WFH WTF

Readers of the London Evening Standard will have been presented this week with what appears to be the newspaper’s single-handed attempt to get Londoners back into the office.

“Remote working is killing London. Get back to the office”, the paper thundered with an editorial by Dylan Jones, the editor. In it he recounted now-familiar stories of parts of the city apparently deserted on Mondays and Fridays, of company bosses complaining of empty (and expensive premises), and everyone from restaurants to dry cleaners noting that trade was still down as a result.

“Come Friday, it’s like a bomb has dropped, with deserted streets around Moorgate, empty shops in Broadgate, the surrounding restaurants all starved of trade. And it has got to stop,” Jones opined. “Remote working is killing London. It’s killing trade, killing commerce, and killing the city’s ability to properly get back to work.”

“Speak to any shopkeeper, retailer, or news-seller, or anyone in the hospitality industry, and they will tell you the same,” he continued. “London feels like it is on its way back: commuter patterns are up, West End footfall is up, and tourists are beginning to feel as ubiquitous as they were pre-Covid. But there is still a bewildering lack of urgency among employers regarding full time in-office working. Many companies still only expect their staff to come to work three days a week - usually Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - making a mockery of the working week.”

We are, of course, talking about the post-pandemic reality (although, with Covid-19 very much on the march again, it’s debatable just how ‘post-‘ things really are). But there is also the view that if there was one good thing to come out of the disease it’s the adoption of more flexible working arrangements for those who can make use of them. It is, though, somewhat arrogantly London-centric to assume that everyone works in an office. But equally, it’s hard to fully get an objective picture of just how our cities are performing in these changed times. 

For the last four months I’ve been working on a fixed-term contract for an industry association whose headquarters is located in the City of London. I’ve been absolutely loving going into the office as often as makes sense. That, though, is the key: ‘as often as makes sense’. Go back 35 years to when I joined Sky TV, then based in the West End, and I was in the office Monday to Friday, and wearing a suit and tie every day. Indeed less than ten years ago I was going into the Paris HQ of the telecoms company I was working for every single day without giving much thought to it (largely as I was living just a handful of Métro stops away and could even walk there if the mood took me).

The Internet age changed everything. The first time I had both my own work-supplied mobile phone and laptop was in the mid-1990s, where remote connectivity was more useful for business trips with the PR agency I was working for at the time. Dial-up access, at home or in a hotel room, was a faff and frankly more novelty than necessity. But over the next couple of decades remote working progressed from something you could do if necessary (for example instead of taking a sick day, or when you needed to be at home for a plumber) to the mandated instruction it was during lockdown. 

I started at my last company a month into the first lockdown in the UK and didn’t see the inside of its headquarters until August the following year. Even the ‘Great Return’ of 2021 seemed tentative. It took months before the so-called ‘TWAT’ syndrome became a thing (people only coming into the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays). Those who went in on Mondays or Fridays were either contrarians trying to make a point, or the socially awkward, preferring the peace and quiet.

If the Standard’s campaign this week is to be believed, TWATs are still a thing. There’s no doubt that my place of work is quieter on Mondays and quieter still on Fridays , which calls into question the financial logic of renting large commercial office spaces in central London on days like that. But on Tuesdays, increasing through Wednesdays until Thursdays when it is packed, the place is genuinely buzzing with bodies. Desks need to be booked in advance and heaven help anyone needing a meeting room without reserving one first.

Along with the Victorian Pencil, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and his absurd pass-agg campaign to get civil servants back into Whitehall post-Covid (when he held the hilariously oxymoronic post of Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency), the most vocal proponents of returning to five-days-a-week in-office working have been the CEOs of large commercial banks. On my own evidence, working in the City, the pubs and bars I walk past appear to be well populated by laddish banker bros quaffing pints at various times of their stressed out days. “Coming together fosters better collaboration and teamwork, enabling us to better serve our clients,” Andrea Rossi, CEO of the City fund M&G told the Evening Standard. Banks have been the most belligerent on this issue, but in-person attendance in other sectors has suffered. “Of course I would prefer to see people, have them in the office,” top advertising industry executive Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of S4 Capital said this week. “It helps in terms of one-to-one creativity”.

Maybe the City of London, where I am currently based, is not reflective of the rest of the capital, or indeed the country. But I certainly haven’t noticed much of the reported deadening of commuter traffic into London on Mondays and Fridays. The Evening Standard kicked off its campaign this week by reporting new travel data which showed that the capital’s three main commuter railway networks – South Western, Southeastern and Thameslink – are carrying 22 million fewer passengers each month than four years ago. “We are not seeing the level of people commuting five days a week that we saw pre-Covid,” Angie Doll, chief executive at GoVia Thameslink Railway, said. “We are seeing people commute on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – and that pattern is absolutely set now. I can’t see that changing again.”

This doesn’t exactly stack up in my own experience: travelling at peak-time from south-west London, even on Mondays and Fridays you’re lucky to get a seat on the 0740 to Waterloo, and on every other day of the working week you’re packed in like sardines. Of course, train strikes make the decision on whether to work at home or not a lot more simpler for those who are able to use the option. 

South Western, one of the largest carriers of commuters from the outer suburbs and southern shires, noted to the Standard that its passenger demographic meant that more were likely to be in senior professional jobs where they could work from home should they choose to (and, I would hazard a guess, have the sort of salaries that put them further outside of London), are more likely to work in senior positions or belong to the managerial classes than other train companies. In other words, they are more likely to have the ability and authority to work from home.

“We have not given up on the weekly commute,” SWR’s customer and commercial director Peter Williams told the Standard. “But commuters are telling us that their travel patterns are fixed in the short term. But there are nuances. Younger people show more willingness to get into the office. It’s important for them to build their profile — and to socialise after work. There are also some employers who hope that at some point they’re able to coax their colleagues into the office more frequently. But with the cost of living pressures, they don’t feel that now is the right time to be insisting on that.”

Which brings us to the notion of ‘hybrid’ working. As someone who has been looking for a permanent job since March, I’ve noticed the amount of hybrid work being advertised. In fact, at one company I interviewed with, its Cambridge office was there largely for collaborative needs when required, and even those who lived locally worked from home on more days of the week than they came in.

Workplace flexibility is clearly here to stay. Many with children or caring responsibilities have found it a boon, as have those whose salaries haven’t kept up with the cost of commuting (not just the price of a return ticket, once you add in the coffees, Pret lunches and all the other ancillary costs that come from leaving the house each morning).

Personally, I love going into the office of my current employer. The work itself is so much more rewarding when you have colleagues to bounce ideas off. Waiting for an e-mail reply or a WhatsApp response is just not the same as walking across to someone’s desk and asking them something. According to research by the Office Group, some 83% of workers would prefer working from some form of company premises than working remotely full-time. 

For me, it’s partly the social interaction but also - oddly - the commute itself. For the lengthiest leg of my journey by Tube from Wimbledon into the City I get a seat for its duration with which to read or listen to podcasts. The overall travel time of an hour each way creates a buffer between home and work life. And even if parts of the commute involve dealing with other people, their headphone noise, phone conversations and sniffing, it’s still a marked improvement on not seeing anyone at all throughout the day during lockdown. 

During the pandemic I had commute envy. My wife, a teacher, was going out every day to teach the children of key workers, which made me deeply envious of her ability to get in the car and drive even just a couple of miles down the road, seeing things other than the hedge outside our living room that was my vista for 18 months. Now, I emerge from Cannon Street station to be confronted with early morning life - people heading in to their offices, going for breakfast, grabbing coffee, being out there.

