Self control

Subject: Self control 

People across the country are being asked to stay away from the office and work from home. It doesn't sit well with our psych if we are used to an office environment which often makes a good substitute for  home and it's easy conformity. There's a natural wish to mix and engage with people, not only on work related matters but socially both in the office and also when work finishes.
Growing up in the 40s and 50s this exodus of people going to work, was exemplified a few decades before, in the 20s by the man who's job it was to tap on the bedroom window and wake the occupant and signal the start of a new day. The sound of the clogs on the cobbled streets marching towards the factory gates has long played on my mind as the archetypal sound which differentiated the poor from the middle class.
In 1962 I spent time living in Amsterdam and formed a strong friendship with a family called Schlaghecke, we became firm friends, only couple of years ago  I flew over to attend their eldest son's funeral. My time with them exposed me to a different culture a culture of people working from home.
Mrs Schlaghecke was a seamstress making dresses. She had a shop/factory on the Spuistraat and I was fascinated by the fact that whilst some seamstress's work during the day in the workshop many sewed the materiel together at home. Kees (the son who recently died) spent each night, after working in the factory driving his combi around the suburbs picking up garments until 10pm. It was an example of the  'off -piste,' industries replicated right across the city. Coming from a country which separated home and work religiously it was a shock to see people devoting so much of what we would define as their free time, to work. Necessity perhaps, but more likely an example of the entrepreneurial mind set which in the 1960s was missing in the UK. Here the population valued fun and games rather than concerning themselves about boosting their income.
Today's computer aided society is far better placed to work from home and the rancour of being associated  with having to work inside the four walls of our homes  with small children demanding our attention shows what a fragile society we have become, more demanding in terms of our independence and more fixated on those rights which were inculcated to be ours. I fear to think what a call to arms would do on our self centred individualism, conscription and forced mobilisation would be impossible. 

I was watching a marvellous program where they used drones to show the pictorial majesty of the Lake District around Scafell  and particularly the Shepard bringing the sheep down from the hills into the farm for sheering. The sheepdogs running hither and thither to the whistled instruction of the Shepard, the sheep eventually corralled by the drystone walls into compliance for the greater good. The sheep-shearer setting to work quickly pacifying the sheep by firmly turning the sheep off its feet, the sheep seeming to surrendering to the positive will of the man sheering.
It was a simple display of man's success over the animal. How at odds with his lack of  an ability to control himself.