Adapt to survive

Any time I look out of our window or walk around our village I’m struck by the huge amount of activity that is still going on, lockdown or no lockdown. And it just goes to show the energy and invention that business people possess and which they are using to keep the local economy going.

There seems to be just as much traffic on the road as in normal times, even with hardly any flights from the Airport. And the number of delivery vans shows how many people are buying things online. Builders seem to be flat out, farmers are hard at it, roads are being dug up and new broadband installed. In other words people are just getting on with normal life.

Except none of it is normal is it ? The hospitality and catering industry has suffered dreadfully and we hope it won’t be long before it is back up and running. But in other sectors they have adapted and found a way to make things work. For many that has meant working from home, something that could be a long term change. It’s not ideal for everyone, but if you have the space at home to create an office then there are benefits, for example the savings in time and money which would otherwise be spent commuting to work.

In fact, in a way the pandemic has returned us to an old fashioned way of working. In days gone by many more people ran small businesses from their homes, Cottage Industries, where all kinds of things were made and sold.

One of the things we have also had a chance to do in the last twelve months is to re-assess the balance between work and home life. That’s not always been an easy process but now people have got used to the new way of doing things there may actually be some positives. Children may have missed out on some formal education but they may have benefitted in other ways by spending more time with their families ?

The big lack has been the shortage of human contact, which has been severely restricted. As a Chamber of Commerce we’ve tried to help with Zoom meetings, but they are no substitute for a face to face social event. That’s when people get to know one another which means they are more likely to do business together. Those events are the glue that binds our community together and we’ll be looking forward to resuming them in the next few months when restrictions are relaxed.