We’re now appreciating the value of all the local stuff we’ve lost over the years, infrastructure that was needed when people couldn’t or wouldn’t travel. Like now. Cottage hospitals, village shops, village bobbies, baker’s ovens and neighbours whose names you know. There are still, however, many local trust funds, set up long ago ‘to relieve the poor of the village’. The trustees spend a lot of time these days looking for poor to relieve. Now’s the time, I’d say, for them to think laterally and go into action; before many are beyond relief.
“The working-from-home illusion fades”
Are workers working from home more or less productive than those catching the 7.02am to London Bridge every day? ‘Probably sitting at home in their bleedin’ jim-jams’, said someone recently of a less-than-helpful call centre employee, the assumption being that, were they surrounded by colleagues and with a manager cracking the whip, he or she would have sorted his energy bill more efficiently.
