The first lockdown was a gamechanger for a whole big pile of reasons. The first ‘don’t go out to work’, the first don’t attend office parties unless you’re a Prime Minister (or a member of his staff) with a very peculiar relationship with The Truth, the first don’t socialise with anyone, the first don’t attend the funeral of anyone you’re close to… It was, really, the first of a crippling bunch of restrictions that any of us had ever seen.
And the police cracked down hard on anyone who broke the rules (unless you’re the aforementioned Prime Minister or a member of his staff, in which case the police will eventually get around to sending you a questionnaire).
A couple of weeks into the first lockdown, when the novelty of WFH eventually wore off, I started collecting photographs from the few corners of the Internet that I frequent. There was no real reason for establishing this collection, other than wanting to look at things that weren’t Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets, or Project plans, or the dogs, or the cats, or my colleagues on Teams.
I don’t mean I didn’t mind looking at some of these things. It’s just that looking at some of these things for eight hours a day was, occasionally, a bit much. Because you can have too much of a good thing.
So I thought I’d share a small selection of the photos that sit in a directory (we’re supposed to say ‘folder’ now though) on the NAS, photos that were on a slowmo rotation on my non-work laptop, which sat next to my work laptop. Yes, former colleagues, this is the reason my gaze occasionally slid away from the camera.
Most of the photos are of the natural world because we live on an awesome blue ball of goodness, even though there are corporations and politicians out there who are doing their very best to destroy it. So here we are, just a few…
Some interesting ones there.
I particularly like the San Francisco one.
I’m quite fond of the full collection. They helped break up a long day of Teams calls.