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Venturing out of lockdown


Here we all are slowly easing out of the most crazy time of a generation, and waiting with baited breath to see if the economy starts to recover. I don’t know about you, but this feels like a time for reflection, as many of us restart life again, with work, family and other commitments.


To be honest, I haven’t experienced lock down in the sense of being confined to my home and on furlough, but rather I’ve been at the other end, where there’s been double the workload,  juggling several roles in the business in what at times has felt like a desperate bid to keep the doors open to enable there to be a job for other team members to come back to.


As a supporter of a brilliant local charity The Island, I wanted to be able to do something to help them support the children they passionately serve and came up with the idea of an activity box, filled with all you needed to create some lovely chocolate making activities to do at home. At the time, it meant we needed videos to show how to do the task, so that the children could follow the videos to do the activities without their parent/carers help. So, 15 takes later, lots of apples, bananas, errors and laughs, I finally had 4 short but very basic videos which could  be sent out by a link, shared with the families who would receive the activity bags. I felt quietly terrified, but reassured that, as the link wouldn’t be made available publicly, only a limited number of families would be seeing my inadequate attempts, that it couldn’t be too bad. So, finally, the activity bags were prepped and made ready for delivering and off they went, delivered by a couple of The Island team, myself and a family member.


Feedback was brilliant, the children and young people who received the activity bags were delighted, and had lots of fun, one comment made by the family was that the activities had drawn them closer as they did them together, which really made my day. 


So, I sent out a few more to friends and family members with young children , asked for their feedback to see if we should consider this for our website, and received a resounding yes! So, a whole lot of design work, ingredients searching, box prepping later and we were ready to launch. In true Linda style though, I’d written into the text, check out the videos here on our Youtube channel, thinking at the time that I’d re do the videos so they were much more professional, you know, like the proper guys make! How ironic, that I find myself, just an hour ago, taking the biggest breath and clicking make public on, with the original not very professional videos, because I’ve not made the time to film them all again 🙂


So, there’s me way out of my comfort zone, there for all to see, and judge in the public domain. The funny thing is, after all that’s gone on over these last few months, all the horrors that others have gone through, and are still facing, I’ve put it in context, and having made those videos with the very best of intentions, figured does it really matter 🙂 

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About Linda

Linda is the founder of Choc Affair, with a passion for creating wonderfully delicious chocolates, that are ethically made.