Any chaos will be in Kent ( and other UK lorry parks )

The UK Government  narrative is clear. If there's friction exporting to the EU and it's "all a bit slipshod and disorganised and there's therefore chaos because of failure of the EU to plan" then HMG is going to blame the direct consequences of leaving the Customs Union and Single Market on the EU. We've left the EU and at the end of the year we exit the Withdrawal Agreement's Transition Period that's been in place since the 1st of Feb. During the Transition Period we continued to be in the Customs Union and Single Market although no longer an EU member. That's what's kept our imports and exports flowing freely since then. It means we're yet to feel the practical effects of Brexit. Next year the EU will continue to exist and operate its Customs Union and Single Market. With or without an FTA, as we'll be outside the Customs Union and Single Market and a third country, all our exports to the EU will be subject to checks at the border. Wh
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London Lockdown

We've been in lockdown since the 23rd of March although we started working from home two weeks before that.

While the UK Government may have struggled to see what was coming based on the news reports from other countries my employer did not and we moved in early March to get as many people working from home as possible.

Lots of stuff had to happen; notably home working set-ups which the IT Department was responsible for providing and configuring. We provided laptops and monitors to a number of staff members so they could work productively and safely at home.

Our son had one last week of school before the lockdown and I drove him into school in the morning and collected him from the school bus in the evening. This allowed him to avoid taking public transport for the last leg as the school bus route ends quite a long way from our house.

My wife started working from home early too and this enabled her to avoid two busy commuting journies each day.

We ended up with the three of us all working from home in the same home office. Luckily, being geeks we each have our own PC set-ups. While it can get a bit noisy when we are all on conference calls we generally manage.

We're also lucky that our broadband connection is good. We're less than 300m from our local FTTC cabinet and get a reliable 80/20 connection.

We did have some connectivity problems in the autumn of 2018 and again in late 2019. Working through our ISP ( Zen Internet ) we had several Openreach engineer visits which involved them working back along our line remaking the connections at several external junction boxes. At one stage our connection was a very unreliable 55/15 with multiple line re-syncs each day - sometimes dozens.

The engineer who resolved that problem - a terrible joint and a worn aerial cable - said he was surprised our line worked at all. Our connection has been very reliable since then.





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