In our summer 2020 special I was bullish for June 2021, and I still think that by the time of our next quarterly, in spring 2021, we will be at the foothills of a two year mini-boom in property values driven by increased global allocations to real assets with half-decent, low-volatility income streams (resi, anyone?). If I am right, then 2021 global real estate conversations will soon turn to: steep yield curves, ‘unsustainable’ asset inflation and, if you can believe it, an overvalued sterling. So, before the caravan moves on, now is probably the time to put on record some of my personal, somewhat random memories of the bonkers year that was lockdown 2020.

Mental health: No, not the fears of HR departments that those cooped up in small spaces and with smelly flatmates or infuriating families were on the verge of breakdown. Rather that, during March and April, I noticed mentally ill people out and about, unaccompanied, in central London. One huge young man shouting in great distress at magazines in a small local newsagent, another preaching at full volume near Kensington Palace and another, essentially naked, dancing and gesticulating manically. I suspect that, in those early days, their carers were not sure where to be, or how to socially distance with their patients.

Manners: This is not strictly a lockdown phenomenon but I have definitely become more sensitive, during 2020, to the deterioration in basic good manners. A couple of examples: a major City law firm that had requested a Zoom call joining it 20 minutes late with a weak non-apology (“Things are so busy”), the marketing team of a London private equity firm not acknowledging an email proposal that they had asked for (it was left to their boss to explain “I guess they weren’t interested”). I am not even going to start on the huge amount of self-congratulatory, embarrassing, immodest rubbish that is posted, to my mind self-defeatingly, on LinkedIn. But my absolute manners bête noire? Drivers that do not thank or even acknowledge you when you let them in. Appalling. But, but, but… credit where credit is due. During the dog days of late March, I stopped as a pedestrian was approaching a zebra crossing. Not only did he smile, he waved to show his thanks. Take a bow, Mr Crispin Odey.

Books, YouTube, telly ads: I am sure I was not the only one who felt almost duty-bound to read something serious during early lockdown. My wanderings took me through Karl Marx (and AJP Taylor’s brilliant introduction to and dissection of him), Trollope (my emails during this period became somewhat formal) and the Bible (has anything more beautiful than Ecclesiastes ever been written?). But it wasn’t all high-brow stuff. I watched old crackling footage of the 1956 and 1960 Democratic primaries and conventions (the floor vote where a thin, sallow JFK, with shirt-collar askew, loses the VP slot to the towering Estes Kefauver in 1956; LBJ debating JFK in 1960) and cried at clips of the late JJ Williams to the perfect accompaniment of Bill McLaren and Cliff Morgan. Embarrassingly, starved of meaningful sport to watch, I started to shout at stuff on the telly that really could not matter less. I hope I can blame lockdown for my irrational obsession with two summer 2020 adverts: first, the utterly feeble OnTheMarket ad where a group of random, totally dead-behind-the-eyes strangers start singing a rubbish tune about buying a house. The production looks like it cost about £2.50. Then in midsummer a self-satisfied ad appeared suggesting coffee bags were a brilliant new idea. I was served a mug of hot water with a coffee bag in it during my university admissions interview in 1981 with a charming, if somewhat chaotic, Irishman who is now Professor of History of Christianity at Cambridge. It was undrinkable. The reason coffee from bags did not, and will not, catch on is that it tastes as if it has been strained through a tramp’s overcoat.

Commercial reflections: Sports clubs and theatre owners trying to extract cash from the government arguing that, without it, such places “will disappear”. Utter nonsense, of course. The owners might change, different shareholders might benefit, but the venues themselves will still be there when demand returns. My sympathies lay not with these big entities (and definitely not the airlines) but with the thousands of small businesses affected. Every time I passed yet another boarded-up shop I visualised the personal tragedy behind each closure. The excitement of coming up with the idea, sitting round a table with friends and family explaining it, the planning, the loan from the bank or from friends, the decorating, then opening day and the first few customers – all blown away.

And then of course we all suddenly had to have a view about ‘the office’. Every single work call since March has had as its opening minuet “How has it been for you?”, each hearing out the other’s ‘take’ on WFH. The most perceptive comment I heard was from one of our contributors, a very senior global fund manager, who said that London and the City was, in the end, about intellectual capital and new ideas and that WFH did not encourage either because ‘Zoom-life’ was too regimented and prescriptive to allow room to improvise, pitch and argue for a new idea with colleagues.

There were some dark days during 2020 of course, and my reading, watching and listening patterns no doubt shaped my irascibility and preoccupations. It was surely no coincidence that I so embraced the theme of ‘everything is meaningless’ contained in both Ecclesiastes and Leonard Woolf’s autobiography (Virginia’s body was found in a river that runs through the farm where I was brought up). But I suspect next year we’ll be thinking that gloom and doom is so 2020.