2 1GT Monday August 3 2020 | the times

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Kevin Maher

I

pity the banks. No, wait! I

don’t mean that I feel moved

by their ethical or ideological

predicaments or whether or

not they are going to struggle

as the economic impact of the

pandemic is felt. I mean that I

pity their feeble attempts, so far,

to lure Covid-shy workers back into

their London offices.

According to recent reports,

Goldman Sachs has been offering

employees free lunches, Morgan

Stanley is supplying free French

pastries and doughnuts, while UBS has

gone one step further and promised to

dole out free booze on Friday nights

for traders brave enough to return to

their Bishopsgate offices.

I am not trying to be instinctually

contrarian about these hopeless

corporate gestures, and have no idea

what exactly constitutes a free lunch

at Goldman Sachs (other than to

acknowledge that, according to the

popular aphorism, there’s no such

thing), but I’m pretty sure that we’re

all supposed to be cutting down on

our intake of doughnuts and pastries

rather than pigging out. The

messaging seems slightly problematic.

Come back to work in London!

Become a fat banker! And die!

And as for free booze? That’s a

recipe for disaster.

We’ve all known for years that

work and alcohol simply don’t mix.

At least I have. My first encounter

with “proper” journalism was a boozy

lunch with a newspaper features editor

about 20 years ago, just as the practice

was falling out of fashion. I can’t

imagine the nature of the material

that he, ahem, “edited” that afternoon,

but I went home to bed.

I’ve since done interviews with

crafty booze-hardened actors who

have coaxed me into “sharing a glass”

with them, only to nudge me into

woozy complacency and subsequently

run professional rings around me.

During one early interview, with a

tough senior Scottish actor, the beer

was flowing, the bonds were being

forged and the backs clapped, and I

remember thinking: “Wow, this is the

best fun I’ve ever had, drinking with

actors is cool, and this interview is

going to be astounding!” And when I

listened back to the interview tapes?

Mostly me talking and him laughing

uproariously, safe in the knowledge

The rules:

we’re all

confused

Can 30 people gather?

Do they all wear

masks? What if they

are from the same

(admittedly massive)

household? Can they

have a friend over? And

what if that friend has

just returned from

Spain, but has flown

into Dublin and driven

across the border to

Belfast and got the

ferry over to the

mainland instead?

Confused? Well,

according to a new

University College

London study,

55 per cent of us are

increasingly baffled

by the government’s

ever-shifting

lockdown guidance.

Hear, hear!

I was with friends

last week and one

of them offered me

a glass of wine. As he

presented it to me he

paused, sniffed and

took a slurp, nodded

approvingly, and

continued to hand

it over.

I held it for a

nanosecond and

thought: “Hmm.

What’s the government

guidance here?” Then

I remembered that

this friend had already

had Covid and so I

greedily sucked up his

saliva stain, hoping to

absorb some precious

antibodies through his

spit. I’m still healthy.

So that should probably

be a new rule. Is it safe

to lick survivors’ spit?

Hell yeah!

I heart

Harry’s

love texts

ridiculed for his

overuse of the ghost

emoji, as revealed in

the recent biography

Finding Freedom.

Apparently, Harry’s

early love texts,

irrespective of

content, were full of

ghost emojis, which

some commentators

have deemed uncouth.

I get it, though. I’m

particularly fond of the

“shaka” emoji (you

know? Thumb up, little

finger extended?). It

was originally a surfing

gesture (roughly

meaning, “Hang loose,

brah!”) that was

popularised by

footballers, actors and

even Barack Obama.

My teenage son did it,

briefly, for a term and I

liked the look of it and

immediately adopted

the corresponding

emoji as my own. No

one, of course, does the

shaka any more. But it

lives on in my texts.

Everyone needs to give

Prince Harry a break.

He was recently

that he had not faced a single

“difficult” question or revealed

the slightest piece of personal

information to the mildly sozzled

plonker in front of him.

I went on Newsnight once, around

the same time, after three ciders.

Terrible idea. I was just so slow. It

was as if I were on a satellite link

and waiting three seconds for every

question to land before I could

possibly concoct anything as

elaborate as an answer.

Worst of all, I was once

commissioned to write a magazine

feature about a day in the life of an

It girl. I was to shadow two aspiring

London It girls (it was an early

Noughties thing, they would probably

be called Instagram stars now)

around West End bars and in their

champagne-filled limousine before

ending up at the Fridge nightclub in

Brixton. That was the plan, anyway.

My night ended somewhere between

falling out of the limo and collapsing

in the chill-out room, duly abandoned

by the It girls, having lost my notes,

my Dictaphone and my sense of

self-respect.

I woke the next morning with just

a splitting headache, a desperate idea

to repurpose the feature (“Yah. Kev

here. I was thinking that instead of

a day in the life, which is, like, soooo

yesterday, what about a more thinky

piece? About the meaning of the

phenomenon?”) and a determination

never to drink on the job again.

