"Welcome to lockdown diaries episode seven.

Who ever thought they'd go on as long as this and I think we're going to get a little bit more of this to come up but it hasn't stopped people from doing the most amazing things and this last week I've just been completely inundated with emails and pictures and videos and all sorts of things - which is brilliant by the way thank you all so much. I have had so much stuff come in I've had to make some notes so occasionally I'm going to look down to make sure I read out the right people who've done the right thing at the right time in the right order.

I want to start I think with just a shout out to Tom - Tom's a postdoc who works for Max and he's doing really, really fantastic work - clinical trials work on a patient's plasma, and a great picture Tom you look incredibly courageous, much more courageous than I would be with the needle coming towards me in that kind of way. Shout out also for Federico and the virtual coffee and mornings which I think keeping people going we all need to have these kind of moments in our day to keep us going to them making sure that we're connected and not just focused on work or not just focused on not work - whatever it is that is occupying us at that moment in time. One of the things that's clearly occupying a lot of you is your kids so David sent me a wonderful email about how he's really connected closely with the kids just in this period of time on furlough, using that furlough time to really make that bond even stronger and Michelle was one amongst others who wrote about how kids are becoming slightly more nocturnal at this period of time. Don't know if you're having that same experience, but Michelle's eleven-year-old is staying up later and later and kind of getting up later and later. I remember being a kid, summer holidays - that was my dream, staying up late, get up late.

I've had some great pictures of people, Alan sent me this amazing picture of the back of the Oculus, there's loads you may have seen on social media actually we've got loads of old Domino's boxes there and other pizza delivery companies are available and round it is a bird's nest, just incredible never would have happened if you weren't in this lockdown situation. Steve sent me some brilliant pictures, the product of homeschooling which shows it can work. You can get wonderful product out for that and thanks for that Steve and fabulous news on your mum as well. Surinder sent me some pictures of the brilliant, brilliant work that the Sikh union does in a whole variety of different areas but this was about food deliveries and support for people across our city and Surinder, your rainbow turban is just absolutely magnificent. And David and Alice, so not everybody might know that the 4th of May is a very special day for a number of people who like Star Wars - may the 4th may the force be with you, you even know it and get it or you don't know it and don't get it but if you do, you should see these are the brilliant pictures of David and Alice dressed as you'd expect Star Wars and extras to be going around meeting people just cheering people up on their daily exercise routine.

We've got lots of people doing brilliant stuff for charity as I keep saying every single week, actually we now as a university are doing some particular work and we're reaching out to alumni philanthropists, businesses, friends to see if we can raise some money for student hardship and one in four of all our students comes from a low-income background and as we know it can be particularly challenging at the moment online working and so on and we're trying to raise some resources there. WMG HR group, they've started this fantastic project of miles for Mind, the charity and it's one of those walking processes you walk, you upload, you raise money in that kind of way so if you're interested in supporting them please look for the WMG HR team. And Steven, shout out to you, Steven works in the library and he's walking everyday for ten days with a load of books in a rucksack on his back - I said to him I'm not sure what books I'd choose and which books I wouldn't choose but he is raising money for bowel cancer and best of luck to you, thank you so much for this fantastic work that everybody's doing.

Now inevitably over the last few weeks, we focused a great deal on the city and the county, our region and everything that has been done to try and support our region. Warwick though is a really international place and I thought it would be really important this week just to share with you just a few things that people have been doing to help the wider world through this crisis. I'll start with Mohan and Karuna in the Medical School who are doing amazing and brilliant work getting testing reagents ready and then sending them to Africa so they can be used for testing regimes in that continent and to be supportive of that big international programme of work to help in Africa.

Stephanie wrote an amazing amount of stuff that is going on in IGSD, reaching out to partners across the world in low-income countries to help support through this crisis in lots and lots of different ways as a fantastic newsletter which IGSD has put out which just gives you some sense of the sheer scale everything that's going on. Emma amongst a few others wrote to me to say how miserable it is frankly at the moment to see that Chinese people and people of Chinese heritage are under such pressure and sometimes even physical attack you may have seen that in some of the national newspapers, fortunately not around us. How desperate it is that people were taking up their fears of the virus on people they think are in some sense responsible when clearly they are not responsible and clearly China is not responsible in this situation. And so I just wanted at this point just to reach out a sense of solidarity really with the Chinese students and staff, colleagues and friends and those of Chinese heritage to say we stand with you. I could take this moment, if you will allow me to do a quick shoutout to Harbin - Harbin institutes one of the big universities, many universities in China, linked partner of ours - how it's been their 100th anniversary, I can't celebrate it physically at the moment but they're celebrating virtually, so let me just say Happy Birthday to Harbin.

