We ran out of Later Flow Tests before Christmas. I toured the chemists and the vaccination centers in the City to get another box. I was advised to go online to order, but that service doesn’t appear to be working.

More questions are being asked about the government’s strategy for distributing lateral flow tests after it emerged that the sole distributor to pharmacies closed for four days shortly after it received 2.5 million tests.

Alliance Healthcare, from whom pharmacies receive LFTs to hand out to members of the public who come in with codes, took delivery of the tests on Christmas Eve and then shut.

A government source said last week that shortages in independent pharmacies was a result of deliveries having “closed down for Christmas”.

I want to carry on my work in the company of others , using shared workspaces. But I think it irresponsible to do so without an LFT. I am sure there are many children who will go to school and many adults going to work, with Covid on their breath.

Coming over the Studland ferry yesterday, every person on the open deck wore a face mask as asked. People are mindful of each other’s safety and where people are behaving irresponsibly, they aren’t shy in saying so.

Herd immunity is a great concept, but herds are made up of individual cows and none of us wants to be the infected cow who infects others.

So I wonder just how many of the meetings I have planned to be face to face this month, will happen.

Until LFT boxes reappear in a chemist near me – I suspect very few. Which suggests we are still locked down.

Testing is the key to our confidently going about our business and PCRs simply don’t turn around quickly enough for us to conduct business as usual.

We do need to get LTFs back on the chemist’s shelves and quickly!