Career highlights

I thought almost bursting into tears during a call yesterday was a career first. Today on a video call with the boss, the pressure of my workload tipped me over the edge into definite tears, and that’s certainly a first. In the future, comedy sketches will be made of scenes like this. A team member has a meltdown whilst isolated indefinitely in a random house during a global pandemic, whilst the line manager can only watch and give virtual hugs through a Skype video screen. Anyway, it was a useful release and I didn’t let it ruin the rest of the day, as grant deadlines don’t flex because of an applicant’s emotional state.

This deadline is for European Union funding, which is particularly difficult to manage. I don’t think the EU deserves more negative press at present but the aid it dishes out is usually more concerned about whether the staff involved have made duplicates of their timesheets than whether the project is having a positive impact on beneficiaries. The EU is known for ‘clawback’ during the audits it commissions on projects it has funded, and we’ve been burnt by this many times despite being a group of committed people trying our best to protect forests in Cambodia or national parks in Liberia. The EU would say they must defend the integrity of their taxpayers’ contributions to these projects. I imagine EU citizens (are we still counted as them? Who knows...) would sleep soundly in their beds knowing the likes of us were working hard in difficult circumstances and that if we failed to retain and photocopy a boarding pass stub (another rule for all flights undertaken), it didn’t necessarily imply we were corrupt and deserving of penalties.

Applying for these funds results in a heady mix of the likes of me having to justify to anyone more senior why we’ve seen fit to put ourselves at such financial risk. If there were other sources of funding emerging from the shadows, we’d be going for them, but we’re not left with a range of plump and easy options at the best of times, and especially not in a time of unprecedented crisis.

I liked this scene during my evening walk as it felt rather Dickensian. I’m not sure they had zebra crossings in the 1850s, but it was a simpler time. Whilst everyone was slumped in the workhouse as gin-soaked heaps of syphilis, EU grant rules and regulations were an unheard of thing of the future.