It is Thursday (23 April, but how can you tell?) and the sun is shining. I wake at about 9am, which is truly shocking for me. I am usually up before 7am, frequently with a view to being on a train to Biggleswade in short order. The extra improved sleep, during what would have been a commute, is a welcome silver lining to the lockdown cloud. And I am learning to book in calls to start late morning.
I don some rather disreputable shorts and jump on the cross-trainer for 18 minutes. It nearly kills me, but it is 18 minutes more than I was doing before, so I hang onto that. Then ‘imself makes me a tomato omelette and a lovely fresh cup of coffee. We have two of our adult children back with us (boomerang kids!). Neither of them are up yet but I can’t get too exasperated. Everybody is making an enormous effort to be accommodating. And I feel bad for them – you couldn’t have kept me in for even one night when I was in my early twenties.
Like most folk, I guess, my new working day starts with responding to e-mails. UKR is currently piloting a planning application through our local authority, so there’s a bit of discussion about how to do that remotely.
It is not hugely controversial, in that we already have a consent for the scheme. We are merely tidying up the access points with a view to better connectivity for the secondary school and including – rather excitingly – working on a new alternative future transport system.
We have long had an aspiration to sort out new ways of moving people around our market town and we take the view that the Covid-19 crisis presents an opportunity for something of a reset. The current thinking is autonomous pods, a bit like the ones at Heathrow T5. This new system will form a flagship project for our Economic Recovery Plan for Biggleswade and we get super aerated about all of this.
Having sorted out my in-tray, my first call is to Gill Marshall, UKR head of stakeholder engagement. We plan the day and sort out messaging etc for the likes of the Biggleswade Chronicle, which is doing a cracking job keeping the residents informed during the crisis.
We are currently embarked on a community consultation exercise for our planning application. There are quite a few challenges in trying to do this via the website and with phone calls. But Gill is doing an excellent job, and as we have consulted on what is pretty much the same scheme with our community for 10 weeks already, we are not turning up many surprises.
One new thing is people asking why we have chosen such an unfortunate time to lodge a planning application. To which our response is that we certainly didn’t do it on purpose, our application has been developing over the past nine months.
Lunch is late as we all started a bit late, about 2pm, and then I go out into our garden to read The Times and get a bit of fresh air in the sun. We are lucky to live in a suburban house with a garden. I feel for people in flats, particularly those with children.
Then there are more calls. First with the UKR professional team on updating the design brief to reflect the new access roads. And then more interesting calls with local council members. We always try to work closely with local elected representatives. I recently got internal sign off to build a splash park in the town as a stand-alone project, separate from the main UKR scheme. That was partly as a signal of our helping to kick-start the recovery when the time is right. So I am liaising closely with local elected representatives, who are introducing me to their equivalent team in Dunstable, who have delivered a splash park recently. Another part of the recovery programme is that UKR has bought two pubs in Biggleswade town centre which are to be repurposed and I update our councillors on our recent discussions with planning officers.
Lockdown has been a great time for writing. For the past year I have been working with Peter Bill on Broken Homes, our book about the housing crisis. He’d made me promise to get the first draft complete by Easter, so the first few days on lockdown were totally manic – 10-hour stints. Things have calmed down a bit now, but there’s still stuff to do. I’m doing some work on the acknowledgments this afternoon.
Our book may have become very topical: it describes UKR’s mission to build bigger homes, 25% bigger than the usual space standards, in a development emerging from a country park – and these are things which seem to have become more important during this crisis.
Roast chicken at 7pm and then it’s time for “Clap For Carers”, which has turned into THE weekly event in our household. We all go out into the street and join the collective applause. It is heartfelt, and it is celebratory. And then, for some reason, it is Happy Hour, with the ritual opening of a bottle of Sicilian fizz, from a case sent by my business partner. The festivities begin. Three games of Scrabble en famille, followed by two episodes of The West Wing.
Life could be worse.
