Churcherians during COVID

In a year like no other in living history, Old Churcherians from various walks of life share their experiences during a global pandemic…

New job, new rules

Alice Ballard (16) graduated in the Summer of 2019 and hadn’t been in her job very long when the pandemic struck…

The day I knew that the pandemic was very serious was the day I looked out from my office in March, which looks over Borough Market in London, and the road was empty. There was not a single person grabbing a bite to eat from the market or in line to one of the many coffee shops. This was very unusual for the area and my day got even stranger on the tube home when the carriage was almost empty.

As an Interior Architect at Featherstone, specialising in workplace and commercial design, I knew that the job was going to change drastically when the government announced a work from home order. As someone who designs offices for a living, this was scary news!

There were a few weeks when I thought that my industry would not exist as I knew it anymore, people initially were enjoying working from home and removing the commute was very attractive for most. As someone who has studied wellbeing design and has a passion for making people’s working life enjoyable, I knew working from home was not going to be healthy for a lot of people in the long run.

Being at the beginning of my career, I could not imagine doing my job without the social and collaborative benefits of working by my team’s side, so we decided to help get workplaces safe again. Featherstone reached out to past, current, and new clients to see how we could help them get staff back in the office with COVID-safe measures implemented. Health and safety were our main concerns and knowing how difficult some people were finding working from home, including myself, was a big incentive to help. We reconfigured spaces, implemented one-way systems and ensured clients were given distance while working. It felt good to be able to adapt our skill set to the current issues and to be able to help where we could. Now, I believe my job has changed forever. When speaking to clients, it warms my heart to hear how much emphasis is being put on making staff happy. The aim now is to make the office a destination, we understand that some of the ‘head-down’ working can be done at home, but you need somewhere to collaborate and work agilely. I have been working on bringing the luxuries and home-comforts of working from home back to the office. I have educated myself even further on how important happiness is for a successful working environment and how we can push the norms of what design is known for.

I think people understand the importance of their environment since working from home, and how a large chapter of our lives is spent in our careers so let’s make it enjoyable! The main thing I’ve learnt is to prioritise your health, both mentally and physically and to reach out to family and friends to see how they are doing too.

“I was honoured to find out the U12s had named a team after me who went on to win the Churcher’s Champions sports festival in the Autumn Term.”

Tackling life

Joe Atkinson (10) gives an insight into professional sport during a pandemic…

When schools were allowed back in the autumn, the Churcher’s Sport Department wanted to come up with a way to encourage and nurture the competitive talent of the pupils without the opportunities presented through sporting fixtures with other schools. They created an intra-school tournament, Churcher’s Champions Sports Festival, to be held on the last weekend of the first half of term where all pupils would compete within their year group bubbles under the team names of OC sportsmen and women.

OC professional rugby player, Joe Atkinson (10), the namesake of the winning group of teams, gave us his account of his year under COVID.

At the start of the 2019/2020 season, I made the move from Wasps RFC to Bedford Blues RFC. At the start of the pandemic, we were two thirds of the way through the season. Our last game was against Newcastle Falcons on Friday 13th March. The next day all of the games were cancelled and the following weekend the season was postponed..

We went into lockdown with hopes that the season would still be completed. To keep myself busy I was helping a local farmer in Bedford during lambing season, this was a great distraction as I couldn’t make my way back to East Meon, Petersfield, to help on the family farm. The farmer in Bedford had a milking sheep flock, which was unusual, so I was able to learn a lot from him.

As we came out of the first lockdown my girlfriend, Sofija, and I got engaged and so we have been busy planning our wedding for summer 2022. We welcomed our baby boy Maxwell Joseph Atkinson on 4th May.

I have learnt that life throws lots of obstacles at you and being adaptable is a key skill. Over the past year I have been a rugby player, farmer, landscape gardener and now I am training to be a tree surgeon alongside playing rugby!

The 2020/2021 was a shortened season where we have only played each team once, either at home or away. It has been great getting back to playing competitive matches. The highlight being playing against Saracens, although convincingly beaten, it was an amazing experience to play against numerous full international and British and Irish Lions players.

I was honoured to find out the U12s had named a team after me who went on to win the Churcher’s Champions Sports Festival in the Autumn Term. During a brief visit to Churcher’s in 2019, Mr Baker had taken me round the grounds to show off the new facilities and planned works since I left in 2010, which are spectacular! Truly pushing #ChurchersLimitlessPotential.

I look forward to coming back and catching up at the next Open Day.

Away from home but not alone

Mathilda Billsberry-Grass (19)

gives an account of her experiences when she found herself half way through a gap year, stranded in Peru…

When coronavirus arrived in England, I was already in Cusco, Peru, having arrived in early January. I spent the first months of my trip volunteering in a home for teenage mothers, waiting for a visit from my mum in mid-March, when we would tackle Machu Picchu. For the most part, I was blissfully unaware of the havoc caused by coronavirus elsewhere, given that the first recorded case in Peru didn’t arrive until the 6 March.

