London by Lockdown

In this episode we talk about what it's like to be in work, to be out of work, and what it’s like looking for work in a pandemic.

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I’m a workaholic.

In 2015 I forgot how to swallow.

Every time I ate, it felt like a bit of food lodged in my throat. It was intermittent at first; then it would happen a couple if times during a meal; then it was every time I swallowed, and no matter how much water I drank or how many times I cleared my throat, it felt like the food would get stuck. It didn’t matter how much I chewed, either. It felt like everything was squeezing shut. I started cooking soft foods, taking tiny mouthfuls, chewing a lot, and drinking water to push it down. I was scared I’d never eat properly again.

At the time I was working at the University of Queensland, and had three freelance gigs. I was also writing a grief memoir (about my mother’s death from cancer in 2013) for a Masterclass Program. I was working (paid & unpaid) seven days. I knew this was unsustainable, but I’d juggled creative and paid work before. And Shona and I devised an exit plan, and so many other writers and artists do this. But the words I was putting down in my memoir were heavy. (I didn’t know how heavy.) I was diagnosed with a hole in my heart and hypertension. In the middle of all this, two people I knew passed away, four days apart. I remember the inflection in ------’s voice on the phone when she told me ------- was gone. We’d been housemates for some years. Now, that’s a lifetime ago.

Surrounded by death, we flew to Melbourne to say goodbye. The sadness and hurt triggered grief, anxiety and guilt about mum. Back at home I continued working myself into the ground. It hit me a couple of months later, on a trip to Canberra for the Masterclass. When I ate I thought I was choking. I didn’t know what was happening, so I flew home early. I was exhausted.

I didn’t eat solid food for weeks. I lost 10kg. My short-term memory dissolved, I couldn’t sleep, my digestion stalled, I was edgy, I thought I was going to die from cancer. I took leave from work, and only just finished my freelance gigs. As for the memoir, I submitted the 10,000 words, but I shouldn’t have. At times I’d finish a paragraph and just start sobbing.

To get through, I went to counselling. To stay healthy I run 40km a week. To stay sane I work Monday–Friday, 9-5. Sometimes food feels like it’s not going down properly, but I’m usually tired or stressed. My memory came back, my sleep is ok, but I have to be careful with what I eat. And of course, in lockdown, there’s the temptation to work more and the guilt of not working, so I really have to stick to my 9-5 regime.

Thanks
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Background music, ‘Touching Moments’ by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
Background music, Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)
BBC SFX Archive
Justin Mullins SFX
London Soundsurvey (sound & audio maps)
Carolyn Pelling for her brilliant poem

Mental Health Resources
How to Access Mental Health Services (NHS site)
Mental Health Australia
Only Human Radio Show
Pink Therapy

AI voices (Amy & Brian)
Free Text to Speech

Find out more

Sex workers
SWARM: how UK sex workers set up and ran a hardship fund

Tate workers
The Tate workers strike
Video (protest outside the Tate)
Video (all out strike at Tate for jobs and culture)
Video (Tate United)

London’s bus drivers
London’s bus drivers fight for safer workplaces
853 Public Interest Journalism: facemasks are just the ticket for bus drivers
London’s cleaners big win against outsourcing

London’s cleaners fighting against outsourcing:
St Marys Hospital
NHS outsourcing (Guardian article)
You have to take action (Guardian article)

Goldsmiths University
The fight against racist redundancies

Overview of coronavirus-related deaths by occupation
Office for National Statistics

The ongoing campaign for justice for Belly Mujinga (including calls for a Public Inquest into the circumstances of her death and a Coronial Inquest).
Woman and Home (article)
Belly Mujinga Campaign
Bustle (article)

Health workers
Meenal from the Meenal’s World podcast (who is also a doctor) explains why she did a one-woman protest about the lack of PPE for health workers.
The Walthamstories podcast did a great interview with a hospital porter at Whipps Cross Hospital during the first wave of COVID-19.
This BBC article captures a lot of recent surveys and data from UK frontline health and social workers about their fears and concerns about working conditions.