I don’t have a home office or even a desk at home, so going into company premises provides me with somewhere proper to sit at, a large monitor, hot and cold running tea/coffee/WiFi/toilets and, most importantly, people, as opposed to an over-attentive cat. When lockdown first imposed WFH on the much of the workforce, there were younger members of my then-team perched on beds in flat shares or kitchen tables at their parents’ houses. I felt sorry for them, missing out on the shared office experience that I’d had from the very start of my career. 

While it is nice to go in on a Friday when the place is virtually deserted, being amongst and around busy people making whatever contribution they make to corporate life is without substitute. It’s something those younger workers have lost out on profoundly, and will continue to so if they’re still not going in regularly or even at all. Productivity is, let’s face facts, not what it is when you’re at home.

There are other disadvantages to working from home. Firstly, it’s making us fat. Or fatter. A survey conducted by the fitness app MyFitnessPal has found that Brits consume nearly 800 more calories and take 3,500 fewer steps when they work from home - a not surprising set of statistics, based on my own personal experience. 

Mental health has also taken a battering, especially for those who live alone or with vulnerabilities. In its 2022 New Future of Work Report, Microsoft revealed that, while working remotely can improve job satisfaction, it can also lead to social isolation, guilt and overcompensation. At first, there were countless articles about baking banana bread and going for a spin on the Peleton whenever the opportunity arose, but the reality was that many home workers found themselves working even longer hours. As many as 80% have reported their mental health suffering as a result of being tied to laptops all day long, with human interaction facilitated exclusively by home broadband. 

WFH has also dampened spontaneity. Research by the reservation app Ambi found that 30% of working age adults felt that the pandemic killed off having fun, and that spirit has yet to return. It said that 40% of home workers in the UK found that not being in the office all week has made them boring - either not agreeing to ad hoc drinks after work with colleagues or even getting too comfy to want to go out with their own friends.

The Teams meeting experience...

I would agree with both: on multi-window ‘virtual’ meetings, with an array of colleagues resembling the opening titles of The Brady Bunch, it’s a fair bet that some will be distracted by their mobile phones, or e-mail, social media, web browsing or some other form of partial disengagement. We’ve all done it. We all still do it.

I recognise that mine is a metropolitan view. I can’t speak for those in the regions who might be holding on to working from home for other reasons. But as a general statement, over the 37 years of my professional life, I’ve always only benefitted from being in an office. Perhaps I’ve been lucky: perhaps, working in busy, buzzy newsrooms and for the last couple of decades press offices in corporate headquarters, I’ve been able to enjoy the banter, the exchanges of ideas, the arguments and disagreements, occasional bollockings and even more occasional praise that come with face-to-face working. I couldn’t go back to being perched on my sofa, peering into a laptop camera, all the time. It was a novelty once, but it’s not and never will be where I do my best work. And that is largely down to the fact that my kind of work thrives in a social and sociable environment.

Lost and found: tomb raiding or celebration of a legacy?

© Simon Poulter 2021

My entry to the blogosphere happened by accident: a foul mood one Monday morning resulting from England’s latest humiliating exit from a football tournament led to a 1,000-word rant written on a train and in need of an outlet. Thus, this blog’s predecessor, What Would David Bowie Do? was born. It was never meant to be about The Dame (it’s title came from a throwaway remark by a former girlfriend) but over the course of its lifetime, my love of David Bowie’s music was progressively rekindled as I found myself dipping into the extraordinary body of work he had recorded. His death on 10 January, 2016, brought that blog to an abrupt halt. It just didn’t seem right to continue with that title, which was simply a nod to a throwaway, Jägermeister-fuelled quip in a Yosemite boozer. So I wrote my own obituary and WWDBD? ended there. 

Of course, I wouldn’t stop blogging, and there was only going to be one source for the new one’s name, hence the reference you see at the top of this page. Even now, people think I’m a Bowie blogger, but I haven’t actually written anything specifically about him for a couple of years. Today might change that, as I kick off what I’ve presumptively declared David Bowie Month, for no other reason than the 26th will see the release of the latest box set of Bowie reissues, Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001). The package will feature remasters of output in a period where Bowie may have struggled, remarkably, to fit into the Britpop wave that was going on at the time, but in Black Tie White Noise, The Buddha Of Suburbia soundtrack, Outside, Earthling and Hours, still produced utterly compelling material. 

The period also covers a phase of live performances, where Bowie had a white-hot band and was seemingly comfortable in his skin performing all the old classics. Thus, a BBC Radio live recording from 2000 (originally released as part of the limited-edition three-disc Bowie At The Beeb) - a warm-up for his legendary Glastonbury headline performance - is included in the set, along with a collection of odds and sods called Re:Call 5. The true draw to the package, however, is Toy, the semi-mythical record featuring new versions of Bowie songs from the very beginning of his career, but which wasn’t deemed by the record company to be releasable in 2001. I can assure you there will be more on Brilliant Adventure nearer its release date.

© Simon Poulter 2021

Last week I indulged my fandom with a visit to the new ‘Bowie 75’ pop-up shop in London’s Heddon Street, opened (along with a sister branch in New York) to provide an outlet for devotees to gorge themselves on merchandise, music and other paraphernalia (such as a Stylophone with which to recreate the iconic middle-eight of Space Odyssey). I won’t deny that purchases were made (high-quality vinyl reissues of the ‘second’ David Bowie album and The Man Who Fell To Earth, plus the scintillating Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 recorded on the Station To Station tour - Bowie in his absolute ’70s pomp). 

In the shop’s basement you can listen to vintage songs spruced up with ‘360 Reality Audio’ (Sony’s new ‘spatial’ audio technology), as well as play around with magnetic lyrics stuck to a pillar, composing songs as Bowie once did with cut up newspaper headlines. There’s also a red telephone box in which you can have your picture taken, a hat-tip to the shop being located across the road from the building featured in the cover art for The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars, setting the scene for the alien Ziggy’s arrival on Earth.

If people think all this is fan gouging, then that’s up to them. After all, people appear to be paying significantly north of £80 for Adele tickets next summer, so no one has the right to judge what people spend their money on when it comes to pop music. Most of the merchandise on sale in the shops is available on the official Bowie website, but there’s more to it than simply a couple of glorified souvenir kiosks. The London and New York stores (the latter located close to Bowie’s SoHo home of 20 years) have been opened for a strictly limited period, leading up to what would have been the artist’s 75th birthday, on 8 January next year. 

“I’m really emotional,” 35-year-old fan Nikky Smart told The Times the other day while visiting the Heddon Street store. “It’s kind of like they’ve brought him back again.” I can’t say that it was really like that for me, but it was all very tasteful. And seeing most of a back catalogue of 27 studio albums, live sets and compilations on sale, alongside the T-shirts (yep, I bought one), baseball hats, jigsaw puzzles and all the rest, was a poignant reminder of the sheer body of work Bowie left behind when he succumbed to cancer in 2016.

Picture: The Rolling Stones/Bravado

The Bowie 75 shops are just the latest retail ventures opened by heritage acts to interact with fans. The Rolling Stones opened their own ‘Official UK Store’ in London’s Carnaby Street in September last year - a brave move given that it was that brief period of 2020 when normality resumed and people went shopping again, albeit tentatively. The Stones previously had a limited-period concession at Selfridges in Oxford Street to provide the template for the Carnaby Street shop, making it largely a platform to flog somewhat expensive T-shirts bearing the legendary ‘lips’ logo and various pieces of Stones album art. The Bowie shops also arrive a few weeks after Queen opened their own store, also in Carnaby Street, and dedicated to the band’s five-decade career, selling limited edition music releases, fashion collaborations with brands like Champion and Wrangler, Johnny Hoxton jewellery and other ‘lifestyle products’, whatever that means. 

