WORKING FROM HOME: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Isolation is the major component of the writerly life. Lock yourself in a room and don’t come out until you’ve finished a bunch of words. Empty that bladder. Go back to the room and write another bunch of words. And so on.

   What advice do I have for working from home? Wear fucking clothes, for fuck’s sake. What the fuck is wrong with you?! Suddenly you are forced to work from home and you decide to simply not get dressed? Good luck with that if a fire breaks out.

   If you aren’t getting dressed, face it, you’re not climbing out of bed.

   I’ve talked about Deep Vein Thrombosis before. Take breaks. Empty your bladder. Check the fridge. Empty the bins. Tidy shit up. Go back to locking yourself in a room and typing. But remember to unlock that door and take hot things out of the oven from time to time.

   When this shit gets real and you realise you’ve been working from home for a vast three days, remember each day. Obviously, a prompt like the pick-up day for the bins, yes, that’ll help remind you of the day, the date, the month, the year, and possibly the century.

   This is a great time to discover how monotonous your diet is. The daily pizza has to go. Make it the Monday pizza. Then you know it’s Monday. On Tuesday, gargle gravel. Wednesday, eat wet cement. Thursday, consume oil boiled in 1862 – quite a good year for oil. Friday, treat yourself to dry cement and cheapo crisps.

   Vary your dietary routine by the day. Don’t actually eat cement – it is considered a luxury in time of need, and people will look upon you with disdain when sending Tweets about your decadence.

   So. Working from home, do the actual work. Wear clothes. Take breaks. Vary your diet. Arrange tasks by the day of the week. And don’t complain. Or, at least, don’t complain to me.

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You’d think I’d knuckle down and read more books. But I noticed I have a stack of unwatched films there, and it’s those that I am slowly chewing my way through.

   The reality is that…during the Coronavirus period (anywhere from six months all the way up to the end of space-time as we like to think we know it)…like everyone else, I must spend hours on assorted anti-virus precautions…and that means shopping while avoiding people. Avoiding people like the cliché. It means…

   Firing my crossbow at joggers who are willing to run for miles – even if they aren’t willing to run six feet out of their way to avoid you.

   Throwing broken glass in front of speed-freaks on the empty roads. Hey, speed-freak. You aren’t rushing to an appointment. There’s no traffic to hold you back. Slow the fuck down.

   Straight-up taking a high-powered rifle to cyclists who’ve forgotten what a BELL is for. It’s to bring out your dead. Avoid colliding with the ONE person on the path by using your bell as you engage in stealth mode, at speed, directly behind me.

   Muttering internally at dog-walkers who should just let their dogs shit out the back door. (I realise this Scottish expression can be read quite differently. And that amuses me greatly.)

   Aiming a catapult at anyone who stops to stare at a phone while listening to headphones when out and about on essential business. Your business may indeed be essential. But you are blocking the path.

   Lopping the heads off gran and grandpa with my handy scythe when gran and grandpa just pop over on a visit and spend half an hour at the garden gate saying goodbye and breathing over too-close relatives. I don’t need to wield my scythe here. The virus will do my work for me.

   I think of Brad Chutney and Avarice Kumquat Jones the III (and Last), filmed on a Florida beach what feels like a million years ago, and there’s a hint of regret that Charlton Heston is dead. Otherwise he’d be on Liberty Island, ranting at clouds.

   We are all Charlton Heston in whatever apocalypse this is. The strength of the apocalypse is measured in direct relation to the people and their patent inability to gauge how much shit drops out of the average human backside over the course of a week.

   It’s the Toiletrollapocalypse: Attack of the Hoarders. With any justice, a Dino De Laurentiis movie. Filmed in Sensurround rather than Smell-O-Vision.

   We are all Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. Without the satchel charges. Even in that apocalypse, Heston manages to dress for dinner on whatever day of the week he thinks it is.

   I’m guessing he spent ages upgrading his townhouse into a fortress. So far, I’ve resisted the urge to perform any DIY improvements. Going by the sounds of construction out there in the streets, a world of people decided to finally get around to that building project.

