Please shop here

At 8am this morning I was in the Centre Court shopping centre in Wimbledon, stood in a line waiting for my COVID booster jab.  The first time I got the vaccine, I was in an out before PY had time to order and collect a coffee from the coffee shop across from the vaccination centre: it really was a matter of minutes. This time, there’s much more of a queue and a lot of people with appointments later in the day who have turned up on the off-chance that they will get a jab early.  The whole process only took 20 minutes but it really did feel longer.

While I was stood waiting I took a look at the shopping centre. It’s early and I wasn’t expecting it to be bustling but there are a lot of places boarded up and it was eerily quiet. The whole place is being redeveloped and I think that they have some interesting plans but this must be the wind-down phase. It’s a bit sad.

I finally submitted some actual work in the form of some responses to a ‘fake’ RFP from a consultancy we are asking to give some guidance about the product that’s being developed. It remained me of my days as a Sales Engineer. Crafting answers in response to RFP questions is a skill that I might have had once but it has taken me some time to ramp-up into the groove. It has forced me to test my own knowledge of the product that I am working on.

At 6:30pm we were on a train heading for Portsmouth. We are staying at the Premier Inn near the FastCat terminal tonight so that we can be across the water in time for the estate agent to open and collect the keys. I am quite nervous about it all. The hotel is decked out for halloween with some cobwebs and characters hanging around reception. There are more friendly than frightening.