Jennifer Bray

I went like I was cycling in and out to the city center every day for press conferences and the place was empty.

I'm cycling around these deserted streets and I'm going into a press conference and they're like, we've ordered 300 ventilators and we've got a spare mortuary and we've got this, that and the other.

And we were, you know, oximeters and you're sitting there just typing going, what?

But beyond like...

The craziness of that, it's the pressure of the time because people wanted to know, like, can I go to church on Saturday?

Can I bring six people to golf on Monday?

Can I visit my dying grandmother in hospital?

You know, like a serious stuff as well as like normal life stuff.

Can I walk more than two kilometers?

And the question like that question, they were legit questions, but they felt politicians to answer them.

And so it fell to us as political journalists to go and get those answers.

So what it meant, my days were just constantly harassing people, ringing, ringing, ringing.

Like I made such a nuisance of myself.

But you had to, you had to harangue people.

And then there is also still the business of news journalism, which is getting the story out first.

That's how you know you're succeeding.

So somebody would ring you, you know, a trusted contact and say, from Monday, we're going into level five.

And it wouldn't be out anywhere.

And you'd be just like,

level five and you'd be typing like so fast yeah and you wouldn't even be absorbing the information that would just hit you later on at night but like typing it out and trying to get it out before your competitors so those all of this pressure at the time um and it was a lot and the longer the pandemic went on I think the more burnt out I got and I feel like I feel like it's not a negative thing nowadays some people think to say that you're burnt out yeah someone actually said to me recently oh well you know