All these band-based retail concepts appear to have two types of punter in mind: tourists that (in theory) throng to London’s West End, and in particular, social media-savvy youngsters looking to post their visits to Instagram and TikTok (that said, the Bowie shop seemed to be mostly customised by middle-aged blokes…er…like me). “We’re really looking at two things,” entertainment consultant Lawrence Peryer explained to The Times last week when talking about how the Bowie shops came about. “We wanted to create a place for the long-term Bowie fan to come in and find out something about Bowie that they didn’t know before, and have an experience they’d not had before, but also to connect with a young audience. David was always ahead of his time, always changing to connect with the younger crowd, and we’re hoping this will carry on the tradition.” 

Bowie certainly was ahead of his time: many will have seen on YouTube his highly prescient interview in 1999 with the BBC’s Newsnight in which he told a sceptical Jeremy Paxman that the Internet - then in relative infancy - would affect society beyond all recognition. “The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable,” he declared. The year before, Laurence Peryer had helped Bowie create his BowieNet website, widely considered one of the earliest pioneers of online music. It’s just one facet of Bowie that makes him still fascinating today, even before you start delving into the myriad characters and guises he quite consciously invented as avatars for his music. That was something he effectively did up to his dying day, with the morbid, out-of-body experience that was Blackstar, with its conscious references to impending death, which eventually occurred, uncannily, two days after his 69th birthday and the album’s release.

Bowie had a history of prescience. Invariably depicted as an inveterate Mod magpie throughout his life, appropriating music and fashion from wherever and whatever took his fancy, he also kept an unearthly beady eye on technology trends. In 1997 Bowie hatched a plan to monetise the master tapes of his recordings, foreseeing the rise of online streaming services that, as we now know, would only generate paltry revenues for artists compared to what they were used to with sales of physical formats. In the end, Bowie struck a deal with insurer Prudential to issue ‘Bowie bonds’ which used future royalties from his material as collateral, effectively enabling him to borrow against his back catalogue. The deal raised $55 million - shortly before Napster and the file-sharing boom came along, heralding the online music revolution that the industry has been coming to terms with ever since.

Today, as the online platforms Bowie predicted in his Paxman interview have eaten dramatically into sales of physical music formats, many artists have turned to striking deals with companies like the investment vehicle Hipgnosis. In the last year it has bought the rights to the catalogues of artists as diverse as Neil Young, Beyoncé and Blondie. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon have also sold their songwriting for eye-watering sums. Now, the Bowie estate is looking to get in on the act, with the Financial Times reporting last week that it is negotiating a deal for the artist’s albums that could raise anything up to $200 million, to be distributed between the artist’s widow Iman, son Duncan Jones and daughter Lexi, an agreement that would complement another signed recently with Warner Music for the recorded music catalogue.

Posthumously, Bowie continues to merchandise his work with a steady stream of reissues and deluxe packages, including the compilation box sets Five Years (1969-1973), Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982) and Loving The Alien (1983-1988), each containing respectfully tarted-up versions of original studio albums along with recordings that encapsulated Bowie’s stage magic. There has also been a series of live albums, released one by one to build up a box set of their own, Brilliant Live Adventures, and drawn from Bowie’s so-called ‘wilderness years’ in the 1990s when he was, incredibly, not in vogue (all these recordings had been officially available online previously, but lucratively making the available physically, with a limited edition slip case drew in the likes of me - and I haven’t been disappointed, either). Indeed, I’ve had no problem buying any of the these Bowie packages, even if they mean owning the same albums over and over again. Each - as will the forthcoming Brilliant Adventure - contain enough trinkets of genuine appeal to the fan and, if bizarrely, such people exist, provide an entry point to the work of one of popular music’s most richly artistic and charismatic figures. Yep, I know: I’m a record company marketing manager’s dream. Sue me.

Feeding the squirrel

Picture: Microsoft

Tomorrow is, apparently, ‘Thirsty Thursday’. Such is the shift of old Monday-Friday working patterns that, since the notional return to offices in the last month, Thursdays have become the new Fridays as workers cram pubs for a convivial livener before heading home to start the weekend a day early (since the once former end to the working week has now become de facto WFH). 

The pattern is borne out further by Transport for London data from a couple of Thursdays ago which recorded one of the busiest days this year at Tube stations in the City of London, with more than 90,000 individual exits through the gates at Bank and Monument. Canary Wharf , serving the City’s spillover financial district, recorded 80,000 barrier activations on the same day. My own office has been considerably busier on Thursdays over the last month in which, finally, I’ve been going in regularly since workplaces started opening up again (and I don’t think it’s the draw of an after-work pint nearby that is bringing teams together on the same day). There is, though, no mandatory requirement at my company to be in a designated office on any day of the week, which is a massive tick for progressive, flexible employment brought about by the pandemic. Perhaps it’s the sector I work in, telecoms, and influenced by the global technology industry, which appears to have adopted flexible working en masse. 

The London Chamber of Commerce & Industry recently reported that 83% of businesses that could work from home were expecting staff to do so on at least one day a week, which ultimately means that numbers are unlikely to return to anything like pre-pandemic levels. What is clear is that patterns are at least showing a discernible rise in people on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with offices - in London at least - up to 20% busier on  those days. Regardless of the professional sector, the evidence is that things are creeping getting back to normal, or at least a version of normal. I wouldn’t say that from anything more than the anecdotal observation of commuting on two or three days, but even when I do, apart from overground trains in south-west London being somewhat full between 7 and 8am (a mixture of workers and private school pupils), once I switch to the Tube for my journey into Paddington, carriages are a lot quieter. 

Passenger numbers in London remain down on pre-pandemic levels, even if the City is receiving more workers again. In and around the West End, central London is suffering the double-whammy of both commuters and tourists staying away, defying national trends. Footfall across UK cities increased by 17% between June and August, according to a Centre For Cities report, but London only saw a 9% increase, and didn't improve by any great margin last month when things were supposed to be getting back to some kind of normal. The end of furlough, the Centre said, added another challenge.

Picture: TFL

Businesses that rely on office workers in London are managing to paint a rosy picture of the apparent recovery: “The Square Mile is buzzing again,” the City of London Corporation’s Catherine McGuinness recently told The Times, noting how the hospitality sector propped up by all the banks and investment houses in the City is enjoying some return to good times. “Getting City employees back to the workplace is vital to street-level recovery after many months of difficult trading,” she added. “While the virus may not have gone, we are learning to live with it, and are beginning to see a renewed, vibrant and thriving City ecosystem.”

The City, however, is not London, and London is not the UK, clearly, but some of this commentary provides a useful barometer for the post-COVID recovery. But the cold hard truth is that we’ve all become so used to working from home (if we work in a sector that enables it, of course), that we’re unlikely to go back to the traditional 9-to-5. Work-life balance, which was always an issue before the pandemic, has been thrust into the spotlight, as companies acknowledge that modern, digital working is so relentless. Few of us are truly off duty, thanks to smartphones and cloud-based apps that allow us to connect to corporate e-mail on any kind of Internet connection. That is only if you allow it to.

