With our 2021 camping season about to belatedly start, we are once again busy with preparations.



Ever hopeful, with a few nice days of spring sunshine to warm the cockles, we will get the go-ahead next week which will allow us to implement phase one of re-opening on the 12 April. This is the date on Boris’ roadmap when outdoor hospitality and self-contained accommodation is go go, go go.

Businesses doing risk assessments is normal and it always has been, after all no business wants its guests falling down a hole being dug in front of the front door. The difference today is that Risk assessment has become a jargon term for what people used to call common sense. Today we have to write everything down because we live in a litigious society dominated by lawyers and insurance companies. It has created a whole new industry, where you can see jobs advertised within the Department for Hazard Mitigation Services.

Last year and this, a new branch of the Government’s Hazard Mitigation Services created the Covid Secure Guidance to Business, a weighty but deliberately vague tome from our Civil Service, outlining the need for businesses wishing to open to be ‘Covid Secure’, another jargon term for implementing common sense during a virus pandemic.

Having given business owners a few days to become masters of this new science, we all created risk assessments based on said advice from the weighty tome, Meanwhile our insurance companies gleefully dotted another I and crossed another t and tightened up a few clauses to their new policies to ensure they minimise their own risks of paying out. Cynical, I know.

In practice, it is the process of how to provide a clean, safe and excellent holiday by minimising and respecting the devastating effect of a pandemic. Our aim is to keep you safe and give you a feeling of having hidden the pandemic in a wardrobe during your stay so that you have a good time.

Welcome sanitiser stations (bottles of sanitiser), track and trace logs (booking information, QR codes), a lot of yellow rubber gloves and bleach and a huge uplift in PPE consumption. This year’s PPE shortage appears to be the patio heaters we are struggling to find, apparently stuck on the Suez Canal. Either way the pandemic is doing little for the green planet movement. Where did Greta Thunberg go?

Major boost for our new seasonal staff is the purchase of a fogging machine promising to revolutionise the sanitising process, cutting minutes off the palaver of booking a shower. The Shower – Ventilate – Sanitise – Next Guest shower booking process is now down to 55 minutes per shower room enabling us to offer a shower slot every 27 ½ minutes, which we have rounded to 30 minutes for simplicity!

With the world discovering Zoom and other tech solutions during the Pandemic we will try our own bit of tech. We have invested in some APP ordering software for our campsite and glamping guests to play with this year. In theory, (we have yet to test the demand on the rural internet, Denise and our kitchen) our guests should have some sort of campsite room service whereby they can order and pay for a Pizza or flagon of beer (another job to do) from the comfort of their well-appointed 10 berth tunnel tent, then await delivery whilst they tend to their campfire and enjoy the spectacular sunset view in a perfectly Covid Secure setting.

All in all, having done our risk assessment, things are much the same as last year with the odd tweak or two and wariness of far more Covid fatigue amidst the population. The risk conclusion of our scientists is that the outdoor nature of camping and glamping is the safest holiday available in 2021. For our site we believe we would score very favourably, we have easy to ventilate individual toilet and shower rooms which allow us to sanitise and ventilate between family bubbles, thereby reducing the risks of viral transmission between guests using communal facilities. Unfortunately, with that said, we are not allowed to open our communal toilet and shower blocks until May 17 somewhat limiting the ability of a campsite to be a campsite. The only solution is for guests to have their own self-contained facility. Rock on caravans, motorhomes and toilet tents. A quirk to our own business, is that our pub is allowed toilets open but not the actual pub. So for this we have moved the pub to a tent (our new marquee bar). I know! 

As with a lot of these rules it often makes no sense, so I can only guess that is why the Department for Common Sense gave up writing Covid Secure Volume Two for this year. This year it is just had a simply policy of: ‘yes you can open…. AH’. We are dealing with the AH so hope to see you soon.

Happy Holidays.