Small business
‘How South Asian Corner Shop Culture Helped the UK Survive COVID 19’ (Gal-Dem article by Sana Noor Haq — Gal-Dem is an online and print publication committed to sharing perspectives from women and non-binary people of colour and is a cracking read)

Latin Village
Learn more about the 17-year struggle of traders in the Latin Village market and mutual aid hub in Seven Sisters. Their landlord, Transport for London, has shut traders out of the market completely during the COVID crisis.
Facebook
There’s no room for you here (Shado Magazine article)
Save Latin Village

Worker safety
The Independent Worker’s Union of Great Britain is calling for all government designated ‘key workers’ to have access to healthy and safe working conditions — including a right to PPE for Uber drivers and couriers. Find out more about their efforts to take the government to court.

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks 
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown

What’s it like to be twelve and in lockdown

In this short bonus episode our niece Kayla has recorded her reflections on the ways Covid-19 has impacted on her and her friends.

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We love everything about our nieces and nephew: their creativity, their questions, the songs they sing, the art they make... Every time we video call Tom and Sadie, Tom needs proof that if it’s day there, then it’s night here, and visa versa. Sadie has impeccable comedic timing for someone so young (she really does). And Kayla, who’s almost a teenager, loves, among other things, reading, writing and drawing. The artwork for this episode is hers. She’s a winter baby, and I met her a few hours after she was born — wrapped in a blanket and beanie. It’s hard to reconcile today’s independent 12-year-old with the tiny human who could hardly open her eyes back in 2008. I was on my way to live in Timor-Leste with Shona (she’d already left Australia to take up her new job) and didn’t know when I’d be back, so it was important to be there for those first hours, days and weeks of Kayla’s life. I’m not sure if humans do the same thing as some birds, but there’s an imprinting thing that happens where the babies imprint on a ‘suitable moving stimulus’ (ideally a parent bird). On the off chance humans do that as well, I wanted to be there. So, whether she likes it or not, Kayla’s stuck with me. Tom’s a runner and a climber, and Sadie’s into anything and everything her older brother is — she does not like to be left out, and fair call, too. The youngest is always pushing to be included. In saying that, they look after each other. We miss them all. Even in Australia, where we lived, Meanjin (Brisbane), is a long way from Tom and Sadie in Naarm (Melbourne), and from Kayla in Canberra, so we don’t always see them as much as we’d like. Being so far from home at the moment with so few options to return in the near future, it’s the video calls and photos bringing us regular updates on loose teeth, artworks, science experiments, cricket, ‘Bluey’, skiing, books, cubby houses, backgammon, trampoline-ing, lego, grazed knees, star wars, afl, and butterfly wings that keeps us going.

Thanks
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Background music, ‘Touching Moments’ by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
Background music, Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)

If Lockdown’s Getting You Down
How to Access Mental Health Services (NHS site)
Mental Health Australia
Only Human Radio Show
Pink Therapy

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks 
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown

This episode uncovers lost rivers, a smelly ogre and a magical reawakening.

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Once upon a time there was a river...
I love rivers. The Birrarung (Yarra) in Naarm (Melbourne); the Murrumbidgee skirting Canberra; how the Maiwar (Brisbane River) psychologically and spiritually dominates the city of Meanjin (Brisbane) like no other river I’ve encountered; the powerful convergence of the Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan) and Djarlgarra (Canning) rivers in Mooro, Goomap (Perth); the contradiction that is the Thames (I’ve still not spent any time with it); and the lost River Peck, a tributary that gives its name to Peckham, a neighbourhood to the south west of Telegraph Hill (which sits at the northern tip of what was once the Great North Wood).

