It has been very encouraging to receive the news from Xiaofang’s family and from our friends that life in China is starting to open up again. Her parents are now busy in her grandmother’s vegetable garden in the countryside near Xinzheng (having been allowed to leave the family home in the city), local schools in Henan have reopened for A-level …

We’re not supposed to admit having read ‘How to Stop Worrying and Start Living’ by Dale Carnegie, but (apparently) it’s a very good book, and maybe it has special value right now. In it, the author makes an analogy between living day-by-day, and the construction of ships: vertical internal walls called bulkheads divide the ship into watertight …

During my professional career so far, my working environment has ranged from three-trainees-in-a-room-without-windows, to partner-office-with-big-desk, to open plan (KPMG and Pinsent Masons), to working primarily from home (since 2013). For us at LCN Legal, what’s new about the current arrangements is not working from home, it’s having children …

There are probably very few areas of life where I’m ahead of you. One of them might be intercompany agreements for TP compliance. Another might be surviving* coronavirus quarantine – having spent around 5 weeks of ‘lock down’ in China, and then another two weeks of self-isolation in the UK. Since there seems a real possibility of China-style …

I’m very pleased to report that we’ve survived the 14 day period of self-imposed quarantine in the UK, having flown back from China on 21st February. The only tense moments were wondering whether our children will pass the various airport temperature checks – they haven’t had any signs of fever, but they’re just naturally ‘hot’. Especially …

As far as we can tell, containing the corona virus seems to depend more on washing hands, rather than wearing surgical masks the whole time. You might think that you know how to wash your hands effectively, but in reality you probably don’t. If you’re anything like me, you probably just act on auto-pilot, based on a bundle of misconceptions and …