So no, I won’t be tempted back into

an office by free pina coladas and

Krispy Kremes. I am made of sterner

stuff than that. Although, if you insist

on plying me with tawdry offers and

craven corporate enticements, my own

parking space, some private lift access

and a dirty great wad of cash might be

a good place to start.

I feel for bankers being

offered free booze to work

— it will end in disaster

Go back to our

Many young professionals say that they

won’t return to the stressful urban grind

when this is all over. They explain why

O

n a sun-drenched café

lawn I was drinking my

first proper cappuccino in

months when I clocked

a handsome man striding

towards my table. Things were looking

up. Except he kept on walking. His

destination? A cute toddler playing

with her plastic picnic set on the grass.

No surprise — I was an island in a

scene awash with families and couples.

Around Old Ryton Village, the pocket

of Gateshead where I grew up and

where I now live back home, I am

seemingly the only singleton.

Such are the perils of being a

millennial in Covid exile. And there

are quite a few of us: at least

10.5 million Brits moved back in with

their parents due to the pandemic,

over two thirds permanently, with no

move-out date in sight, according to

research by the personal finance

comparison website finder.com.

Like me, people in their twenties

and thirties are ditching city life for

something more bucolic. In April

alone the proportion of London

buyers registering with estate agencies

outside the capital almost doubled.

The company Escape the City, which

helps people to change career, has

claimed that 51 per cent of new sign-

ups wanted to leave London compared

with 20 per cent in 2019. And the

estate agency Savills reports that 71

per cent of younger buyers crave more

outdoor space and rural locations.

In March I joined this mass exodus

of Londoners who defected to their

home towns for extra breathing space.

When I shoved a few belongings into

a suitcase and took off up north to my

parents’, I assumed I’d be back in

a couple of weeks.

But then, like a loose thread being

tugged, came the unravelling. I lost

my job as a travel book editor. My

flatmates and I wanted rid of our

expensive rent. A decade’s worth of

stuff is now back here in boxes. I’ve

slipped into the slow lane, from which

I have no immediate plans to leave.

And so the bustling Soho restaurant

I had planned for my 32nd birthday in

April became a Colin the Caterpillar

cake tea party on my parents’ kitchen

table. While I was slicing up Colin

with thoughts of the year to come,

it crossed my mind that perhaps

wholesome village life was what I’d

been missing all along.

After so long in the concrete jungle

I’d forgotten about the Zen qualities of

rural life. I float about, taking daily

trips to the woods, going on long bike

rides and running in clean country air

rather than smog.

A garden is nice too — in the flat

I shared with two other women in

a particularly concrete-heavy part

of London our tiny terrace was

considered a luxury, even though it

was reigned over by a mangy fox. It

could only fit two people at a time, so

one of us would always be half-inside

the dusty doorway.

Perhaps I should have seen this

coming. Londoners say you get used to

the Tube, but crowbarring myself on

to three sweaty lines on a 50-minute

commute nibbled away at my soul.

Then there’s the ridiculous price of

property in London — I was sick of

spending more than half of my salary

on rent and had long since given up

on the prospect of buying.

Competing with my flatmates for

shower time also was a drag; long

baths were confined to the times when

both the other girls were out. Likewise,

dinner time was designed for speed

(no one likes a kitchen-hogger). Now,

I love nothing more than taking over

the whole place with my paella.

It was only when I moved that I

realised what a constant soundtrack of

drunk people there was in my old

room, thanks to the pub opposite. I

didn’t so much mind the late-night

music as the times I had to call the

police on people throwing punches in

the street.

Which is not to say there aren’t

downsides. Every time I make a phone

call I have to crouch down in the

corner of the living room to get a

half-decent signal. The hay fever is on

a whole different level. And then, of

course, there’s the dating. In my

flatshare of three single women in our

early to mid-thirties, a carousel of

dating stories were eagerly swapped,

usually over G&Ts as the long

townhouse windows flooded our

lounge with sunset pink.

Not so in the country, where the

Peter Pan nature of my urban ways

has been made clear to me. Any

ambition to nab a salt-of-the-earth

type who tends to horses and home-

brews brown ale were dealt a swift

blow by my mum reeling off the

marriages and offspring of all my

village peers. You settle down younger

here, it seems. The closest I’ve come to

flirtation was when a tipsy teenager

complimented me on my bicycle.

Nevertheless, for the moment I’ve

got no plans to leave. You see, I’ve

assimilated to northern village life. My

accent has even returned. It’s a cliché,

but not having the daily grind really

does feel like a weight off my

shoulders. I’ve never felt so relaxed or

at peace. The truth is, I hadn’t realised

how intense city life was until I left.

The only negative

is the dating scene

Siobhan Warwicker, 32

Crowbarring

yourself on to

the Tube eats

away at your soul