Once upon a time there was a river...
The story of Australia, the driest inhabited continent, begins and ends with water. The original colony site, Kudgee (Botany Bay), didn’t have fresh water, so another site “with a run of water through a very thick wood” was found at Warrane (Sydney Cove). This was the “Tank Stream” (named after tanks cut into the sides of the bedrock to capture and store water). As the colony’s main water source, it was so fouled by the colonsiers that they soon had to cart water in from a nearby wetland. When that ran dry, they ventured further west on the promise of a “Rio Grande” or “Mississippi”, and on the back of the myth of an illusive inland sea (a tale for another time). Today the Tank Stream is lost under the streets of Cadi, Djubuguli (Sydney). I heard this growing up, but didn’t know England had a rap sheet as long as your leg. After ruining London’s streams, brooks and creeks they travelled to the other side of the globe only to repeat their mistakes.

Once upon a time there was a river...
The River Peck is mostly underground now; one of dozens of tributaries whose waters were redirected into the shit-carrying sewers. Here and there, though, before it hits the pipes, The Peck pops up to remind us: the brook in Peckham/Rye Common; a shallow depression running alongside East Dulwich Road; a bubbling spring in a basement, which is then pumped back into the river system; or a stream through the cellar of a pub. Where Shona grew up on the outskirts of Naarm the local oval was originally a small overflow wetland for Brushy Creek, before the creek was diverted and sent underground. Now it runs under the oval, which explains why the grass remains lush, even in the heat of summer, and why, on any given evening, birds flock there to feed.

Once upon a time there was a river...
Our rivers are never completely lost.

Music & SFX
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Background music, ‘Touching Moments’ by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
Background music, Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)
BBC SFX Archive

If Lockdown’s Getting You Down
How to Access Mental Health Services (NHS site)
Mental Health Australia
Only Human Radio Show
Pink Therapy

Websites & Articles
London’s Lost Rivers by Paul Talling
London is a Forest by Paul Wood
Great North Wood
The Lambeth Cholera Outbreak (1848-49) by Amanda J Thomas
Hollie McNish; Instagram & Twitter: @holliepoetry
Ben Okri
Brendan Kennelly
Forest Schools Association
BugLife
Tales of the Thames (Guardian)
Peckham/Rye Common
Pump Shutdown Stops London Cholera Outbreak, 1854 (Wired)

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown

From my home to yours.

In this episode author, travel podcaster and poet Maame Blue drops by to chat about London, Naarm (Melbourne), travel and... oh yeah, her debut novel "Bad Love" (Jacaranda Books).

"I’m not a romantic. I don’t know how to tell those kinds of stories, the ones filled with magic and laughter and a purple hue. Romance has never connected with me in that way. But love — hard, bad, rough love — well, I could speak on that all day." — Maame Blue "Bad Love", 2020

From the start, nothing about Maame Blue’s first novel "Bad Love" is what it seems. Even Dapo Adeola’s cover design hints at an underlying chaos that’s at odds with the cover’s gentle beauty. "Bad Love" is a detailed search for belonging; a love letter to a London that’s far from perfect; and an exploration of faded and unconscious decisions, half-thoughts and shard-words — all those things never said. It follows Ekuah, a young Ghanian-Londoner in her 20s as she navigates and dissects all of love’s permutations: hard, bad, rough, straight, queer — and everything in between. Lyrical where it needs to be, playful when it wants to be, and truth telling when it has to be, "Bad Love" is a complete rendering. I found myself fretting, cheering, and caring about every character: Dee and Jay, Ekuah’s loves; Amelia, Vio; Ekuah’s parents. There is heartbreak here, it’s not all hugs and puppies, but the power of this novel comes from Maame’s agile writing consistently defying expectation. So the power isn’t immediately obvious. Drawn from personal notes on relationships, experienced and observed, Maame’s quality as a storyteller lies in her caring and tender descriptions of every aspect of so-called everyday life. There’s something extraordinary in all our everydays, isn’t there? In this way "Bad Love" is not about, as the potentially misleading title suggests, a particular type of Love, a specific Relationship, or even one explicit incident of "Bad Love" — as I said at the start, nothing about the novel is what it seems. Without giving away any spoilers, "Bad Love" is a celebration of all the constituent talus and scree (both the good and the bad) that make up love; and it’s about how love’s riffles and glides (again, both good and bad) make their way inside us over the years, and, if we’re open to it, teach us how to love deeply.

