July 2021 Part One - The dreaded "Pingdemic"

The glorious weather continued. I swear the summers during the pandemic were the best we had ever seen? Or is it just me thinking that? Anyway, we continued spending time in the garden, and I picked up a load of of bedding plants from work to pop in between the strawberries for a bit of extra colour. We also tried to save water by wrapping the bottom of the baskets with bin bags to stop the water just coming through, as the birds kept stealing bits of the fibres of the base of the basket to use in their nests. It partially worked, we seemed to be watering a bit less, but the birds kept pulling the bin bags off! I think we gave up in the end. The strawberries were still coming through thick and fast, although other things in the garden seemed to be struggling in the heat.

Here's husky looking as cute as ever!

And here's a picture of me. I though I've never shared a picture of myself on here before, so here you go. Here's me. Albeit I look better four years ago then at the moment! We had a dress down day at work, wearing bright colours for the day. I thought I looked cute in my Ramen t-shirt, it's one of my favourites!

We had a nice day out visiting Portchester Castle, thankfully on a slightly cooler day! We had a fantastic time exploring the place, which I'd been to as a child, but not since. The site is full of history, a fortification was built here by the Romans, and then the Normans started off the castle, and it was even used as a prisoner of war camp by for captured French soldiers' in the Napoleonic wars. A period of our history that you don't seem to hear much about.

One of the beautiful arched doorways, and below, a view over the ruins of the castle buildings.

And most fantastic of all, while the French soldiers were kept here, they would keep themselves amused by crafting and creating art, like this painting on the wall in the keep. They would also scratch their names and the dates on the wall, giving us a timestamped record of who was here and when.

The French soldiers would even put on plays for each other and the guards, here's what the stage would have looked like, with James giving us a performance!

The whole visit was so so interesting, there's so much more here than what I remember. It's right on the coast too, so you can sit and watch the ships go by, as well as having a picnic in the grounds. The site is operated by English Heritage, tickets start at £8.50, but there is a 15% discount if you book in advance via the website. And of course EH members get in for free. A really worthy place to visit. You won't be disappointed.

July coincided with the end of Covid restrictions, although I continued to wear a face mask in busy places to be on the safe side. But the end of restrictions brought a new problem itself, the aptly named "Pingdemic". This was caused by frequent pings on the NHS app. Now, this is a good thing, because it would alert you if you had come into contact with someone with Covid-19. But it would just tell you to isolate, it didn't matter if you were vaccinated or tested negative, you had to isolate. Great if you had the virus, not great if you didn't. And it caused havoc at work. At one point, there was four people left in the store one afternoon, and I spent my day manning a checkout, because there was no sales floor staff to do so. All my managerial tasks were put on hold, and we tried to draft in staff from other stores, but everywhere else was in the same boat. It got to the point where we were discussing closing earlier, like my local Iceland, because there was simply not enough staff. When another manager came to swap places with me on the til so I could have a lunch break, they advised me not to look at the shop floor as I went out back. Confused, I looked down the aisles as I went backstage. I was horrified, there was gaps everywhere, and it looked like a hurricane had just passed through the place. Nobody had been filling all day, because everyone we had was serving on the checkouts, even the store manager did a day on the tils.

I ended up working a stupid amount of hours that week, both while we were open, and after we had closed, just to try and get stock on the shelves. Hours and hours of filling, sending very little if any overstock back, but just couldn't fill the gaps. Fortunately for us, things eased after that week, and staff started to come back. But it was horrendous. Gaps everywhere, and we had the stock, just no one to put it out. And customers constantly complaining there was nothing to buy. Sometimes in retail, you just cannot win. And this was one of those situations. The funny thing was, by the end of the week the warehouse for ambient products was so empty we might as well have converted it into a bigger staff canteen!