Credit Management July and August 2020

VIEW FROM THE SEA FRONT
AUTHOR – David Andrews
CYCLING through the eerily
quiet North Laines area
of Brighton on the first
weekend of lockdown (I was
out for my daily exercise,
before you go grassing me
up), I was reminded of an early episode of
The Walking Dead.
Rick is walking down a normally
heaving suburban High Street. There are
no signs of life, tumbleweed cartwheels
down the main road. ‘Jesus,’ says Rick.
‘Where is everyone?’
The silence is then punctuated by that
now scarily familiar low growl, signifying
a peckish zombie lurking nearby. Yikes.
Reader, I can testify that there were no
zombies (apart from a couple of shuffling
street drinkers who had not got the Stay at
Home, Save Lives message) in Brighton’s
Kensington Gardens on the morning of
March 28, 2020.
But there was no-one. Houston, there
are no life signs. Nada. A fine spring
morning in the North Laines normally
heralds hordes – literally – of DFLs (those
Down from London) and other assorted
day trippers mingling with the locals,
spending freely and showing why my city
is one of the most visited in Europe.
But that was then. BCV. Before
COVID-19. Before THE VIRUS. Before our
lives changed, perhaps forever.
‘The writer defines the world’, asserted
the great American novelist James Salter.
And if one thing is certain in this uncertain
universe, it is that many, many words will
be written about the extraordinary social
and economic events of 2020.
TENNIS LESSON
I was in Spain playing tennis for a few days
when news of the ‘bug’ that was thought to
have emerged in China began to appear.
That was back in January. Mostly, people
just shrugged. So, what of it, was the
typical response. It’s like the ‘flu, right?
It happens. It’s winter. And so on and
so forth. I recall images played across
Spanish media of UK expats, partying
loudly on a beach and taunting locals with
shouts of ‘we’ve got the vi-ruuuusssss’
drunkenly sung to the ‘tune’ of a popular
football terrace chant.
I recall thinking, these clowns are
doing us no favours at all here.
And I recall thinking, I’m getting the
heck out of Dodge. Before it’s too late. Fast
forward to high summer 2020. Our beaches
are beginning to heave once again, our
shops are slowly but surely beginning to
open for business, and the tumbleweed
that a few months back metaphorically
blew through the North Laines has been
replaced by human beings, rather than
zombies.
Rebuilding, as it was following the
Second World War, will be a long, slow,
and mortally expensive process.
‘It’s like we have upset
the Gods. I’ve been trading
for 15 years, and in that
time we have had the
meltdown of the banking
crisis, when it was as if
the earth had swallowed
up my customers’.
NATIONAL COST
Just how much it is going to cost us as a
nation – in monetary terms – is an ongoing
calculation. And the numbers continue to
travel north at a phenomenal rate.
Our government borrowed a record
£62bn in April – more than had been
expected for the whole of 2020. The
budget deficit – the shortfall between
state spending and income from taxes
– continues to accelerate as tax receipts
fall off a cliff with the economy only just
embarking on a long and fragile road to
recovery.
The Office for Budget Responsibility,
the Treasury tax and spending watchdog,
estimates the deficit could hit £300bn this
year, five times the sum borrowed in 2019,
and almost twice as much as after the
2008 financial crisis.
Nature may be impeccably reliable in
terms of its timing regarding the seasons,
but when pandemics are involved there is
no rhyme nor reason. Timing, in the case
of COVID-19, could not have been worse.
Many areas of our economy were
only just emerging, blinking into the
harsh, chill January days. The near civil
war in our country brought on by the
Brexit debacle and a bruising General
Election, the early seeds of a recovery in
a beleaguered property market – these all
now seem to be distant events, shadowy
vicissitudes played out through the
miasma of a distorted 2020.
On the weekend before the Prime
Minister made that fateful address,
announcing the immediate closure of
our shops, our pubs and restaurants, a
shutting down of our way of life, I spoke
– presciently it now seems – to a man who
owns one of the more popular cafes in
Brighton’s North Laines.
UPSETTING THE GODS
I was locking my bike to some scaffolding
outside his joint, and we started to chat. ‘I
don’t,’ he said, ‘much like the way things
seem to be going.
‘It’s like we have upset the Gods. I’ve
been trading for 15 years, and in that
time we have had the meltdown of the
banking crisis, when it was as if the earth
had swallowed up my customers. We
started to recover and then we had that
blasted Brexit. And when punters face an
uncertain future, they stop spending. It’s
a herd instinct. You can’t blame them….’
Now, as I pedal through those same
North Laines, and I clock the orderly
socially distanced queues outside the
slowly but surely re-opening cafes, the
gingerly returning out of towners, and
the tumbleweed is replaced by tentative
footfall, I think of that circle of life.
And think of all the grievous challenges
societies have faced over the centuries.
The wars, the plagues, the pogroms, the
terrors, and the horrors, and I think, yes,
we will survive. Of course we will. And
we will be back together again, happily
handing over our fiver for a pint, once
again browsing the restaurant menu, once
again booking a flight to the other side of
the world. Living, once again.
David Andrews is a freelance writer.
Advancing the credit profession / www.cicm.com / July & August 2020 / PAGE 27