We took the privileged middle class route of leaving London in early March for our house here on the Sussex coast between Rye and Hastings. Thinly justified by distancing our older selves from two millennials then sharing the house and braving the tube to work in central London. With just sheep for company in the fields surrounding our sizable garden, we suffer none of the restrictions facing those in tight urban flats. Breakfast and lunch on the sun-dazzled terrace looking out to the Channel can make it feel like an endless holiday. Living carefully well within an old fashioned defined pension removes us from the financial stresses facing enterprising (and not so enterprising, even more so) young things just putting together their futures in private sector jobs directly affected by the lockdown. At the fitter, younger end of the at-risk group, we can venture out once a week for a careful socially distanced shop at the local butcher and quaint family run supermarket which survives in Rye despite being a tad pricey for its limited but perfectly adequate range of staple foods and household items.
So l record our perverse enjoyment of this tragic and worrying period whilst aware that I’m edging into that smug and tin-eared territory occupied by the purveyors of the dreaded Christmas family round robins and Facebook entries about their holidays on there Algarve. We do all the obvious things. Gardening. Zooming. Admin via internet. Online lecturing and exam marking and conference calls. The latter are more of a challenge than is sometimes realised and thus not quite the cure-all for future business operations. I’ve only had to chair one so far and, despite careful advance planning, it reached its decisions rather more painfully and slowly than I had expected. I’ve just been tuning into the others and have found them somewhat languid and tedious affairs at times from which my clumsily multi-tasking mind has all too often wandered.
Relations with children and grandchildren are arguably improved by the need for more precise structures. The daily history lesson with four out of the five grandchildren is the main focal point now. Pretty time consuming as I struggle to stay half a chapter ahead of the class (how did old fashioned generalist school teachers survive before Wikipedia?) but I seem still to be getting away with it. No walkout or rebellions yet. And Laura does a weekly Zoom round all the cousins on the Greek side which can be a bit chaotic but is loads more regular contact than we all had before this restricted period. I haven’t seen so much of Katherine’s Canadian nephews and nieces for ages.
That side of life will probably survive the current crisis and become a more regular feature. But I’m not writing off the airlines. Unlike Warren Buffet against whom it’s risky to bet and who has clearly decided that a mixture of Zoom and fear had sealed their fate. This is probably the biggest single unknown outcome from the pandemic. Predicting how institutions and individuals will adjust their travel behaviour on a permanent basis. Most other activities will simply accelerate the trends that were already up and running. Hence the resilience of share prices in the FANG group of digital giants even though they will all record big drops in their profits this year. The new normal will favour them even more than before. But whether we shall find the internet and Zoom an adequate substitute for personal contact is more doubtful. At the start off this, I predicted that universities are going to struggle long term with marketing their campus-based degree against the online alternative which more and more students are currently experiencing. That remains my view for the lower end of the university food chain, but the top end will strengthen its hold on the premium market. Whether that (and its equivalent in other service markets) will produce sufficient volume of inter continental travel to keep the airlines going is a massive guess. Deciding whether to buy shares in Ryanair and easyJet will be an interesting test of my appetite for gut instinct risk.
View from the Clapham Omnibus 