Information & Contacts
Maame Blue
Jacaranda Books
Headscarves and Carry-Ons
Dapo Adeola (illustrator & designer)
Jacaranda Books August 3 Instagram Live Event: #twentyin2020

Thanks
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Background music, ‘Touching Moments’ by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
Background music, Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)

If Lockdown is Getting You Down
How to Access Mental Health Services (NHS site)
Mental Health Australia
Only Human Radio Show
Pink Therapy

Websites & Articles
Australia After the Bushfires (Guardian)
The Goats of the Great Orme Have an Important Coronavirus Message (Wired)
Book Brunch (an interview with Maame Blue)

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks 
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available: linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown

How much Iso birthday fun can two people have?

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I arrived four weeks early: induced, tiny, underfed. My ‘origin story’, according to my parents: when the doctors heard my heartbeat weakening, they induced; once born, they used tissue-sized nappies. Details are thin on the ground, but I’m the eldest, so I imagine my parents were really stressed and probably didn’t have all the information themselves. From what I can gather, the placenta wasn’t working so well (when this happens growth slows to maintain essential organs: brain, heart, kidneys). The placenta transfers nutrients and oxygen from mum to bub. Our friend Sally, a midwife, explained it to me this way: ‘Placenta is like an oxygen tank, and if it stops working it’s very hard to survive.’ If doctors see a placenta malfunctioning it’s often better to deal with the challenges of prematurity (immature organs that might not work perfectly) than a fully defective placenta. Sally again: ‘You’d rather be in a leaky boat than underwater with a faulty tank’. Having said that, being premature, even today, holds risks, but here I am 47 years on. And since I’ve been old enough to wag school I’ve taken my birthday off. I try to enjoy exactly where I am, but that’s not always easy.

We lost mum the year I turned 40. My family crammed into a hospital room with crappy blue curtains and catchpenny furniture, and sat around my tiny disappearing mum. What I remember, though, is when she ate half a piece of my birthday cake, the only solid food she’d eaten in weeks, and smiled. She did that for us. I found it difficult to find light in my birthday afterwards, although recently Shona and I created a tradition of going to Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island) each year. So maybe losing and then finding that light on that beautiful island helped us to reconfigure 2020’s birthday — not that any of us have a choice. It wasn’t without its problems, but we had a good day.

We all know the pandemic sucks, and I’m sure you have similar touch-and-go birth stories, but if you add up our childhood accidents, the stupid chances we take in our teens and 20s, and the random-ness that can strike any time, stopping one day a year to look about, even now — maybe especially now — feels right.

Thanks
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Background music, ‘Touching Moments’ by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
Background music, Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)

Information
The History of Mary Prince
The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano and Olaudah Equiano
Narrative of the Enslavement of Ottobah Cugoano

If Lockdown is Getting You Down
How to Access Mental Health Services (NHS site)
Mental Health Australia
Pink Therapy
Only Human Radio Show

Websites & Articles
Resurrection Myths by Marcus Westbury
Coronet Inside Out by Ben Okri (Shona played me this poem on my birthday)
Isolation Song Contest After being randomly assigned a country, each comedy act had one week to compose an entry. The contest has so far raised almost £30,000 for The Trussell Trust, Crisis and Refuge.
The City of London’s Wild Heart
How Rebel Botanists are Using Graffiti to Name Forgotten Flora
Country Diary: preening avocets attract attention

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks 
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown

In this episode we see if Craig can make a new friend during lockdown.

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Between mid 1990 and early 1991 I had a recurring dream (Grades 11 & 12 at Lake Ginninderra College). I’m sitting in the shallows of a lake... I’m unnerved because a near drowning a few years earlier means I don’t swim. Thunder, lighting and wind convulse the water into a wave that propels me from the land. I’m lucid, but can’t control the dream. In a second, day is now night, I’m at the opposite shore at a bonfire party of friends (current, future, past, lost). I’m greeted heartily as I make my way to warm near the fire. I know them all, but recognise none.
A friend hands me a glass.
I scan the crowd over his shoulder.
‘We lost her at the beginning.’
‘Where have you all come from?’ I ask, but wake before he answers.
In the first month of 1991 a friend tragically drowns while swimming in Lake Ginninderra. I’ve not dreamt that dream since.

