Madness, I suppose, enjoying hit after hit supported by witty videos that brought them to a global audience in a way they'd never really managed during the 1970s when they were, arguably, at their most interesting.

Here, though, marks the dividing line between diehard fans and those brought to the band via the heavily-rotated MTV hits. Some maintain that Genesis lost their soul when Gabriel left in 1975. I'll maintain that they became enriched by the departure. A Trick Of The Tail, which introduced a reluctant Collins as lead singer in 1976, is arguably their best. But the Gabriel era still hangs heavily over the band's legacy. Even reports today about the 2020 reunion tour couldn't help themselves from mentioning that Gabriel would not be taking part. "Peter left the band 45 years ago and he's been trying to live it down ever since," joked Tony Banks this morning about his former schoolfriend. "When they put his birthday in The Times, they always say, 'Peter Gabriel - Genesis singer.' And I think, 'What's the guy been doing since then, for God's sake?'". Taking a more serious tone, however, Banks pointed out that even if they could persuade Gabriel to join them (unlikely as he turned down the idea in 2005), most of the songs people know came after his departure. Fair point.

Picture: Facebook/Genesis/Stephanie Pistel

There are, then, two testaments to Genesis. The band formed at Charterhouse in the late 1960s, and won their first record deal with Jonathan King by emulating the Bee Gees' sound at the time (pre-disco - think Massachusetts) as he was a fan. They spent their first few albums eschewing the blues-based rock prevalent at the time by fusing pop, rock, classical and even jazz sentiments into something truly unique. I'm never going to win over the haters, here, but the 70s Genesis albums still hold a magic, even in some of their unashamedly less cool moments. I suppose you had to be there.

So, will I be there in November when they tour the UK? I'll be honest, my thoughts are mixed: I've always regretted only seeing Bowie the once (the horrendous Glass Spider show in 1997), same with Pink Floyd. I've seen the Rolling Stones five times now, and would readily go for a sixth, even as they age gracefully/disgracefully. Indeed, the Stones are still the benchmark for venerated acts remaining out on the road. Having seen footage of Collins' recent solo shows I'd be lying if I thought he will be anything like the last time I saw Genesis, at Twickenham in 2007. But here's the thing: despite their live prowess, they have always been about the songs. Indeed, when it looked like their recording career wouldn't take off, they considered themselves songwriters first, writing for others. Tony Banks still exemplifies this, being the least comfortable in the spotlight. The stage school-educated, former child actor Collins was always the more natural performer as a result of his upbringing, although even he was initially reluctant to step forward from the drum riser after Gabriel left.

Of all of the Genesis line-up, past and present, still certainly worth watching live, it is guitarist Steve Hackett. He has been successfully touring the classic albums he played on in their entirety in recent years, highlighting the guitar solos that - not always recognised - were as much signature of the Genesis sound as anything else. Hackett's shows, which have included complete renditions of Selling England By The Pound and his final studio appearance, Wind And Wuthering, have brilliantly fulfilled the 'older' fans' needs, even supplanting Gabriel's voice with the wonderfully eccentric Swedish singer Nad Sylvan. Wisely, Hackett hasn't pushed into the band's catalogue after he left, which saw them move away from the "prog" tag, mixing longer and shorter songs and generally being more accessible (in other words, 'commercial'). The hits that followed will, I'm sure, comprise the bulk of their sets in November, much as they were on their supposed final tour in 2007 ("There are a few old dogs that won't be running," Collins said today, pointing out that what they will perform wouldn't include songs powered by his drumming). With Collins himself no longer able to drum, and if still confined to a chair on stage, part of the energy that made Genesis a genuinely exhilarating live act will be lost. Though reluctant to be the frontman at first, his charisma was core to the band's overall entertainment value, often taking a less than reverent tone to songs which, from a certain angle, could be described as somewhat rarified.

What is certainly not the case is that this tour is one last boost to the pension fund. Having sold more than 100 million records over their 52-year career, what's brought them back to the road is the recreation of something they've missed personally. You can be cynical about that, but having followed Genesis for 42 years, what they do together - like it or not - is something special to them. "We all felt, 'Why not?'" Collins told BBC News. "It sounds a bit of a lame reason - but we enjoy each other's company, we enjoy playing together." Rutherford added that with Phil touring again in the last couple of years "it seemed the natural moment to have a conversation about it." And, he added, it's not like they had been overstaying their welcome in recent years. "I worked it out and we've only done two shows in the UK in the last 28 years, so we haven't over-worked it." I'm sure the shows will sell out - Genesis have proven over their five decades-plus to be impervious to fashion - it's just a debate as to whether the magic will be there again.