My name is Lynette Macnicol and I grew up on a farm 20km east of Invercargill between Dacre and Mabel Bush. I went to Woodlands School and Southland Girls’ High School before studying Microbiology for four years at Otago University. I spent the decade after university alternating between a couple of years in New Zealand and a couple of years somewhere else, but since 2007 I have been based in the United Kingdom. I’m currently living in Leighton Buzzard and working in Milton Keynes, about 40 miles north of London.

I don’t think I need to explain too much about what it is like living in lockdown conditions – you’ve been there and done that. In the UK we should only leave the house for essential food, medicine or an hour of exercise, or to go to work if we are allowed to. My industry has been identified as essential, so I am still working. I even have a kind of “access all areas” letter from my work to carry in case of being stopped and questioned about my journey by the police. I hope I never have to show it to anyone though, because for a start it’s a bit cringey to pull out a letter saying it is critical you go to work in these times when you are not a healthcare professional or someone who can provide people with food. But secondly it is the word critical itself – in this four paragraph letter it appears three times, spelt differently on each occasion. In the middle of the page, underlined to emphasise its point, the bearer of this letter is described as “mission critcal”.  

Technically I could work from home most of the time, but as we have a number of people who are having to stay away for the duration due to childcare or health issues, I was asked to come in to ensure we have enough senior staff on site. This is fine by me, because my flatmate is working from home and has commandeered the dining table meaning when I do work from home I am doing it mostly from my bed. Sometimes in it, sometimes on it. Sometimes bathed, sometimes dressed. And always in close (too close) proximity to a lot of snacks. It is definitely better for me to have to leave the house. And the commute – I can’t describe what a delight it is! It takes around a third of the time it used to take, and on the occasions when I have made it in to work without having to stop at a single roundabout (there are 12) I have pulled into the carpark feeling invincible. That generally wears off pretty quickly – sometimes before I’ve finished walking across site to the lab – but it’s a nice start to the day. 

We have of course introduced measures at work to mitigate the risks of sharing the same space. We have split the teams so that there are as few people in the labs at any one time as possible, and have turned a meeting room into an extra tea room so there is enough space at break times, but it can still be hard to maintain the distance in the other common spaces. All the desks and computers have wipes for decontamination before use and we all have our own bottle of hand sanitiser – or at least, it looks like hand sanitiser but we can’t be sure because the label is in Chinese. Hygiene measures are nothing new to microbiologists, we are constantly decontaminating our work surfaces and didn’t have to learn how to wash our hands in a new way because that’s how we should wash our hands at work anyway. We also know how to take off and dispose of gloves without contaminating our hands or anything else that touches the disposed gloves – I have seen so many people walk out of the supermarket undoing all the good work they have just done. 

In the UK, facemasks have not been recommended as there really is no evidence that they do much in the defence against coronavirus beyond making your face hot. However, our head office is in the States and the CDC has recommended their use, so now all of our sites globally are required to implement mandatory use of facemasks from tomorrow. I have somehow found myself in the position of Mask Monitor for our department so I came into work on Saturday to sort them all. Because we have biohazards in the lab, we can’t wear those masks outside the lab so need three sets each in their own paper bag. One bag will hold the mask you have been wearing in the lab (but you will throw out and replace after four hours of use), one will hold the general use one that you wear for every other activity on site (four-hour rule also applies), and the other holds the rest of your stock for the week. It will take quite a while for people to get used to remembering to carry their general use bag with them down to the lab, and to take the lab mask off when they leave. I can guarantee that at least one person will get to the end of the week having used only one mask the whole time. To be honest, it will probably be me. It’s just too complex, and I have “mission critcal” things on my mind, and usually other stuff in my hands.

We do not have any face-to-face meetings anymore, even with people in our own building, but use Webex instead. Before lockdown, the company banned travel so I had the dubious pleasure of attending a five-day training course for a piece of software over Webex, when I should have been in the Netherlands. And the follow-up to that training should have been a series of workshops at another of our European sites. These have been replaced with four-hour Webexes from 12pm to 4pm every day in April. And with every other meeting being held on Webex, it has been a painful month. I’m talking mentally and physically – my back is a mess from not having the chance to get up and walk to another building between meetings. However, one thing I will really miss when this is over will be the ability to mute myself during meetings in order to express any urgent thoughts about the topic (or perhaps the speaker) without shocking the other participants with the strength of my opinion or the colour of my language. Some days that mute button must feel like a therapist.

We have been very fortunate on site that we have not had any colleagues contract COVID-19, but sadly one of my teammates lost her uncle to it after a very short and horrible illness. Even though we were already in the first week of lockdown at that point, it was only then that this really started feeling real, and close. The number of cases and deaths started to rise very rapidly and there didn’t seem to be any stopping it, but we have reached a point now where it seems to be slowing down, where it seems that the measures are working, where it seems that we might be allowed to drive to another town before the end of the summer. But by now we have already had 20,000 deaths in the hospitals, and many thousands more in care facilities like rest homes which are not included in the daily totals. It really does feel like much of this could have been avoided.  

