"Well, Hello everyone and Welcome to - could you believe it - Week 16 of these Lockdown Diaries.

Week 16. Really quite extraordinary, and the first thing I just want to share with you all is that we are making really good progress with our time capsule project. We've got a great team together now. People with great skills, great ideas and great ways of sharing it and what we want to do, over the course of the next week or so, is get the team together to say what they are doing for the project in their own words. We want to share that with you with a video so you have a sense of where we're going, what we are trying to do It's not too late to keep sending materials so, if there are things that you want to send, please do. For those wonderful people who already have, I have an apology. I asked you all - Didn't I? - whether you give me permission to use it in the time capsule but actually there's going to have to be a form. I'm sorry about that. I didn't do it properly for all the reasons that you'll see when you get the form. It'll only take you a second. We'll send it out over the next couple of weeks. Don't worry about that but if you just let us just have it back then we can make sure everything's in the right place. I'm really quite excited about it to be honest because there's a huge amount of really great stuff and actually, just looking back over where we have been and where we are now, it's quite clear that even though people feel - I know because you're telling me - "I'm still on furlough" "I'm still working from home" "I'm still going into work", we're getting towards more of a routine at the moment and I think that's really quite important to reflect on and you've been sharing that with me. Laura gave me a wonderful account of 'A day back in the office'. She works from home - "I had a day in the office this week" and that strange feeling of being both comfortable to be back here and all the stuff that she had left was there but also uncomfortable because it's new and different compared to the new routine and the new kind of normality that we're all working towards.

I wanted to share with you a really great kind of example of how the way in which people have been carrying and working together has continued from a doctoral college team. They put on a Blue Peter competition. Blue Peter, old days. Stuff I really remember. Sorry, this is now going to be a very generation specific 30 seconds or so but pictures of Valerie Singleton, John Noakes Peter Purvis - the old days - and the dog and I can't remember the name of the dog but there was a big fuss about this dog. It was a really popular dog, John Noakes' dog and I can't remember the name which is a terrible thing. I probably have to look it up online later on. But, great to see that teams are still working together. Still engaging with another even though, for so many of us, we are working from home at the moment. Actually, there's been quite a lot of new routine, working at home stuff this week that people have sent me. So, Marguerite has sent me great picture of Poppy the Cat and Poppy wants to be part of the home working experience. Ideally with paws all over the keyboard and I suspect many of us have had that kind of experience. And Jane's sent me a great picture what she describes as a working from home uniform which involves wearing the most enormous pair of slippers I've ever seen. Well, actually, I say it's a pair, I'm not sure it's a pair of slippers. It just looks like one hole slipper that you put your feet into. Gareth works - goes in - works on campus and has sent me seventy-six photographs of campus which was slightly embarrassing because my broadband here at home wouldn't cope with seventy-six photographs so we had to find different ways of transferring it. And, for those of you who are working on campus at the moment, well, you've actually had a real privilege of seen the way in which the campus has gone through the seasons with with relatively few people and the way in which nature is taken over in lots of different ways. One of the people who's very pleased with themselves and has quite right to be pleased from study is Emma because - If you remember I said last time that people in reporting the sad, the sad sight of house plants in offices that have died - well Emma had the presence of mind, as we were closing things down, to take her plant home. Arthur is the name of the plant and Arthur is doing really well unlike Arthur's brothers and sisters around many of the offices I'm afraid in in the University.

I wanted to give a shout-out also to some people are continuing to do fantastic volunteering work and it is wonderful to see. Fiona shared with me the wonderful work that Joan's doing. Knitting toys. Beautiful knitted toys and particularly for the looked after kids of Coventry and in particular in this case but also for Warwickshire. And, it's just wonderful to keep hearing about the brilliant things that so many are doing for our communities across our city in our region. So, it's a new routine. I think everyone's settling into a new routine and some people clearly are enjoying aspects of that new routine, whether it be that you can spend time with your cat or if you're enormous slippers, whatever it might be but obviously not everyone is having a great time all the time with new routine and I just want to give, again, a particular shout out to parents with school-aged kids. I can't imagine what it must have been like for weeks and weeks of home-schooling and looking after kids and also shielding kids and all the rest of it and Marsha wrote me a brilliant, brilliant email where she had counted out how many times her eight-year-old had said MOM during the morning of work and it was 56. And, I can't really imagine how you get half a day's work done when you've got energetic little people who are demanding so much of your time. Great to be able to spend time with them. Really challenging obviously when you're trying to home-school and you're trying to work at the same time so we do thank you. It is really important work and those of us who don't have school age children moment, well we can only imagine what you were working through at the moment.

I've also had a really good couple of emails if, I could put it that way, with Sally who's in Leicester. She's one of our staff that lives in Leicester. I know we've got a few colleagues who live in Leicester and, of course, it's really challenging a moment. The whole city in Lockdown. A lot of the measures that had been in place, that had been removed for the rest of us, still in place there. Really difficult, I think, in Leicester at the moment, particularly, as we can see, there's a football team still playing there. We see there's a racecourse still going on there. We can see that, for some activities, Lockdown isn't happening, for some people it is happening and we know - Don't we? -how difficult all that is. I've been looking at some of the survey work that people were doing this week about attitudes at the moment, how we're feeling, and you know, it's really quite clearly the case that anxiety, which was very high the start of the Lockdown, kind of went away - is back again, because so many of us are really nervous about what might happen next. And, what we've done recently is we put up a video, which you can all access, to see where we are in terms of our financial plan. I've done quite a detailed report - I hope you'll find it anyway - if you're interested with that think about the new year. And, in a few week’s time we'll do another one as well which we're really looking at all the measures that will be in place for a fuller campus reopening as we get towards the new academic year.

So, thank you all for being in touch and sending me a lot of materials. Please, please do so again. I'm gonna do another one of these in a couple of week’s time. I know that, that routine now is making everyone feel, "I know what's happening" a little bit more on a day-to-day basis but please do keep sharing things with me and what I want to do, if I may, is to leave you with another poem - you know how I like poems. Poems that you write. And, Lisa sent me this poem so, if I may, let me just share this poem with you because I think it says quite a lot. This is Lisa's Lockdown poem. "Lockdown they say, How hard can it be? A nice little break with my family, A new routine for my lad and me, Starting with Joe Wicks as a new morning fad, The teenager mopes on his PlayStation for, Snacks are unlimited but he always wants more, Daily exercise, We go on a walk, At least we can all finally talk, But moaning and groaning always cuts it short, VE-day was fine, We really did have a great time, With socially distance with our neighbours, And we'd run lots of wine, Home-schooling is a chore, And my boys find you a bore, I've become a teacher and I don't want to be one anymore, Missing family and friends and living in a house with just boys, I really didn't realise they had so many toys, Together as a family we have worked as a team, The seeds have turned into flowers and our garden makes me gleam, More meals around the table, You see we have time for that now, Fresh cakes and scones in the oven giving off a delicious smell, Being on furlough isn't as easy as it seems, I really miss my Warwick University team's, Normality could be some time away, But the memories are in my mind to stay, We've had some ups and downs but hey, I'm still lucky enough to be here to tell my story, so that's okay." Thanks Lisa. Definitely something for our time capsule.

Thank you all. Please, do keep sending in materials and reflections and thoughts. Just tell me how things are going on. I know some of you at the moment are doing some tests around the Coronavirus for various projects. Some of you now are going up to the Ricoh and elsewhere to get tests, to see where you're going on. The virus is most certainly still we with us, so please, everyone, do stay safe.

Do keep in touch and thanks very much."

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart Croft.