“Part 5” was all about work. Part 6 is all about the day-to-day, real-life stuff like getting covid, leaving the country, being back in the office - but still not really knowing what might be coming next.

“The great home working experiment” has concluded, and offices are open again.

But “the great hybrid working experiment” doesn’t really seem to have begun just yet…

Life is still some way from normality yet- making plans involving travelling abroad still feels like a bit of a gamble, and its anyone's guess whether we'll get a similar Christmas to last year with last-minute lockdowns, or the Christmas we expected to get. Societal norms for things like when you should wear a mask or how much space you should give strangers in public are still a bit fuzzy - masks on trains, the underground and shopping centres are starting to become conspicuous by their absence. I haven't noticed the lingering smell of hand sanitiser for months. "Protect each other" seems to have fallen off the agenda. We're still in a ‘reevaluation’ stage - the "new normal" might be in sight, but not quite here yet.

But that means that what we can do (which we couldn't when we were still adjusting to life in a pandemic) is start getting ready for it. The big question isn't "when will this end?", but "how will we continue?"

On a minor obsession with my coffee mugs at home, and the fact that after a long break, I’m back to drinking coffee from the office coffee machine again, and wondering what post-pandemic office life might look like.

What I write here tends to be what I'm thinking about, with a general theme of 'how people adapt to technology'. Right now, our society is undergoing a seismic shift - millions of people are suddenly living and working in a totally different routine, much of which is enabled by the internet and online services - meaning I've got way too many things to be thinking and writing about to actually write any of them down.

So, this is a "for now" post while I try to get my head around what comes next.