Early Covid pandemic tweets from the archive

A DAY IN THE LIFE:

Langton is on half-term hols this week and we’ve organised the weather nicely.

Just Yorkshire but hey, that’ll do. Pubs, walks and more pubs, what’s not to like?

We’ll try to get a stub of an email out and intend to be active on Twitter. Back properly on 7 June.

COVID – THE EARLY DAYS:

It’s almost impossible to view the past from the future.

Largely because you know what happened and you can’t empathise with the people at the time (even if it was an earlier version of yourself) who didn’t know then what you know now.

So it was with some interest that we pulled together the tweets below. They were sent out in the very early days of the pandemic. We were shocked when Chris Whitty said 20,000 people might die, we thought a furlough was a distance marker in a horse race and we were assured by some leaders that it would all be over by the summer and by others that we should prepare ourselves for far-reaching change.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:

Listening to the highlights of Dominic Cummings’ excoriation of everything not Dominic Cummings last week brought back to mind the early days of the pandemic.

Remember the heavily guarded buses of travellers returning from China, the shunned cruise ships and then the ‘don’t go to work but go to work but don’t go to work’ advice?

And then the ‘don’t go to the pub…shut the pubs…stay at home’ series of comments?

Although we poked fun at the overuse of the word ‘unprecedented’, these were unprecedented times.

And then the loo-roll panic, the PPE, testing etc. Weird times & we all lived through them.

Herewith, some of our early Tweets. They’re unedited and hopefully give an idea of the struggle to get through uncharted waters. They’re under a few headings, Questions, Observations, Dilemmas & sundry. We’ve left them in date order as that seems to make more sense. Some more tomorrow.

THE TWEETS:

Weds 1 Apr 2020:

• Covid ££ side effects #23. More (permanent) remote working? Landlords may be on the back foot but it’s unlikely tenants will give them a break. If remote working works, then why not do more of it? A non-starter for pubs but it could save 10% or 15% of sales for others.

• Covid ££ side effects #24. More hoarding (& waste)? Will empty shelves scare (or scar) consumers or is this all a big nothing? Probably not the latter. A shock could raise the savings ratio. Could make bla-blahing about a ‘sharp bounce back’ a bit wishful?

• Covid ££ side effects #25. Shortages, cardboard, who’d a thought it? But it makes sense. Recycling down, bulk shipping down => no pulp etc. Gimme bread over cardboard any day. But we’ve been used to both.

• Covid ££ side effects #26. Cut dividends further expose criminal folly of final salary pension schemes. How can we pay for them? I mean, how? Youngsters paying for the Boomers? Again? Langton, as so often, in the squeezed middle.

• Covid ££ side effects #27. Poverty is the new black. Is premiumisation going to have to take a back seat when we get back to ‘normal’? Personal balance sheets are taking a pasting, perhaps ‘trading up’, ‘upselling’ and the like will be so, well, yesterday?

• COVID Qs #6. When you stress tested your business model, did you have this in mind? No? And we grind to a halt when it snows, our flood defences don’t work. Yes, these are rare events but is it sensible to have a bit of financial fat on the bone? Ask a grizzly in October.

Thurs 2 Apr 2020:

• Covid ££ side effects #28. What about re-opening costs? Companies struggling to pay wages & rent with no income & no gov support (yet) & then they have to stump up to reopen? Take hoarding down, re-order stock, a thorough clean, re-boot staff etc. How’s that gonna happen?

• Covid ££ side effects #29. Permanent changes? Cookery programmes shooting the lights out atm. Will customers flood back to restaurants? When they’ve boned up on cooking & have 1,000 tins of baked beans to eat?

• Covid ££ side effects #30. Business rates: Can you really bring them back? They are 1) hated and 2) gone. You wouldn’t reintroduce the cane at school, would you? Well, you might. Correlates strongly with which newspaper you read…

• Covid ££ side effects #31. Will we be the same after this? Probably not. Consumers may – deep thinking alert – reflect on their own mortality. They will have to repair their own balance sheets, save a bit more & perhaps spend a bit less.