The government here were slow to act, inconsistent in approach, and vague in their communications. At the end of January, the first two cases were identified in the UK. They were Chinese nationals, so everyone getting off the relief flights from China entered a fortnight of enforced quarantine at hotels around the country. But by the start of March, when the virus was well established in mainland Europe, there were no restrictions put on the movements of the people returning from their ski holidays in Italy or “winter sun” breaks in Spain. If the government had taken (what I would call the “obvious”) measure of treating the returning passengers from everywhere else the way they treated those from China I think our current picture would look very different. Throughout this period the messages they were giving out tended towards vague and confusing. Stay at home, said Boris, then admitted he was planning to visit his mother on Mothers’ Day. Keep your distance, said Boris, then admitted he’d been visiting hospitals and shaking everybody’s hands. I guess we all know now what happens to someone who goes around doing that sort of thing during a pandemic.

We envy you, you know. Not just my UK-based Kiwi friends, but other Brits who have an eye on what is happening around the world. We don’t know what the exit strategy for this is, there doesn’t seem to be a clear plan – although that’s par for the course with this government (Brexit, anyone?). We know we are in these conditions for a least another couple of weeks but have no idea what the next phase will look like. You’re in level 4, you know what that means. You’ll be moving to level 3 soon, you have a date for it and you also know what it means. We are in the dark. Please do be aware of how fortunate you are in New Zealand to have a brave and empathetic leader, who has communicated clearly and with compassion throughout. Jacinda is regarded with awe by the citizens of many other nations, who have suffered in the absence of this level of leadership – decisive and prescriptive whilst remaining human and caring. Although to give Boris his due, he has never (publicly, at least) posited that the idea of injecting people with disinfectants was one worth looking into. 

And speaking of fortunate, I am fully aware of how lucky I am in this situation. My daily life has barely changed – I still have a structure to my day, I get to leave the house, I engage daily with multiple non-virtual humans that I don’t live with. I sneakily have two lots of exercise a day that nobody will find out about because they happen in different places. Do not tell anyone, I do not want to be publicly shamed or arrested. At lunchtime I walk from work around the completely deserted river/canal/lakeside pathways of this mostly non-residential part of Milton Keynes, and in the evening I walk around the woods by my house which are gloriously laden with bluebells just now. I’ve been suffering from chronic indecision and procrastination meaning I hadn’t booked any holidays yet, so I have none of the disappointment of a cancelled adventure. I only have one regular engagement during the week which is my photography club, and they have almost seamlessly migrated to Zoom for meetings, with only one week of downtime. The weekends are much harder now that the weather is nice, but I can do sitting around reading quite happily. Sure I can’t see my friends (except those I work with), but as an ex-pat I am in a constant state of not being able to see my friends and family anyway so this is just a minor and temporary extension to that. 

But most of all, I have an income and job security, and short of actually falling ill with the virus, I am likely to come out the other end of this pretty much unscathed. I feel for all of those who are having to deal with unthinkable uncertainty, those who have lost jobs or had to close their businesses, the elderly and those with underlying health conditions which must amplify the anxiety the rest of us feel a million-fold. They say we are all in the same boat, and that’s true enough, but a tiny few have access to the lifeboats, others of us have lifejackets – many will be dependent on finding some wreckage to cling to. As someone lucky enough to have a lifejacket (and probably one from H&J’s Outdoor World rather than The Warehouse), I feel both a sense of guilt and of helplessness. There seems so little I can do to make things better for those who might suffer through no fault of their own, other than donating to the charity appeals. That, and continuing to pay my gym membership while they are closed. They were looking for support to keep them ticking over, and since I am absolutely no stranger to paying for the gym and not going, it didn’t take much thinking to agree to it. When we are out of lockdown, I will try my best to support the local businesses on the high street – for starters the jeweller who can finally replace my watch battery. I will probably even force myself to go to the pub.

This situation has brought out the best in so many people, and an absolute outpouring of love and support for the NHS. All the houses that contain children have rainbow drawings in the window and messages of support – often on the footpaths too. I’m sure you have all now heard of Captain Tom, the 99-year-old WW2 veteran who wanted to raise £1000 for NHS charities by completing 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday. As of today, he has raised £28 million and is also now the oldest person ever to have a number one single. But the most moving is probably “the Claps” – yeah, no, claps plural, not the other thing. Every Thursday night at 8pm people go outside their houses and clap for the frontline workers putting themselves at risk. On my estate the sound echoes hauntingly. Because of the way our flats are positioned you can’t actually see anyone else’s front doors or balconies, so there is just this clapping and cheering and kids shouting “thaaaank yoooou” and even some fireworks – but no people in sight. Spooky and awesome. The NHS has never felt so much love, but this government has been swinging the axe at it for years. I do hope that Boris will think twice before the next round of budget cuts, now that he has first-hand experience of being nursed back from the brink (and, famously, by a Southlander and another foreigner – grrr, coming-over-here-taking-our-jobs-saving-our-lives…). If not, he will almost certainly be hung, drawn and quartered by a clapping, rainbow-drawing mob. Should make for some meme gold when the time comes.

So that’s it for life in the UK from my very privileged perspective. Kia kaha Southland, and stay safe.

• If you're a Southlander living (or forced to return home) from living abroad, we'd love to hear your story. Please contact us at [email protected] Likewise, if you know a Southlander living abroad, please encourage them to get in touch with us to we can all learn more about how this coronavirus is changing life for Southlanders everywhere.