Category: Investment returns

November saw the second national lockdown in England.

Most shops closed. All pubs/restaurants closed. Hair dressers closed. No social mixing indoors, and max 1 person to be met up with outside. Not a whole lot of fun. The weather has been relatively nice to us – it’s been damp and chilly, but not unrelentingly so. I’ve found some new parts of London.

At work, we assumed things would turn downwards – as business became harder to do. But in fact we were busy in November. Much busier than we expected.

Trump is now officially a loser. It feels hard to describe Biden as a winner – perhaps I know how Trump feels? – but it is certainly easy to describe Trump as a loser.

But the word of the month has been Vaccines. Both an expensive Pfizer/BioNTech one, and a ‘good enough, and easy enough, and cheap enough’ one from Oxford University/AstraZeneca. Suddenly the mood music has changed very much for the better.

Continue reading “Nov 2020: spirits lifted in lockdown 2.0” →

It’s national lockdown, in England, again.

It seemed pretty bad being put into Tier 2, here in London. This arcane form of lockdown jargon has us Londoners unable to socialise indoors with people from another household. Which turns every law-abiding restaurant’s dinner, at least in central London, into Valentine’s night.

The weather has been miserable too. The wettest month for over 10 years. Thankfully, not unrelentingly so.

But at the end of the month, kaboom, we have another national lockdown for (at least) a month. It doesn’t sound as if it will be quite as bad as the spring version – while pubs/restaurants have to close for eat in dining, takeaway-etc is very much allowed, and a variety of shops/services are allowed to continue to trade. But household mixing is off, almost including outdoors, and misery has set in.

Continue reading “October 2020: A miserable end to a miserable month” →

September saw some lovely weather. I found myself getting out around a lot of water, for some reason. London has a lot more water than just the Thames.

Autumn kicked in with a vengeance at the end of the month. Along with it, the surge in Covid-19 cases that has been occurring across Europe started happening in the UK too. The government brought in a ‘rule of six’ (people, maximum, except in workplaces / weddings). In London our lockdown remains relatively mild, but there is a definite question of how long that can last – while some pubs/restaurants are models of compliance, others aren’t – if I get covid-19 anywhere it will be from one of them, I am virtually certain. Most likely from some waiter leaning over me, with their mask not reaching their lower lip, breathing a dose-y viral load all over me in a confined indoor space.

I’ve been back in the office a few times. I’ve used quite a few Ubers, and been on the tube a couple of times. I’ve been out to quite a few restaurants/similar. My spending is definitely returning to normal.

Continue reading “Sep 2020: update on a zero month, and on Q3” →