After some trouble with flights, Mum arrived on the 13th, having redirected her flight due to border closures to some European countries. While I believed this was the end of our problems, she thought these early closures could develop and we should ditch the mountain for an early return. With flights booked to London from Lima in a few days, we queued for hours in Cusco airport, and finally arrived at our next stop. After no luck trying to push our flights earlier, we booked one night in a hotel and would try again in the morning.

That night, Peru’s President announced a national lockdown, with absolutely no way in or out of the country from the following evening for the next fortnight, and likely beyond. We set alarms for 5:00 am, to try to get out on the last flights before the lockdown, but four hours of queuing led us to the realisation that we weren’t moving forward because the line was diminishing, it was from the volume of people ahead of us who were giving up and leaving the queue.

I was fortunate to be with my mum, who secured us an apartment, where we spent the next two weeks going for daily shop runs, and trying to generate awareness of the thousands of Europeans stuck in South America, until we were finally repatriated by the British military. I also felt lucky in that I had already experienced much of my planned travels, so had some level of competency with Spanish, meaning I was able to communicate our situation with locals, and more importantly argue with the doorman when he told us we weren’t allowed to even go to the shop!

I learnt so much from the entire trip, but this experience made myself and my Mum aware of the incredible amount of support we have. We relied so heavily on people signing petitions and contacting friends in Lima and the news industry, to get us noticed by MPs who could actually help us. It’s a cliché, but we really couldn’t have got home without the actions of our friends, and we spent many evenings sharing the kind messages we received from our friends and family, so I’d like to say thank you for any part anyone had in that.

Since being back in England, I spent summer lockdown working in a care home and at a local pizza van, earning to fund my studies of Film at Newcastle University, where I am now enjoying a different lockdown…

Keeping the audience entertained

When the pandemic struck, Michael Auger (08), a member of the musical theatre group Collabro, winners of the eighth series of Britain’s Got Talent in 2014, worked hard to find new ways of performing and keeping in touch with the fans…

The first lockdown started just a week after my 30th birthday party and I feel very grateful I managed to celebrate it as I know so many people who have had lockdown birthdays!

Work wise, Collabro had just performed at ‘Love At The Musicals’ at Cadogan Hall, London alongside Joe McElderry and Sophie Evans. We were looking forward to a summer of outdoor gigs before our 25-date headline UK tour ending at the London Palladium in October 2020.

When the first lockdown happened, we quickly had a lot of our summer gigs rescheduled to 2021 and made the decision to also push back our headline UK tour to October 2021. We were so saddened to delay by a whole year but we wanted to be safe. We started an account with Patreon where fans can pay a monthly fee to be able to access exclusive content such as joining in on band meetings, hearing songs from the archive that never made it onto an album and joining in quizzes to virtually interact with us. This was a great way to reach out to the fans. We also tried to rehearse together over Zoom in order to be ready for any gigs when they came in. Lambert Jackson productions offered us opportunities to do live streams where we were able to meet at venues in London when the lockdowns weren’t as strict, and we managed to socially distance perform with no physical audience. We also managed to perform at an outdoor gig where audience members were sat in ‘pods’ with members of the same household which was a very strange experience but so much nicer than performing to no audience at all.

Once a week I would run a free exercise class for anyone who wanted one on YouTube which kept me positive and I’ve been told was very helpful to lots of people which is great. I also wrote a Christmas song with Ben Adams (from boy band, A1) called ‘Christmas Is Here’, which became the title of Collabro’s first ever Christmas album, recorded during the summer, going into the studio individually with the producers working their magic to build up the harmonies. We also decided in the weeks leading up to Christmas to give all profits of ‘Christmas Is Here’ to the charity, Help For Heroes, as we’ve worked with some of the veterans before and know how important the support is that they get, especially around Christmas time.

Although socially distanced, we managed to record Alan Titchmarsh ‘Love Your Weekend’, Songs of Praise and also the Britain’s Got Talent Christmas Spectacular where we sang a duet with Amanda Holden at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, the same venue we had our first audition for BGT back in 2014! Amanda kept saying ‘I just want to give you boys a hug’ so I’ve got one waiting for her for when we are all allowed to again!

I also volunteered as a co-host on Petersfield’s Shine radio. The team is incredible and I always had such fun presenting. We managed to record the 50th episode of the P-POD at The Petersfield School and I sang ‘Never Enough’ from The Greatest Showman solo in front of a small audience and also hosted the Christmas special of the morning report which was great fun.

I am currently still keeping up with my fitness and am about to restart my YouTube classes which I’m looking forward to. Collabro is still going strong with Patreon although, unfortunately, lots of the gigs that were postponed from 2020 to 2021 have had to be postponed again or have even been cancelled. We are keeping everything crossed that our UK tour can still go ahead this October and I hope to see lots of familiar faces in the audience.