My own experience of the last month canvassing my fellow office returnees has delivered a mixed picture. Some colleagues say they were more productive at home, enjoying being uninterrupted by office bantz, unsolicited conversations and that person who doesn’t realise that using a headset only makes them louder. I, on the other hand, have found the office more productive, perhaps a result of having spent 35 years in these environments. I have enjoyed the separation of home and work, even regarding the occasional perils of commuting in London as a small price to pay for a couple of hours a day to read a book or tune out.

What is nice, though, is to have the choice. One thing is consistent across both types of colleagues: hybrid working has made them more content, more trusted and even more valued, which might be something particular to my employer. Some, however, aren’t so forward looking: recruitment company boss James Cox branded job candidates asking about WFH policies to be “lazy, spoilt and entitled”. “I’ve done this job for 15 years,” the 35-year-old railed on LinkedIn. “Before COVID I had never heard anyone ever say to me that they want to work from home.” And so he ranted further: “You want to work from home so you don’t have to get dressed at 6am? So you can save money on travel? So that you can watch Loose Women on your lunch break? Working from home so that you can feed the squirrels at 11am in the garden!” Unsurprisingly, Cox has been royally trolled for his comments, with one HR manager branding them “possibly the most offensive, small-minded” post she’d ever seen.

Picture: WeWork

Regardless of CoxI’s archaic opinions, clearly the tide has shifted the employees’ way. New employment reforms will allow new recruits to request the right to work at home, a change particularly aimed at women, the disabled, parents and carers to better balance  professional and personal commitments.

If there’s an incentive to get people back into offices, it might be a healthier lifestyle (unless employers adopt the Silicon Valley fad for free snacks). Researchers from University College London last week revealed that travelling to a place of work has benefits for mental health, fitness and work-life balance, not to mention the waistline. According to UCL neuroscientists, nearly half of 3,000 people they surveyed said that being in the office put them in a better work mindset, improved productivity and made a positive difference to their work through face-to-face collaboration. “The commute delineates boundaries between home and work life and can be used to switch one off and transition to the other, UCL professor Joseph Devlin said. “Just going to work generates more diverse experiences than working from home, especially through interactions with other people.” Half of those surveyed said they snacked more when working at home, with 43% saying they were much more easily distracted by things like home shopping deliveries, household chores, pets and even taking longer lunch breaks. More significantly, over half reported the benefits of a change of scenery - something I’ll attest to having been forced to spend 18 months looking out of the living room window with a high hedge beyond it and…er…that’s it. 

More concerning, perhaps, is that continued WFH has the potential to hit people in the wallet in the long run. While commuters have all pocketed the benefits of not paying exorbitant travel costs to get to work, government data shows that, pre-pandemic, people who worked from home were far less likely to get a promotion or a bonus compared with their office-based colleagues, a drop-off of as much as 38%. Before COVID-19, WFJ employees were paid almost 7% less. Another pitfall being talked about is that the move to hybrid working, or even freedom to choose the working model that suits best, could be the thin end of a wedge, with companies also making job location more flexible, leading to fears of companies off-shoring positions to cheaper employment markets.

One month in to my own return to office life, it’s still too soon to conclude what the future holds. We could, of course, face another winter of COVID and lockdowns, or we could, as a society, learn to live with it, accepting the grave risks that come from sharing commuter carriages and desk space. It’s a dilemma for someone like me who, despite being double-jabbed, is considerably clinically vulnerable (and just last week received a jolly e-mail from Sajid Javid reminding me of the fact). The frustration is that I have loved going back to an office, of dressing that little bit smarter, of seeing a bit more of the world as I travel about. Even my anxiety caused by maskless morons on the train and Tube has eased to some extent. 

Perhaps my third jab, when it comes, will ease my anxiety further. It’s just that weighing up the odds of being out ‘there’ with that thing still on the lose, cannot be equated with the old risks of just catching a cold. And that is a proper conundrum for my own mental wellbeing to try and resolve.

Masked anxiety

So there we had it: our first flights in over a year: to Edinburgh and back for a four-day break. The only ‘foreign’ holiday this year, as everywhere else was either booked or that plonker Grant Shapps has placed it on the red list, or the amber list, or the amber-plus list, or the oh-what's-the-point list. Or Iceland. And, yes, it wasn't lost on us that the train from London to Scotland would have been more environmentally friendly, but with exorbitant ticket prices for a family of four, plus a five-hour journey each way, we wanted to both maximise our budget and what little holiday we were actually able to get this time.

Edinburgh was, thanks for asking, very pleasant. So pleasant we got engaged there. Yes, I am now a fiancé. The things you do on holiday, eh? What was noticeable in the charming Scottish capital was, firstly, how relaxed it felt for a busy administrative city, and secondly, how well drilled everyone appeared to be under Ms. Sturgeon's jurisdiction. Call the Scots Nats upstarts if you will, but Covid-discipline was impeccably observed wherever you went, even by the vast majority of tourists. There really was precious little obvious civil disobedience when observing the still-enforced coronavirus etiquettes, both social distancing and mask wearing in shops, restaurants, on buses, and inside attractions. No one, from what I could tell, was abstaining on grounds of belligerence or twattery, and that made for a pleasantly anxiety-free time. Only the occasional tourist - who clearly hadn't received the memo - sauntered around indoor venues with their fizzogs fully on display.

You see, I’m a self-confessed zealot when it comes to observing the COVID rules. Despite having had two jabs and indeed a mild dose of the virus itself back in November, I’m diabetic and over 50, and bloody paranoid about catching this thing again (a possibility - even the double-jabbed health secretary Sajid Javid got it). 

I’ll admit that having a  compromised immune system is partly the result of my own misadventure, but I can’t help being 53. Basically it meant that the final leg of our journey back from Edinburgh, from London City Airport to home, was one tightly knotted ball of anxiety, as every carriage we entered on the DLR, the Tube and the SWR train was full of maskless Covidiots, looking back at my petrified eyes, peering over the top of my mask, as if to say “Yeah? What’s your problem?”.

To be somewhat fair, part of the problem is not necessarily ignorance but our dear Prime Minister. Ever since Boris declared 19 July “freedom day”, the wearing of face masks in England has been largely a matter of personal choice. How very doctrinal. This is despite warnings from the scientists - those people who, it would be decent to point out, know a thing or two - that easing rules on masks will reduce public protection. So with “personal choice” the most ambiguous health and safety stipulation you could make (I could jump out of a hot air balloon without a parachute or cut off my legs with a chainsaw - it’s all a matter of personal choice), it’s no surprise that anyone with an aversion to wearing masks, due to comfort, personal freedom or because being told to do something is not for them leads to people cramming onto our trains with their faces bare, breathing in and breathing out in crowded compartments with little concern for their own wellbeing and, more bluntly, mine.

This all stems from one of the few consistencies throughout the pandemic in the UK: inconsistency. And indecision. Boris Johnson appears so eager to please freedom-loving party acolytes that something as simple as mask wearing in environments where the virus can be passed with amusing ease can not be countenanced out of common sense, above anything else. It’s why London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has deemed that masks will remain mandatory when traveling on all Transport for London services, including the Underground, buses and trains. Not that he’s been able to enforce the rule, as our journey home the other night amply demonstrated.