   Why that building project sounds like the construction of another house, I can’t fathom. Heading out on my essential hunting trips, I’ve noticed gardens are far neater of a sudden. And the birds seem bolder. I can be forgiven for thinking I’ve wandered into a Draughty du Maurier story.

   These are uncertain times. As opposed to what? The not-so-certain certain times preceding these uncertain times? We are living in an unprecedented era. No, we’re not. There is precedent. Influenza pandemic, 1918.

   I’ll grant that we live in the time of Twitter. And Twitter has failed us badly, with the hashtags for CORLEONEVIRUS, CORNONTHECOBVIRUS AND CORONAVIRUSVIRUS. The hashtag WRITINGCOMMUNITY suffered for a good while as the WRITINGCOMNUNITY. So it’s not all virus-related. I made some of these up.

   What would I like to see, in response to the virus? In news conferences, I’d like to see the person at the furthest lectern walk into the room first without having to bypass the person who takes the central lectern. No, that’s a lie.

   I want to see news conferences handled from different locations, with images of people beamed in. We don’t want to see people telling us to stay distant and reduce infection if these people are going to lick their fingers a microsecond later, before gripping the lectern’s edges.

   No, we don’t want cosy government ministers from 1955 popping along to tell us it’s all a jolly wheeze. Poor choice of phrasing, thrown in at the last gasp. What we need is a doomsayer spouting fire and brimstone from the pulpit – behind a large glass screen, of course.

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Have I missed anything? Yes, the cliché. I used to adore the cliché. It always made me laugh. Any sort of story featuring an apocalypse with characters deciding to…

   Flee to Scotland for safety.

   (Laughs heartily for fifteen minutes.)

   Zombie invasion? We should drive to my auntie’s place…in Scotland. Giant lizard wading ashore at Harryhausen Bay? Y’know, we could always try our luck in Scotland. Nuclear war? Why don’t we head to the radioactive slagheap that constitutes what is left of Scotland?

   No one, in their right fucking minds, ever flees to Scotland – certainly not to the Highlands. Have you ever been in the Highlands? I’ve been to the Highlands, and I am here to tell you…there’s fucking nothing up there. There’s one hospital with one nurse and half a doctor – she does postal deliveries 50% of the time.

   The medical system in the Highlands is overwhelmed by three tourists rocking up to Accident & Emergency for midgie bites. And that’s during the season. Off-season, the hospital is a bothy. And a cramped one, at that.

   Yet Scotland made the so-called news for tales of people fleeing to the Highlands to self-isolate. Great idea. The Highlands, and we won’t forget the Islands in this, are apocalyptic at the best of times. Apocalyptic and apoplectic. People in the Highlands mortgage their houses to pay for petrol and postage. It isn’t even first class postage.

   Aye, there’s a scarlet puffed-cheek form of rage in the Highlands and Islands when it comes to price-gouging the local yokels. Flee, by all means, to places that are wild and lonely and overpriced and devoid of the regular emergency service infrastructure you’ve taken for granted in the crowded city you bugged out of.

   But, with the best will in the world, don’t expect any fucking sympathy. I’ve said it before, and I’ll happily type it again. There’s nothing in the Highlands but scenery. Ah, but what scenery, though. The visual delights of the Highlands, in all their harshness, raise the spirits. Have a reason to be there, or else don’t be there at all.

   The people who are there live with the fragility of the economy. Then you come alang, in yer camper van, wi’ yer erse haulf-oot yer breeks, trailing yer virus particles in yer wake an’ up baith sleeves. Aye, ye hae the luik o’ a Cam’ell aboot ye. Awa’ hame, ye scunners.

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Brad Chutney and Avarice Kumquat Jones the III (and Last) are dead, alas. Sadly missed. But not by me. Leave the house to hunt for supplies. Stay home, free of disease, and spare the health system an absolute fucking doing. Advice we must repeat at hourly fucking intervals, it seems.