It's A Return

 

Just when you believe things may be slowly getting back to normal, the world looks like it's going to go absolutely mental once more.

From Monday, I am going back to work for the first time in over five months.
Now lets not get ahead of ourselves. I'm only going back to cover someone's holiday, and then sporadically for another couple of weeks. There is still no part of my actual job to do yet (or not enough of it to justify having to start paying my wages again) but I'm grateful for anything right now.
Our theatre is also a cinema, and we are re-opening three days a week, to test the waters and see what the appetite is for our audiences. We are one of the lucky ones in the fact that we have the facility to do that whilst we cannot stage full theatre/comedy/music. Cinema is significantly cheaper to run, and we need approximately 20 people per screening to cover our base costings. With a capacity of around 65 with social distancing, it's a gamble we are going to take for now.

Theatre is not really functioning in any way yet, and that is one of the points I wanted to make mainly here. 
It's great to hear this morning that Nimax and Nica Burns will be reopening some of their theatres from the  end of October, and with that Everybody's Talking About Jamie looks set to be the first West End musical to return before the end of the year. 

But it's important to remember that this is far from over. 
A second wave is looming. Whether the country will go back into lockdown remains to be seen. Personally I can't see it, because there is no way the economy would survive and the Tories couldn't magic another furlough scheme out of the air - that was a one time thing. Everyone  is still struggling, and unable really to plan with any certainty, and with winter on it's way, everything just feels that bit more gloomy...

I've been at home now for 27 weeks, and not working for 23 of them. 
In some ways this all weeks like it's gone on for about 10 minutes, but in other ways I truly feel like I've lived through a millennium. I know people are talking about mental health a lot at the moment, and I imagine most people are getting fed up of it, but it really has been hard. 

It was all semi-manageable because we thought we could see an end in sight. There was talk that the summer might kill it off (that was just optimism I guess), but we got through it because we had good weather, could spend time in our gardens, and had an hour a day outside. With the winter on it's way, and the  the threat of going back to where we were once more, it's hard to think positive.

But, work tomorrow. 
A little bit of normality, even if it's just for a short while...

So let the sun come streaming in
‘Cause you’ll reach up and you’ll rise again
If you only look around
You will be found

Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek and Paul