My 2020 dream occurs the week I’m flying to London, and is set at Lake Ginninderra College. I’m speaking to a friend, known but unrecognised, when one of his mates steals my wallet. Despite knowing the culprit, I pretend to canvass the whole school. My friend’s in a gang, so when I get to their hangout, everyone, except my friend, crowds me until I leave. I repeat the process — dreams within dreams? — until, in time, I find my friend alone. We search the place and discover every artefact that’s ever been stolen at the school, collated and stored. I wake before I find my wallet. Within a month of arriving in London the world is locked down. I’ve not had any ‘covid dreams’ since.

These two premonitory dreams — thirty years apart — are indelible. I have counter-intuitive relief. Sure we have no idea about the virus’ long-term implications, health or otherwise, but the world’s frame has never really made sense to me, so now that the system’s fragilities are so obviously laid bare, we see what we’re up against, and we know how to win: radical empathy, compassion, connection and friendship.

Thanks
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Background music, ‘Touching Moments’ by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
Background music, Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)
BBC SFX Archive
Justin Mullins

Information & contacts for the people and organisations featured in this episode
Speaking Volumes
Jay Bernard
London Renters Union
Mutual Aid London
Radical Empathy Podcast
Hill Talk Facebook: @hilltalkshow
Waltham Stories
Maame Blue Writes and Headscaves and Carry-ons available on Spotify

Websites & Articles
I Dream of Covid
Wired

If Lockdown is Getting You Down
How to Access Mental Health Services (NHS site)
Mental Health Australia
Only Human Radio Show

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks 
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown

In this episode we turn our attention to those everyday sounds we often overlook: the creaks, the squeaks, the buzzes and the pops that we build our daily soundtracks around without necessarily noticing.

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Whenever travelling in a new place it’s easy for our attention to be hijacked by the grandiose: the British Museum, Tower of London, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge. End to end, our flat is a modest 32 footsteps. At first, when we paused to listen closer, all we heard were random, almost opaque, individual noises, but as we refocussed our attention — maybe as we plodded into lockdown, maybe as we fell into restlessness and insomnia, maybe as the world we knew ground to a stop — patterns of composition, harmony and story took shape. And it was the familiarity of these stories that comforted me, despite having never listened to them before. I found a grounded counterpoint in an emerging world that isn’t mine (or yours, for that matter — it is too much to say here it’s now the virus’s). For me, lockdown is like sleepwalking though a restless Dream-Wake hybrid world punctuated by fatigue, insomnia and curious dreams that, dull at their edges and obtuse and fractured, create No Time. And I’m not alone, lockdown has spawned a world-wide epidemic of weird, mysterious and self-contradictory dreams.

In this soundscape, we explore, and in part decipher, the mental and physical landscapes of London during lockdown. Through the intricacies and half-spaces of a recurring dream about leaving a house — any house, my house, your house — we attempt to uncover the overlooked stories of our homes.

Thanks
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Background music, Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)
Justin Mullins for SFX
BBC SFX Archives
London Improvisers Orchestra (LIO Bandcamp page)
Facebook:@londonimprovisersorchestra
Sound Design at Greenwich blog
Facebook:@SoundGreenwich

Articles
Coronavirus has created an epidemic of weird dreams
Why is Ryanair taking to the skies when there’s nowhere to fly?
Transition Events (excerpt from my novel set in a hybrid Sleep­–Wake world where nothing is as it seems)

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks 
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown

In this episode we learn about the place we now call home.

