So in February the Covid-19 storm hit the UK, which meant lots of changes in the way we all go about our daily lives. The worry about the symptoms of catching this new disease from the East, what it would mean to our personal and work lives and how they would be irrevocably changed.

So now we are all 6 months into the journey, we think it’s worth stepping back and looking at the new normal; what changes we thought might happen and what differences are now in place for us, the Marches Biogas family and the wider world at large.

When it all hit home that lockdown was going to be a reality, we all expected to be baking and learning foreign languages and playing instruments. The big question was that now we could only do an hours’ worth of exercise a day would all this extra baking mean we are able to balance the waist line impact of the new regime.

However, like any problem, we worked systematically through the issues and now have risk assessments and method statements that address the Covid-19 risk. If you had said in January that we would have needed a completely new section in our documentation, I think Sarah, our HQSE manager would have been a little bit hurt; however new sections we have. The whole team are aware that anyone can catch this most transmittable of diseases, but to pass it on would be a trauma, not only to the individuals concerned but to the effectiveness of the team in general.

So, as we have discussed before, Teams meetings, home working, masks, hand washing and all the other risk mitigation issues remain very firmly in force and look to be so into the long term.

But it has not been all doom and gloom, like a number of organisations we have found working from home to be positive as a means of balancing out the work life balance and concentrating on our productivity rather than just hours at work. We are very conscious that we live in a beautiful part of the world, but it is a little remote, so as we expand could we have a team made up of people in a central office, perhaps we can recruit on the basis of home working and so get a larger cohort of applicants – all questions to be considered for the future! This is just one example of how this Covid-19 challenge is positively asking us to think again about how we go forwards.

So retrospectively we come back to the issue of looking back on Covid; clearly, it’s been a challenge, but one we are up to, however, certainly in my case the hour of exercise was clearly not enough….