“I’ve repeatedly made clear that the simplest and safest option would have been for the Government to retain the national requirement for face coverings on public transport,” Khan has said. “But ministers aren’t willing to do what’s right. I’m not prepared to stand by and put Londoners, and our city’s recovery, at risk.” He has since doubled down on that view, last week calling for mask wearing to be made legally enforceable with criminal prosecutions an ultimate sanction for failure to comply. Khan’s view is partly out of the hope that a bye-law on London’s transport network would partly reduce any further spread of COVID-19, but perhaps as importantly, it would increase the confidence of commuters like me in returning to the capital for work or pleasure, giving a much-needed boost to the economy. Sadiq Khan says that 86% of passengers do observe the mask etiquette, but that means that a sizeable 14% don’t, which is a problem as scientists have said repeatedly that masks only curb the spread of the disease if everyone wears them. I think we’ve lived long enough with the Covid numbers to know what risk that represents to public health. 

However, imposing such rules is still reliant on enforcement. Given the number of trains and buses operating in London, most of which now are driver-only (and in the case of the DLR, driverless), restoring guards as, effectively, enforcers, on the scale required would be problematic. Transport for London has some 400 enforcement officers already, but given the prevalence for some of London’s finer citizens to carry knives, you can understand the reluctance for confrontation. This places extra pressure on depleted police ranks to enforce what is at present little more than a polite request.

Picture: TfL

The challenge for Khan, however, isn’t just safety: TfL faces a budget deficit of as much as £500 million over the current financial year, having been severely impacted by the pandemic. As restrictions ease, Khan desperately needs people back on public transport. That said, there are already signs of private car usage increasing, and second-hand car sales have gone through the roof as people spend saved cash on used vehicles to get around in.

Back in Scotland - where Nicola Sturgeon has appeared to be one step ahead of Johnson throughout the last 18 months - the government intends to continue with the wearing of masks “unless exempt for special circumstances” until at least next year. “The law says you must wear a face covering in most indoor public places including public transport,” official guidance states. “The Scottish government recommends that face coverings should be worn when moving around when it is crowded. This is encouraged for busy outdoor events.”

In England, Boris has customarily faffed on the issue, conceding that “If it’s not mandated it probably won’t do any good” and that he “expected” people to carry on wearing face coverings in enclosed spaces, which is hardly an imposition. Here, in the midst of all this, is us and especially me, the paranoid. The trouble is that the issue is now at risk of getting bogged sown in politics. One scientist worries that this will mask the actual point about wearing a face covering to begin with: “We know wearing masks, particularly in crowded, poorly ventilated environments, has a big impact on the levels of transmission that can take place,” Professor Clifford Stott, who sits on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (Spi-B), told LBC last week. “But also I think [that] wearing a mask is also communicating to others about a sense of responsibility, and I think that’s a key issue in mask-wearing now, unfortunately. It’s become almost a little bit politicised whether one wears one or not, which is I think a shame.” Stott is firmly of the belief that masks have had a “big impact” on stopping transmission.

In truth, according to the Office for National Statistics, mask wearing in England hasn’t changed all that much in the last month since the legal requirement to wear them in enclosed spaces was dropped, with figures showing that 95% of people were still covering their face when leaving the house. Our public transport experience, however, suggested otherwise. Perhaps it’s an East London thing, as the majority of abstainers were on the DLR west from London City Airport, and then from Canning Town to Waterloo on the Jubilee Line. That degree of mask-free fellow passengers has done nothing to restore my confidence in getting out and about again. A shame after so many months cooped up at home (including three confined to the sofa following foot surgery). I’ve been desperate for freedom to return, but I won’t hide my anxiety at what I see as other people’s inconsideration and ability to comply with something as relatively simple as wearing a mask.

Perhaps, then, it’s just for me to deal with, but it does rub with me that my liberty can be curtailed by an inconsiderate few. Perhaps I should move to Scotland, where Sturgeon’s position - admittedly, not universally accepted - has at least been unambiguous. “It is my view that if a government believes measures like [face coverings] matter, and this government does, we should say so,” the Scottish First Minister has stressed. I won’t gloss over the fact that the overall numbers are falling, as vaccinations and so-called ‘herd immunity’ take effect. It’s true, too, that the R rate appears to be dipping, but with the school holidays in force, this may well be the ‘circuit break’ needed. 

Come the autumn, and the possible return of colds and flu as more and more companies open up their offices for the first time since March last year, the whole issue of travelling to work on public transport will come under the political and clinical microscope again. This, I’m sure, will put Boris’s chronic prevarication on the line.

A little bit more than a ’ot dog

I've put money in all your pockets. 

I've treated you well, even when you was out of order, right?! 

One lunchtime, not so long ago (actually, quite some time ago, in the days when there were things called offices) and when I had a job near London’s Tower Bridge, I left my desk to go for a stroll around the historic backstreets of Wapping. What began as a cathartic midday plod in the late summer sunshine soon became a literal walk down Memory Lane, as I mooched about streets I hadn’t visited in 30 years, not since the days when I had to visit the offices of The Sun and Sunday Times while working for Sky TV. 

Rupert Murdoch had, not long before I joined Sky, decamped his newspapers from Fleet Street to ‘Fortress Wapping’, a divisive move that changed British newspaper publishing forever, as the tycoon belligerently took on the print unions in an acrimonious and, at times, violent period of media history. Like much of Wapping, the area around News International’s site at the junction of Virginia and Pennington streets had once been staunch working class, populated by dockers and their families. Today, Murdoch's presence is long gone, with the newspaper industry undergoing further schism in the online age (with News International losing, along the way, the News Of The World, a victim of its own dubious practice).

Walking back to St. Katherine’s Dock, which my then-office overlooked, I ambled close to the river on Wapping High Street. Making a turn, I found myself in Scandrett Street, where I was confronted by a typical canyon of newish brick buildings, designed to resemble the warehouses that once lined the area, and now a testament to rampant gentrification. It was then that it struck me that this was precisely the vision that fictional mobster Harold Shand had had at the end of the 1970s when he had the idea to do something about the dilapidated streets of E1. 

This, then, is the basis of The Long Good Friday, one of the finest British films ever made, and which was released 40 years ago this week. “This is the decade in which London will become Europe's capital, having cleared away the out-dated,” Shand pronounces on the deck of his gleaming yacht, moored in front of the Tower of London, as he tries to convince an American mafia delegation to come in on his project to regenerate the East End. “We've got mile after mile or acre after acre of land for our future prosperity,” he continues. “No other city in the world has got, right at its centre, such an opportunity for profitable progress.” He was incredibly prophetic. After decades of post-war wrangling about what to do with the area, in the same year that The Long Good Friday was released, Michael Heseltine created the London Docklands Development Corporation. By the end of the 80s and the start of the 90s, Docklands itself was transformed. Post-Big Bang, the banks and their bankers moved east. Canary Wharf was built on the Isle of Dogs, and continues to grow to this day, with gleaming spire after gleaming spire springing up like cocktail sticks planted on a Cream Cracker. Today it might be quieter due to the lack of office workers, but it is no less a powerful symbol of the economic aspiration that stretches out of several boroughs spreading east down the Thames from Tower Bridge.

But back to Scandrett Street, which plays a notorious role in The Long Good Friday: as I stood there, staring at faux history clad in modernity, I felt a shiver of familiarity, despite having never been in that place before. Opposite the new developments was a wrought iron fence surrounding the garden of St. John’s Church. For East End authenticity, it could have been Albert Square itself, but something told me that I had seen that fence in some other context. Sometime later, reading up on the production of The Long Good Friday, I discovered what had been there before - at the end of that street (and now long gone, the result of modernistic development) was The Lion & Unicorn pub, the East End boozer blown up by - at the outset of the film - hoodlums on Good Friday.