A couple of people I have written back to and I said I will do a big reveal this week. Because the last few weeks I have not said much about my own physical exercise regime and that's been deliberate because of Jenner I got onto the Warwick Sport, walking the world app, Warwick Sport, 118 people - you do your walking, you upload your steps and you take the whole team read on through the world and I joined and we were in Turkey and a few weeks later, we're still in Turkey but I looked at this list of people and I thought, well you know, I can get up that league table and here you are hearing I'm afraid something of my competitive side. I thought I can get to top ten but only if I don't tell anybody; and yes! I got to tenth place and it was the most extraordinary sense of satisfaction no doubt when I look again, I'll be down 15 or 20th or something like that but for that moment, I hit that top ten period. If you are doing steps or something like that do have a look at some of these apps, do have a look to see if there's something you can connect with. There's lots of chat opportunities as well so you can talk to people who are doing the same sort of things.

Now this is a really important period of the year for many people, we spoke a few weeks about about Easter and how challenging Easter was for Christians in that period of time when they couldn't get together and socialise in their usual way and now we're in the period of Ramadan and of course it's a big challenge for our Muslim students, colleagues and friends as well in this period of lockdown. So let me say, if I may, best wishes to you all and we have a message, a really good message from our Muslim Chaplain that we're going to share by text alongside this. Solidarity again is what is it all about going through this period and I had a great email from Alex a student, member of the Christian union, a number of people and his friends would gather together in the Oculus to work together, and now they have replicated that on Zoom across many countries, across the world and that Warwick community again becoming international is a fantastic and wonderful thing.

Colleagues on furlough well you're writing to me large numbers now so thank you all so much for that. I don't know if you have seen but this last few days some information has been put out from the Government - one person in every four in a job in the UK at the moment is on furlough, a quarter of our country are on furlough, so you are certainly not in a minority, you are certainly not isolated - huge swath of people on furlough as we have got colleagues and friends in our University waiting for the moment when we can restart our economy and get ourselves moving very, very quickly.

Mark sent me a great story - WMG of course are doing lots of things around ventilator support, ventilator challenge and we've got a group of furloughed technician colleagues in WMG who volunteered to help in that ventilator supply chain to try to get more of these really important machines and into our hospitals. I can't really mention everybody, I've tried to get a lot in this week but before I move on to one last topic, I just wanted to just say something about Anil who wrote to me - lovely, lovely email, thank you so much and very gentle but telling me off and quite frankly rightly telling me off because what I fail to do in these several weeks of lockdown diaries, is really focus on a particular group of students who are really important to us. And these are our mature students and often CLL, but not only in CLL, often they have key workers, often they have kids - key workers kids studying hugely, hugely demanding and you know I just wanted to say, I think on behalf of all of us or for you in those categories, working in that kind of way, living with those really great challenges of work and study, and family, we are with you as well - best wishes. We have a period coming up now where we might see the lockdown moving in slightly different ways but for you who are our key workers certainly will be continued pressures on everything that you need to do.

Lastly, I just wanted to talk a little bit, just a little bit about more work things because as a number of you have said to me, you can't help miss that in the media at the moment, there's a lot of stuff about university finances. The government has put out a financial rescue package as they describe it which actually involves no new money at all it's reprofiling the money and that is important so I am not knocking it at all. It's important because universities of course need to have enough cash in order to be able to pay people and this is a way of putting cash forward in the financial budgets. But there's no new money and I think we have to realise that we are going to be on our own working through the financial challenge that's going to come, and there is going to be a financial challenge because clearly the number of particular international students will be coming to the UK will be lower than it probably has been for many decades and there is a consensus on this. The Government recognises that this is going to be the case, UCU recognises that this is going to be the case - UCU say that there will be a shortfall of about two and a half billion in university finances across the sector, over the course of the next year. We've got to look at this and take this very seriously now we know there is going to be no Government financial support that we can rely on. Now we are beginning to get some sense on what the lifting of the lockdown might be. So what we're going to do is - we've got a series of thoughts of principles of ideas, of structural ways to go forward. I'm going to share that with a group on Monday afternoon, it will be for our heads of departments, heads of administration, got about 330, going to take in some feedback and work on that and on Wednesday afternoon we've got a slot that is for an all staff meeting and obviously, we can't have a physical all staff meeting but we are going to put out our thinking and our processes out to everybody there so please if you can, do look out for Wednesday afternoon and we'll put out a video cast to share things.

I'm going to do another one of the community updates on Friday of next week so please do share with me any insights, any thoughts, any great pictures, anything that's going on and I'll focus those and let you know what's going on in the community update and talk about the business side of the house as it were on the Wednesday.

That's it from me, if you can have a great weekend, bank holiday weekend. If you have anyone in your family who remembers VE day, give them a virtual hug and I'll speak to you all again next week.

Thanks a lot."

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stuart Croft.