I went back to the office for the first time in seven months the other day, expecting to find the place largely unchanged.
不久前，我七个月来首次回到办公室，期望找到一个基本上没什么变化的地方。
A colleague who had just done the same thing said he had found his desk still covered in newspapers from the days before the building emptied in mid-March, plus a withered Pret sandwich from the same era. “It’s like Pompeii,” he told me.
一位刚刚做过同样事情的同事说，他发现自己办公桌上仍堆满了3月中旬大楼被清空前几天的报纸，还有一个当时买的Pret（指英国三明治连锁店Pret A Manger——译者注）三明治，已经蔫巴巴了。“好像庞贝。”他对我说。
He had a point. My desk looked exactly as I had left it. In my mail tray there was a copy of The Economist from late March, with a cover picture of planet Earth behind a sign saying “Closed”.
他说的没错。我的桌子和我离开时一模一样。我的文件盘里有本3月下旬的《经济学人》(The Economist)周刊，封面是张地球的照片，前面有个牌子写着“关闭”。
The rest of the office looked much as I remembered it, except for the lavish supplies of hand sanitiser and face masks.
办公室的其他地方看起来和我记忆中的差不多，除了大量的洗手液和口罩。
Yet it was also deeply different. Not exactly ghostly, but subdued, with only a handful of the normal number of people, many working quietly alone. It was a reminder of one of the great peculiarities of pandemic life: so much of it looks so normal, until you realise it is not.
然而，这里已经在深层次不同于正常时期。整个氛围不完全像是鬼屋，但绝对冷清，来此上班的同事寥寥无几，许多人静悄悄地独自工作着。这让我们意识到疫情生活的一大特色：很多事情看起来很正常，直到你意识到其实不然。