The John Mackenzie-directed thriller remains one of the greatest British films ever made, but its use of London locations, in particular, made it so rich. It was also uncompromising. Appearing a year or so after the comedic Minder arrived on British TV screens, itself a distant descendent from The Sweeney, and around the same time that Only Fools And Horses made its debut, The Long Good Friday was an equally colourful depiction of shady London life, but with an infinitely deeper agenda. Barrie Keefe’s bristling story combined IRA terrorism, a mafia plot, a prototype yuppie (in Shand) before the term had ever been used, and was populated with a cast of cracking British talent. 

Bob Hoskins remains throughout a mesmerising, Napoleonic figure, with his boxer’s nose and street-smart belligerence, trying to understand who and why anyone would be trying to derail his grand vision, unaware that one of his gang has become embroiled in a dodgy deal with terrorists in Belfast, who exact their revenge on Shand’s empire in startling form. Shand’s quotes throughout the film are legend, especially the “I’ve put money in all your pockets!” near-soliloquy at the top of this post, but also his admonishment of the American mafiosi as they renege on their agreement inside The Savoy hotel: “What I’m looking for is someone who can contribute to what England has given to the world: culture, sophistication, genius. A little bit more than a ’ot dog, know what I mean?” he quips, with tongue not entirely in cheek. “I’m glad I found out in time just what a partnership with a pair of wankers like you would’ve been,” he thunders on, probably not grasping the fact that Americans wouldn’t know what sort of an insult that was.

Critics have tried to analyse The Long Good Friday, even attempting to make parallels to The Godfather, given both films’ levels of brutality and their central figures of gangsters trying to change their business models. Like Mario Puzo’s somewhat Shakespearian tragedy, quintessentially a New York tale, The Long Good Friday is pure London, as the list of filming locations pertains. Nothing has come close since, not Guy Ritchie’s geezerfests or anything in Danny Dyer’s canon. It works because London’s Docklands were bleak at the beginning of the 1980s and, even now, if you look closely, still are. It’s just that the converted warehouses that line the river, housing London’s new urban elite, have given it a respectable polish, the kind of aspiration that Shand himself had envisioned. Paul Barber (who played ‘Errol the Ponce’, mutilated in his kitchen by Shand henchman 'Razors'), this week likened Hoskins’ character to the principle character in Only Fools And Horses, in which he also appeared: “The thing that got me was Harold’s speech on the boat [at St. Katherine’s Dock],” Barber told The Guardian this week. “Think about it now: it has all happened. It was the Thatcher era and he was like the young Del Boy.”

“Nobody had done a movie like that as far as I can recollect,” Helen Mirren, who played Shand’s moll-like wife Victoria, also told The Guardian. “It broke ground,” she said, saying that she was blown away from the outset by Keefe’s script. “It was like a piece of literature, and movie scripts don’t tend to be like that. This one you read like a novel. With the exception that my female character was terrible – she was very, very dull.” That may have been the case - and I’m sure Mirren wouldn’t deny that Victoria serves as little more than window dressing to the piece - but the film is certainly novel-like, as Shand questions why things are going increasingly wrong with his grand plan. And, of course, it ends so brilliantly without conclusion: as Shand exits The Savoy for a rendezvous with Victoria, he jumps into his chauffeur-driven ride, only to see his wife being hauled off in the opposite direction under duress. As he realises the unfolding situation, a figure - Pierce Brosnan in his film debut - pops up in the front seat wielding a silenced pistol. Much like the final scene of The Sopranos, it’s up to you to decide what happens next. But whereas Tony Soprano’s fate is subtly ambiguous, the elongated closing sequence of The Long Good Friday, set to Francis Monkman’s driving score, sees Shand gazing out of the Jag’s window, seemingly accepting his fate.

It was, without doubt, the film that planted Hoskins in our consciousness. He’d made his breakthrough a couple of years before in the BBC’s adaptation of Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, and he would sort of return to the Shand character five years later in Mona Lisa. In The Long Good Friday, Hoskins is the focal point of a fascinating essay about Britain at the beginning of the 1980s. Keefe has appeared to shy away from casting it as a great sociological snapshot, with director Mackenzie calling it just “a damned good gangster movie”. But 40 years on, as we address many contemporary issues about morality, race and even patriotism, The Long Good Friday holds up on so many levels, not the least being that it’s British film making at its very best.

They think it’s all over. Well it still isn’t

Picture: AstraZeneca

Given that our current prime minister sees himself as Winston Churchill-incarnate, there’s a temptation to look upon yesterday’s 'V-Day' rollout of the coronavirus vaccine in the terms of the wartime leader’s famous quote in the autumn of 1942, when the tide of the Second World War appeared to turn: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Boris and Matt Hancock, his perpetually perky propagandist health minister, might be seeing those “sunlit uplands” hoving closer into view, but - and sorry to rain on their parade - there is still a long road out of the pandemic. Fantastic as it is that yesterday saw the first vaccinations administered, and that by Christmas the NHS should have had four million doses available, but infection rates remain stubborn. Yesterday’s government figures recorded over 12,000 new national COVID-19 cases, almost 1,500 new hospital admissions and 616 new deaths - the equivalent of three Boeing 737s crashing catastrophically with all on board. Sorry to bring the mood music down.

Even if the excitement about the vaccine is entirely understandable - people are desperate for some semblance of normality - normality is clearly not on the agenda yet. Speaking today at a joint meeting of the House of Commons Science & Technology and Health & Social Care committees, England’s chief science officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, said: “The biggest risk we face now is that people think it’s all over. It isn't all over. We have a very important light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re a long way off. It’s not the time to relax things. If that happens we will have a big surge." His partner in crime, England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, added that, in general, the British public had responded well to the restrictions on life since March. “The altruism of the British public cannot be understated,” he said. “Because of that, many, many people have been saved.” But, he noted, some people will get bored of the restrictions.

That seems to be evident here in Tier 2 London, where there is a very real risk that a rise in virus cases in two-thirds of the capital’s boroughs could put it into Tier 3, just as the Christmas shopping season reaches its frenzy. One former Public Health England regional director, told The Guardian today that a decision on moving London up to Tier 3 was needed within the next 48 hours, otherwise it faced a “terrible situation”, with rising deaths ahead of Christmas. According to the Evening Standard eight east London boroughs have recorded more than 200 new cases a week per 100,000 of population in the week to last Thursday. Worryingly, my borough, Kingston-upon-Thames, has the ninth-highest infection rates in London, recording 202.8 per 100,000.

Graphic: The Times

My experience of being out and about in London in recent days is that most people are still observing the rules on social distancing and mask wearing, but it is still only ‘most’ people. On the Tube on Friday there were people openly ignoring the rules on masks. Likewise, in a department store we were in at the weekend. It’s not often that I’ll agree with a Conservative MP, but I’ll make an exception for Nickie Aiken, the MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, who told the Evening Standard: “Every single person who breaks the rules adds to the chances of [London] going into Tier 3. We have got to work together as one city to ensure our cafes, restaurants, shops and other businesses survive and also to protect lives.”

Ah, cafes and restaurants. Of all the commercial activities that have struggled the most during the pandemic’s economic haemorrhage, they remain the one statue of normality that we cling to, to the extent - and I speak from bitter experience - we’re prepared to turn blue-lipped to sit, COVID-compliantly, outside pubs. But even this break for freedom comes at a price. How many people, out of desperation to have a pint while sticking to the rules, are ordering a “substantial meal” (such as…er…a Scotch egg…) which they then leave untouched? 