• Covid ££ side effects #32. What is all this noise crowding out? No bandwidth to think about much else. Will Pizza Express still need to refi? Other walking wounded? What about the Pat Val criminal trial? And any civil action? And Mr Johnson’s divorce? Etc. Etc.

• COVID Qs #7. Calling a spade an effing shovel. How can gov ‘privatise’ this problem? 1) take the lockdown off, keep ‘social distancing’ in place, drop job support & let private sector take the hit or 2) watch Italy / Spain & copy them. Low political risk is 2. Reality might be 1.

• COVID Qs #8. People to Govt. Eff business, we don’t need experts, that one. Could you even run a bath? Rabbit, headlights & we had China, Italy to copy. And saying current gov is ‘better than the other lot’ is a) unproven but b) possibly true & c) deeply, deeply depressing.

• Destroy the economy or let 200k vulnerable people die? It’s a dreadful, dreadful choice and well above our pay grade. But one thing we do know. Don’t, whatever you do, do both.

Fri 3 Apr 2020:

• Langton Covid comment #1. Industry facing two ways at once: A miserable & depressed face turned to landlords (to secure concessions) but a more upbeat one for the bank (as it is under no obligation to lend to companies that were not viable before the Covid-19 upheavals.

• Langton Covid comment #2. So feedback from companies is driven by a) the truth as to what is going on out there but also b) by whether they’re more concerned about being downbeat (to influence landlords) or upbeat to secure funding from the bank.

• Langton Covid comment #3. Shoot us, this is the pits. Langton found itself watching a back-episode of Bake Off yesterday. Sure, Nielsen says ‘consumption’ of online media has spiked, but we’d hoped we were better than that…

• Covid ££ side effects #33. This is a change of life crossroads. Some habits, hopefully pub visits, gym contrition etc we will rush back to but others we might dump for good. Not sure the bookies are in a good spot at present.

• COVID Qs #9. Where’s the lecture on life skills from Jacob Rees Mogg when you need it? He’s likely been silenced & reduced to haranguing peasants through a megaphone from behind the diamond-encrusted battlements of his castle in Somerset somewhere. Britain needs you Jake…

• COVID Qs #10. Long Easter Weekend coming up shortly but will we even notice? Or are the weeks descending into some sort of formless mush? Looks easy on paper but it could be hard to spark up the old engine again when this lot stops.

Monday 6 April 2020:

• Covid ££ side effects #34. The outbreak has kicked off some unpleasant behaviour. Derbyshire Police & general legitimised bossiness. A lot of Capt Mainwairings out there, this will need rowing back from at some point. Weaponised coughing is obviously disgusting & illegal.

• Covid ££ side effects #35. Illicit drugs. Street dealers now stand out like sore thumbs. The elements of Langton that stayed in London have seen two busts outside our flat in E1. Legit. Spread-‘em, drug dogs, packets of white powder, ‘ten-grand easy, Sarge’, the whole works.

• Langton Covid comment #4. Langton getting told to stand in line, being ticked off for bagging 3 cartons of long-life milk etc is bad but things could be worse, Jacob Rees Mogg could be haranguing we peasants on our life-skills deficiencies from the battlements of his castle.

• COVID Qs #11. Will it be a V-shaped or U-shaped downturn? Or will it be ‘bath shaped’? Given the financial shock involved in putting the lockdown in place & the sheer bloody hard work that will involved in taking it off, we think V and U shapes are aspirational.

• Langton Covid comment #5. And talking of this being a good year to bury bad news, just where is the Russia report? But, frankly, does anyone care? Horrible, obviously, but this is a massive get-out-of-jail card on a number of levels.

• Covid ££ side effects #36. Nature doesn’t wait. Beards back in & hair dye growing out but spare a thought for the growers out there. Bedding plant demand zero & what about dog breeders? Your one ‘friendly chocolate lab’ is about to become 12 with nary a buyer in site.