> Very interesting your experience of thinking that you had the plague early on as I've heard that quite a bit.

I fell ill on 10 March. It hit me super hard, in the space of about two hours. My downward slide was sufficiently fast that I cleaned out my desk as I knew I was going to be working from home for a while. I've only been back for one hour since.

For me, the only good thing to come out of this whole debacle has been the acknowledgment by employers (those few that are left operating) that working from home does not automatically translate to employees taking the piss. That said, I'd gladly go back to the office if it meant an end to the dictatorship.

> This is if anything the elephant in the room that doesn't get much discussed here.
> So I will start something like a Hearts and Minds topic here and hopefully excite a bit of discussion.

The LS community needs some wins. It's been nothing but a relentless slide into despotism for so long that I think most sceptics are at their wits' end. Being angry all the time is exhausting. Hopefully, having something like Hearts and Minds to focus will do us all some good.

> What did you think of my idea of adapting some of your merchandise to reflect a more positive message?

I'm 100% in favour of it. I'm really keen to create a range of paraphernalia that will help us communicate a positive and hopeful message.

I've been trapped in my own head for so long that I have been having difficulty coming up with anything that isn't outright hostile. Having some positive input from other people will really help me, I think.

> I think Community Immunity (as opposed to Herd Immunity) could be a good slogan.

I like the Community Immunity slogan. I'd need some guidance on the range of connotations before I could hack up any "art" though. Ideally, we'd get some art contributed by somebody who wasn't a ham-fisted oaf like me.

I presume that the general public believe what they do for a variety of reasons, so we will probably have to attack the issue from different angles. If we can collect lots of slogans that are clustered around the same core set of messages, I'd be happy to churn out a large set of different images. I can write some scripts to automatically imprint pre-defined artwork with each of the slogans, so generating a large set of image files shouldn't be too onerous. We can then publish the images, both as freely-downloadable resources and pre-cooked merch on sites like Redbubble.

Best wishes, Mabel

I like the Community Immunity slogan!
I have had a few interesting conversations at work in the last couple of days with people who initially started with bedwetting routine phrases.
It turned out everyone of them has been somehow bending the rules. This looks like they have rehearsed their bit enough to keep repeating it, while in fact behaving differently from what they preach (someone mentioned this in a previous post).
This could potentially be the hole in the net to get to their brain. Next time I will try and point out very gently that they disobeyed the same rules they want others to follow and see what happens.

Hi again Mabel

Will get round to starting a Hearts and Minds thread soon. I'm sure I'm even more of a hamfisted oaf than you but if you Google "circle of friends clip art" there are some possibly suitable images there ( for Community Immunity). Regards, Michael