It’s something that a Sheffield barman has, to his absolute credit, made a stand on. Last weekend, Will Dalrymple, tweeted pictures of wasted meals that had been abandoned by his pub’s customers who had “only wanted two Morettis each”. Pubs in Tier 2 can only remain open if they effectively operate as restaurants, offering something more than a packet of Pork Scratchings. Dalrymple complained in several tweets how people had ordered sandwiches, side salads and bowls of chips which ended up in the bin. He said that he saw the rationale behind the rules, but also saw the position they put pub staff in. While the practice of ordering food and not eating it wouldn’t harm a pub’s finances, the moral position about wasting food is just as serious: “With everything in the news about people relying on food banks and free school meals, this is utterly obscene,” he added. ”If you're desperate to go to/support a pub, go when you're hungry.” 

Picture: Twitter/@WJDalrymple

Depressingly, Dalrymple’s tweets drew out the trolls keen to point out that people are just looking for escape. “I completely understand people's frustration at the rules,” he wrote. “I'm as grateful for and welcoming to customers as I ever was. “However, hospitality workers have no choice but to enforce the rules. All these tweets are asking for is for co-operation.” 

What doesn’t help is the lack of clarity on what constitutes a substantial meal. Various government ministers have fudged the issue, while some pubs have even tried to circumnavigate the rules by agreeing to host local takeaways or, simply, boiling a kettle and serving up a Pot Noodle. The point here is that there needs to be a happy balance. Freedom - as we knew it before March - will return, but not for some time.

Parklife

Picture: Twitter/British Summer Time

It was one of those days when it was peculiarly fun to be British. Or English. Or something between the two. The middle Sunday in July, with events conspiring to schedule the Cricket World Cup Final between England and New Zealand at Lord's, the British Grand Prix at Silverstone and the Wimbledon Men’s Final on the same afternoon as the last of six British Summer Time events in London's Hyde Park. For there, 65,000 people - with a notable skew towards women - convened for a guiltiest-of-pleasure line-up consisting of Feeder, Texas, Keane and the Black Eyed Peas on the main stage, leading up to the headline act of one Robert Peter Williams, a "singer-songwriter and entertainer" (so says Wikipedia) from Stoke-on-Trent. 

Being peak Britain, peak British summer, the crowd was largely good natured and progressively sozzled as the extended afternoon's drinking bore on. With no football to cheer on, some male sections of the crowd attempted a chorus of "Cricket's coming home" as news of England's victory just over a mile away in St. John's Wood came through. For others, it was a bonding experience. Mother-and-daughter combos - one couple wearing T-shirts identifying themselves as such - worked their way through bottles of rosé, others daringly sank pints. No surprise that, by the end of the evening husbands were doing sterling work holding some wives upright.

It was, however, enormous fun. This year's British Summer Time line-up has been low on edge and high on entertainment. Over two weekends Hyde Park has hosted headliners Celine Dion, Stevie Wonder with Lionel Ritchie, Barbra Streisand, Neil Young and Bob Dylan, and, last night, Williams, with Saturday night's Florence + The Machine arguably this year's most left field entry. But here lies a point: whether Streisand is your thing or Dylan, the chance to commune with your like-minded music fan is what this sort of thing is all about. I've long admired Glastonbury for the same thing: it's not just or even necessarily about the artistic eclecticism of grooving to pure pop, heavy rock, hip-hop or folk in the same afternoon, it's about the shared experience of having a good time. Music snobbery is left at the gate.

Which will bring me, in a moment, to Williams. Building up to his arrival, Feeder, Texas and Keane did sterling work warming up the crowd. As is often the case at these shows, it's a slowburn thing - many were still queuing for pizza when Feeder played their set, while Sharleen Spiteri (whom I discovered is four days older than me) and band created a pleasing wedding party singalong vibe with feelgood hits like the disco Let's Work It Out, I Don't Want A Lover, Black Eyed Boy and Say What You Want. Keane, often dismissed as being somewhat fey, were anything but, though the contrast between frontman Tom Chaplin's credentials and, say, a Liam Gallagher barely needs highlighting when the singer from the charming Sussex parish of Battle asks if anyone knows the cricket score. Theirs is, like Texas, a crowdpleasing set, prompting the audience half already crammed in front of the Great Oak stage to sway their arms and groove gently to proper festival sing-songs like This Is The Last Time, Everybody's Changing, Bedshaped, Is It Any Wonder? and Somewhere Only We Know. 

I'll confess, of the entire day's line-up, Black Eyed Peas interested me the least. I've seen them before - in Paris, no less - and while their on-stage energy is relentless, their music leaves me somewhat unmoved. That's not meant to be curmudgeonly, just a statement that, even at a pop-driven show like this one, there are different branches of the church that will.i.am, apl.de.ap and Taboo preach at. That, though, thankfully doesn't prevent the crowd getting into pre-Williams mode with some now well-oiled frugging to the likes of Let's Get It Started, Rock That Body, Hey Mama, Just Can't Get Enough, Don't Stop the Party and Where Is the Love?. Half the fun of these outdoor megagigs is people watching, and by 6.30 in the evening there are plenty of people to watch, especially those for whom the well organised refreshment facilities have enabled conversations to open up between random groups of people. The mother and daughter, for example, in front of us who were having a whale of time gabbing away with the lesbian couple who just happened to be parked on the grass next to them.

If there had been any doubt, however, as to who everyone had come to see, the Hyde Park engine stepped up several gears with the arrival of the main event, the main act: Williams. I'd hardly call myself a fan on the same scale as many around us, but the outset of Williams' solo career and his collaborations with Guy Chambers in particular, stood him out from the crowd. Take That did nothing for me, but the infectious Williams/Chambers partnership came closest to the naturally appealing pop-rock that Elton John and Bernie Taupin used to craft. And then Williams went a little LA. He still is, but here in Hyde Park we had a front row seat (well, metaphorically speaking, seeing as my other half and I were occupying a patch of turf some way to the back) on a unique entertainer. Yes, entertainer. That might conjure up some ITV Saturday night game show host who sings a bit, but Williams is blessed with charisma, and a great voice, too. Now, I know you might think I'm now selling out my rock cred, but there is a degree of perfection about Let Me Entertain You, the obvious set opener (even if it does still whiff a bit of The Who). There is also that schoolboy cheek that, even at 45 years old, Williams shows off with every opportunity, from his trademark opening, "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Robbie 'Fucking' Williams", to the roaring amusement of everyone in the crowd. Before he'd even arrived, he'd fanfare himself with The National Anthem Of Robbie Williams, containing the self-depreciation of "Yes he went to rehab, drugs and drink took him low, but would still make Rudebox and gave rap a go".

Parts of the show reminded me of those Seaside Special summer TV extravaganzas from the 1970s, where various light entertainers - some, probably, now doing time - would introduce Showaddywaddy or The Three Degrees, along with The Dad's Army cast from a carpark in Torquay. Thus, the lovely Leslie from Scotland was scooped up out of the crowd and onto a red sofa for Williams to loon around, serenading her with Something Stupid. A man with 'Gay Best Friend' on the front of his T-shirt is singled out for a partially reworked She's The One. And in another Williams concert staple, his pub-singing crooner dad Pete is brought out for a duet of Sweet Caroline, eliciting maximum audience participation on the "bap-bap-BAH!" brass parts.

