Why, Wye, Why?

After return­ing from Italy in Septem­ber I had to do one of the new govern­ment mandated Day 2 PCR tests for trav­el­lers to the UK. My employ­ers duly ordered some from a big company called Randox Health. When it arrived, it turned out you couldn’t post it back, you had to drop it off at a parti­cip­at­ing phar­macy.

Unfor­tu­nately they had decided to only organ­ise two drop-off points for the whole of Kent. A region of 2 million people. The nearest one to me was a village phar­macy in Wye, a pictur­esque village in the middle of nowhere.

I had to do sever­al tests to make sure I didn’t have covid (along with being tested to with­in an inch of my life at work, I’m amazed I have any nostrils left at this point), and then go on two trains to drop off my sample before the 2pm collec­tion dead­line. There was a giant pile of samples swamp­ing the floor of the tiny shop. Supremely point­less, and a major infec­tion risk if I’d actu­ally had covid.

Randox then turned up in the news in a corrup­tion scan­dal for bribing/”lobbying” Owen Pater­son to get them lucrat­ive govern­ment contracts without having to go through any kind of compet­it­ive tender, often work they weren’t compet­ent to handle , lead­ing to the MP having to resign.

Wye is beau­ti­ful at least.