I said that Boris was compromised when the NHS saved his life from Covid. This hasn’t been thrown back at him yet as he has cunningly placed Matt Hancock in the firing line to face the anger from the NHS staff after they have been awarded a seemingly paltry 1% pay rise. The NHS is still under stress, daily deaths from Covid are over 250 and the front line staff remain at risk despite the impressive vaccination of over 14 millions of us, including my wife and I. Boris has laid out a “roadmap” to the end of lockdown and the first step, getting children back to school, comes into effect on Monday. If his luck holds and the virus doesn’t proliferate again, or the effect of the vaccinations keeps the virus in check we could be back to the pre-lockdown state by the end of June. The Government has spent a great deal of our money and needs to plan a way back from all the borrowing. The Brexit fiasco is still in the shadow of the pandemic and the Irish Sea border is still the nightmare that Mrs May said it would be.

In practical terms, we have experienced a limited amount of frustration from the new import and export documentation requirements but there have been delays and fortunately we have had the time to learn how to cope. I can also begin to see that there may be some opportunities arising for the business out of the inconvenience that some potential customers are finding when trying to deliver to the UK market from the USA via the EU. If we can do the job instead of an EU company then we win perhaps.

This week we have been particularly stretched with the usual high level of seasonal orders at the same time as we have begun the new regime with our seconded Shift Manager experiment. As if that wasn’t tricky enough we were faced with three key managers forced to self-isolate due to the contact tracing app mid week, all from the same shift. This was, and will be, extremely tough for a while yet but we are slowly making progress. On the plus side, the daylight hours are getting longer and we all feel a bit better for that.

My pre-occupation is with trying to plan and implement a serious culture change towards the adoption of a PDCA approach to everything and thereby to make fewer mistakes and avoid repeating them. There is so much to do and I find it so difficult to really engage with people when we must keep the social distance and do so much by Teams and Zoom.

On the positive side, we seem to have weathered the storm that we experienced at Christmas with the pigmented suspension product range. We now seem to be producing at an acceptable rate and in a good consistent quality. It remains for me to set up a capital project that will give us a capacity and productivity lift to exploit this excellent work by the team concerned. Then we must find a way to meet the demand that has built up due to Covid for the crematorium de-odourising powder. Our customer has four or five times the volume of orders that we would normally be required to supply and perhaps we are fortunate that the impact of the pandemic has restricted the ability to bring a key ingredient across the Atlantic. Now we must work as hard as we can to refill the stocks.

As suppliers to the agrichemical sector it is common for us to be under pressure at this time of year but while our customers’ customers are sitting in a tractor or in the open air, or stacked in a mortuary, we are trying keep socially distanced and unsure how many people will turn up each day. It is difficult to answer everyone’s question: “when can we have our stuff?”