Millennium, featuring John Barry's gorgeous, sweeping string arrangement from his theme to You Only Live Twice, takes us back to that period of Williams' career when he could get away with anything, including a Bond-themed video, followed by another strong item from the I've Been Expecting You album, the glorious No Regrets, Williams' cathartic flushing of the Take That experience, co-written with Neils Tennant and Hannon. By now, Williams could be doing Three Blind Mice and the crowd would not complain. In fact, the crowd would probably encourage him to sing it, just for laughs. And he would oblige. 

Williams seemingly can get away with it. Covers of Wilson Pickett's Land Of 1000 Dances, Queen's We Will Rock You and the intro riffs of AC/DC's Back In Black on the front end of Kids simply add to the vaudeville. By the time we get to the inevitable ending, Angels (introduced by "I wouldn't go without doing 'the hit'"), Williams has the 65,000 eating out of his hands. It is also this point of the evening, I'd been warned, that he takes something of a liberty with the paying audience by letting them do some of the heavy lifting. No one complains though. Angels is that beautiful piece of anthemic communion that even the hardest-hearted would find difficult to resist a pub-style "...and throo it ALL...!!!!". 

We are now, at this point, near the end. For some, a long journey home without access to public amenities is going to be a very clear challenge. Others are stopped in their tracks heading for the exits when they realise Angels, and the group stage bow thereafter, isn't the end of it. There's just one more, Williams with Chambers on keyboards doing Sinatra's My Way. Somehow, it was the song Robbie Williams was born to sing, not just to lovingly recreate his dad's pub singing act, but to bathe in the many ironies of Paul Anka's original lyrics. Worth it, down to the very last drop. 

Where have all the workers gone?

© Simon Poulter 2018

I’m looking out on the Westway, that grim stretch of tarmac and concrete eulogised, somewhat, by The Clash as a totem of the West London they emerged from. It’s 8am on a Friday morning and something is strange: there’s hardly any traffic coming into the capital, despite what should be bumper-to-bumper rush hour. It may be the last day of August, but that’s not to say people aren’t back at work as, if the Tube is anything to go by this week, they are. It is, though, the last day of the school holidays, which might mean frantic parents are shipping bored teenagers out to Thorpe Park or Chessington World of Adventures for one last outing in the dog days of the summer holiday.

Taxi drivers have commented on this Friday phenomenon: one told me that he doesn’t bother coming in to London on Fridays as there’s just so little business. He blamed flexible working (or, in other words, “working from home”). In fact, so many of us are commuting only as far as the sofa or home office on a Friday that cabbies feel it’s just not worth the trouble. Now, I’m sure this is just an extreme view, but if I look at how my current employer has, to a point, tolerated home working, it may not be a surprise.

When I started my career, 32 years ago, there was no such thing for most industries. Journalism was a little different, as with a typewriter most freelancers worked at home and either brought their copy in by hand or posted it. But then came the digital revolution. I remember borrowing an early laptop my first magazine had purloined in 1987: for the 30 minutes that the battery lasted, it was quite a novelty sitting out in the garden bashing out album reviews. It was, however, the mobile phone that truly transformed workplace mobility. Suddenly you were in when you were out (something I loathed as I always considered the mobile ringing to be an interruption. Mind you, I had the same opinion when someone called me on my deskphone, too...). Today we have all of these devices in one - our smartphone. There is seemingly no productivity activity you can’t do on one. And with us bound to our phones like life support systems, we are never going to be able to switch off.

Commuting is hardly one of the most enjoyable duties, and on Britain’s overcrowded, delayed, strike-hit, standing-room-only trains, it is positively purgatorial. Which is what alarms me about the sight of people on public transport with their laptops, tablets and phones, feverishly working away on e-mails, presentations and reports. It begs the question - do they have unreasonable bosses, expecting them to be connected 24/7, constantly in crisis mode as ludicrously short deadlines keep coming up? Or are people simply spacing their days out to suit their own working style? (Another theory is that workers spend so much of their office time and IT resources on Facebook that they need the extra hours to do their work…).

Picture: TFL

The University of the West of England has just published a study which found that increasing numbers of commuters are now using their travel time to and from work to deal with the mountains of e-mail that corporate life, in particular, generates. This should not surprise: next time you’re on a train before 9am, look around and count how many are stooped over their mobiles. Some will be playing Candy Crush, sure, but others - and I’d suggest those with the most furrowed brows - will be frantically catching up with the overnight missives from other timezones…or insomniac bosses.

So, asks the university’s report, should all this pro bono e-mail be considered part of an employee’s contracted hours? When I used to commute daily from Amsterdam to Eindhoven in a former life, Philips paid for me to have a first class seat on the four-hour round trip, providing me with the perfect environment to work and even leave the office early to carry on working on the train home. It never occurred to me that this was ‘free’ work - it was just work, and I was able to do it in a convenient way, even without (in those days) onboard WiFi. The bigger issue, however, is how much work continues when you get home. In my line of work (PR), there are inevitable periods of ‘wartime’ when there’s a crisis to attend to, or a major launch that simply needs the hours put in, which could be done in the soul-destroying environment of an empty office at night, or in the comfort of home with warm food and a cold beer to assist.

Problems, however, begin when wartime becomes permanent, and expectations arise of being constantly ‘on’, day and night, at weekends and during holidays (I was once on a conference call where one of the participants had taken his laptop on holiday and we could all audibly hear the sounds of a busy Côte d'Azur in the midst of the August grande vacances). Here is where flexible working needs to be just that. Work/life balance is something major modern employers like to promote as part of their commitment to employee wellbeing, but how many proactively enforce it? Workplace stress and mental health issues have definitely seen a marked increase in the era of e-mail and digital connectivity, and far too many companies pay only lip service to enabling employees to keep their work life and home life in correct balance.

So step up accountancy firm PwC which has launched a scheme for new recruits in which they can specify (well, “suggest”) the hours they would like to work per week. The idea is to try and attract employees who may not - or cannot - be tied to the traditional 9-to-5 workday. PWC says that the scheme is in response to their own study which found that almost half of respondents would prioritise flexible hours when looking for the ideal on.

"People assume that to work at a big firm they need to follow traditional working patterns. We want to make it clear that this isn't the case,” says PwC's chief people officer, Laura Hinton. “In order to recruit the best people, we recognise that we need to offer greater flexibility, different working options and a route back in for those looking to restart their careers." Flexible working hours are not only good for staff, Hinton says, but also the economy, business and society. “We're likely to see a rise in people transitioning in and out of work throughout their careers and those organisations who responsibly support their people to do this will ultimately gain a competitive advantage”.

Which neatly brings me to some news of my own: today is my last day as an employee of Nokia, and I’m leaving after almost eight years at Nokia and the acquired Alcatel-Lucent combined. It’s been an amazing journey, taking in the ups and downs of corporate life, changes of CEOs and other executives, a lot of not commenting on rumours or speculation, and some major shifts in technology, as 4G/LTE arrived, the cloud and virtualisation began to replace hardware, and 5G popped its head above the parapet. And now it’s almost here for real. And, yes, working in corporate communications during this time has meant a lot of e-mails and conference calls around the clock, and at weekends, too. I’ll admit, it goes with the territory, but on the other hand, the tools are there and, to a greater or lesser agree, the freedom, too, to manage your own time appropriately.

I’ll have news next week of where I go next (and trust me, I’m extremely excited at the prospect). Strangely, it will involve technology that enables companies and their employees to work flexibly. And I’m sure they’ll practice what they preach.