“In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”

So eloquent is the opening to Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (one of my all-time favourite novels), that those three sentences, drifting as they do between histories and worlds, truths and fictions, contain all the confusion, lyricism and complexity of a full-blown biblia sacra. The simple enormity of it: how one thing is in fact many. My sister gave me a copy for my 21st and it’s travelled with me across the globe, a beautiful old dog-eared and fox-blotched thing. In it Okri asks whose stories should we believe: those told by people with self-proclaimed authority, or those we tell each other? Our local histories birth and sustain our homes, the places we live: material, self evident and layered; our daily battles prove we’re not as fragile as maybe we imagine — despite logical misgivings and insecurities about the world outside; and our shared stories branch out to the whole world, continuing further than one individual, beyond each of us, not limited to one time or place.

Join us as we walk the streets of our Borough, learning about its fearless history (the ‘Battle of Lewisham’, the tragic New Cross Road Fire and how the New Cross Library was saved) and discover the day-to-day actions of the people keeping us safe, connected and sane during lockdown (mutual aid groups, Telegraph Hill Radio, the Doorstep Disco). We acknowledge everyone who keeps the stories of SE14 alive.

Thanks to Jay, Vedina & Unregistered Master Builder for letting us use their audio
Jay Bernard: www.jaybernard.co.uk
Jay’s work can also be found at Speaking Volumes.
Vedina Rose: www.vedinarosemusic.com
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Background music, ‘Touching Moments’ by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
Background music, Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)

Not in the mood for anything too heavy? Here are some cool London links we’ve come across
Bookcase Credibility: Twitter @BCredibility and Instagram #bookcase
Telegraph Hill Radio (enjoy the ‘doorstep disco’)
Waltham Stories Podcast
Black History Month
London Community Video Archive
Great women you should know about 

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks 
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown

In this episode your intrepid lockdown travellers tackle the big food questions.

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What are Romanesco broccoli and celeriac and what do you do with them?
What’s the great “jollof rice controversy”?
How hot is too hot for a vindaloo?
Shouldn’t we all eat cheese scones every day?
Are vegetarian Scotch eggs worth it?

Thanks
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Touching Moments by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)
BBC SFX Archive

Information & Websites
UK Landworkers Alliance.

For the ‘World Famous London by Lockdown Cook Off’ Recipes
Vegetarian Vindaloo
Cheese Scones
Jollof Rice (it’s so good we included two links): here and here
Vegetarian Scotch Eggs

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks 
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown

In this episode we reflect on a confusing couple of weeks and try to make sense of events that almost don't make any sense at all.

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During February and March we were house hunting. My memories of those confused weeks are thin — I’d just arrived from the other side of the world, and as much as I search for a linear and coherent story, none exists. I remember having to shake off claustrophobic thoughts before going into potential homes for house interviews; the intricate combinations of smell and light and sound; and the time before physical distancing. Our precautions came with caveats and weight: we didn’t shake hands, we used hand sanitiser, we Zoomed if we could. I flinched at every cough. As potential housemates, we discussed move-in dates, rent and bills, all without hashing out what ‘our house’ might look like if we, strangers, were plunged into indefinite 24/7 lockdown, except that’s one thing we needed to discuss. We all spoke as if coronavirus was happening to characters in other people’s dreams. But Shona and I had a hard move-out date, the lockdown’s bottlenecks had created myriad uncertainties, and the weeks were slipping away, so we increased our budget; began looking further afield, despite loving Leytonstone; and, somewhat reluctantly, decided no housemates. We also sent a ‘hail Mary’ email to Shona’s colleagues (when all bets are off …). A friend of a friend had a flat in south London. Four days later, moving day, March 24, Day 1 of lockdown: the removalists arrived three hours late, then we took an uneasy Tube trip across town to a part of London we’d never visited, holding an unsigned contract with landlords we’d never met, to move into a flat we’d never seen.

Thanks
Opening & Closing Credits by Unregistered Master Builder
Touching Moments by Ketsa (Free Music Archive)
Markus J Buehler Viral Counterpoint of the Coronavirus Spike Protein (2019-nCoV)

If Lockdown is Getting You Down
How to Access Mental Health Services (NHS site)
Mental Health Australia
Only Human Radio Show
Pink Therapy

Contact
Facebook: @CraigsAudioWorks 
Twitter & Instagram: @LDNbylockdown
Available linktr.ee/LondonbyLockdown