Authored by Ness Gordon and Martine Paynter (Emma Bland and Claire Eatock pictured).

Ness:

My first memory of Covid is sitting in the Centre’s weekly seminar in early March 2020, listening to Prof John Newton, who was a visiting scholar at the time. He abandoned his planned seminar and instead spoke about what we were still calling “coronavirus”.

As a leading figure at Public Health England, John was well placed to offer a warning and his advice was simple: shut down and move to remote working as soon as possible. This was serious.

So John got on a train home, our erstwhile leader Lora Fleming boarded a plane to Maine to be with her family, and the Centre closed its offices – for how long we did not know.

There was a frantic dash to bring home one of our PhD students, who was on fieldwork overseas, as countries began locking down. We managed to get him on one of the last flights out of the Philippines while avoiding giving him the bends – he’d been on a dive trip when the announcement came that Philippine airspace was about to close.

A couple of days later came the now‑famous Government address: “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”.

The first weeks of lockdown were a scramble, finding enough laptops and chargers for everyone, arranging chairs and equipment to be collected from the Knowledge Spa (our base at the time), and diving headfirst into online life.

We took crash courses in running Zoom meetings and webinars, and the struggle with Wi‑Fi was real. Our director sacrificed sleep to battle time zones and communicate with us from the US. We quickly got used to new phrases like “you’re on mute” and “sorry, my Wi‑Fi dropped out, can you say that again”.

But we also found creative ways to stay connected with weekly online coffee mornings, Centre meetings with fun activities (I distinctly remember dancing to Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5), breakout rooms, shared photographs, and lockdown stories on Teams. We reminisced about our last in‑person Centre gathering, a joyful ceilidh in St Erme for our 10 year anniversary, not knowing it would need to sustain us through months of isolation.

We organised online collections for colleagues, virtual cards and videos, and delivered bottles of whisky, flowers, and cakes all around Cornwall for those leaving the Centre – carefully socially distancing to avoid contamination!

And when restrictions finally eased, we met for walk‑and‑talks in different locations and welcomed new colleagues with socially distanced picnics and much needed chats in the warm summer sunshine.

Martine returned from maternity leave to the unenviable task of closing down our extra office space in the Health and Wellbeing Centre on the hospital site. How she managed that with a small baby in tow and only her partner to help I’ll never know!

Strangely, the thought of how we’d struggled to accommodate our staff in our previous generous pre-covid office space is hard to imagine now, with hybrid working here to stay. Yet, as tough as those times were, it was a wonderful affirmation of the Centre’s community spirit. I look back with pride at the way we all banded together to help each other through.

Martine:

My initial recollection of lockdown is a call from my line manager, Emma Bland, during my maternity leave. She explained that my final “Keeping in Touch Day” would take place from home and that, if they could work out the technology, they would try to call me on Zoom.

It all felt very unfamiliar at the time. Yet shortly afterwards, I was conducting my first online interview before meeting the successful candidate in a car park – in the middle of nowhere – to hand over a laptop from a safe distance.

I also remember listening to Ben Wheeler’s reflective seminar. He spoke about the last time he had worked from home and the rhythm he had found. His reflections were both inspiring and reassuring at a time when so much felt uncertain.

Slowly, as Ness describes, we found our own rhythm too, supporting one another through small connections while adapting to constantly changing restrictions and guidance for working in an NHS building.

As the world gradually reopened, it was strange to realise that colleagues I had once seen every day had not been seen in person for over a year.

Despite the challenges, the pandemic brought many positive changes to the way we work. It demonstrated that we could work flexibly and effectively from different locations, improved connectivity for remote colleagues, widened who we could recruit, and reduced the need for lengthy commutes and overseas travel.

At the same time, it is important not to overlook the difficulties many people experienced. For some colleagues, lockdown was an especially isolating time. The support of colleagues, the routine of daily life and even the simple change of scenery that came from going into the office were suddenly gone. One lasting lesson has been how much harder it can be to notice when someone is struggling, or to have open and honest conversations, through a screen.

COVID-19 brought about one of the most significant periods of change that many of us will ever experience and its impact continues to shape how we work, connect, live our daily lives and support one another.