London Diary: fashionistas wait for the ‘mother of all discount sales’  

Running for Corona

Fundraising for the National Health Service to fight Coronavirus is fast becoming a cottage industry in Britain. Literally.

After a centenarian war veteran Tom Moore hit international headlines by raising more than £30 million by taking rounds of his front lawn on his walker, another centenarian — Dabirul Choudhury, a Bangladeshi immigrant—is doing the same. He set himself a target of 100 laps when he started his mission on April 26, and though he achieved that within days he is still at it having already raised £75,000. He is also observing the Ramzan fast.

The money he raises will go towards helping coronavirus victims not only in the UK but also in other countries, including his native Bangladesh. He hopes his modest initiative would feed into the larger international effort to fight poverty and disease. Not to be left behind the two centenarians, a six-year-old boy with a spinal deformity has raised £280,000 winning praise from Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Frank Mills, who only learned to walk 18 months ago, managed to walk 10 metres a day with the help of his walker. According to the BBC, he was hoping to raise only £99 but has raised nearly 3,000 times that. Johnson described him as “brave and brilliant”. Who’s next? Come on.

Collateral damage

Nobody is waiting for the Corona lockdown to be lifted as eagerly as Britain’s fashionistas. And for good reason. Apparently, “a mother of all discount sales” on fashion labels is waiting for them at the end of the tunnel.

Seven weeks into a forced business blackout, fashion stores are stuck with so much unsold stock that they are desperate to get rid of it before it gets dated. Many, including such big brand names as Mulberry, Next and H&M, have already been discounting heavily online, but the real deal is promised for when normal shopping resumes.

Unsold clothes and accessories estimated to be worth more than £10 billion worth are said to be ready for the chop with offers of upto 50 per cent discount. “When shops do eventually reopen, it’s going to be a race to get rid of stock faster than everyone else,” an industry insider told The Mail on Sunday.

Suppliers too are feeling the heat with Bangladesh’s Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association reporting cancellation or suspension of orders worth over £2 billion. A collateral casualty of the pandemic.

Social-distancing? Moi?

A high-profile British scientist Neil Ferguson, whose dire warnings against the spread of Coronavirus led Prime Minister Boris Johnson to impose the countrywide lockdown, has been forced to resign as a government adviser after he was found breaking his own social-distancing rules by arranging a secret rendezvous with his mistress.

Ferguson heads the group of scientists at Imperial College London whose modelling recommended stringent physical distancing rules to avoid the risk of catching infection. Yet, even as the rest of his countrymen and women were being forced to follow his prescription, he himself had no qualms breaking the rules in the quest to meet his girlfriend, Antonia Staats.

She travelled across London to visit him on at least two occasions. Her explanation: she considered the two households to be one!

But the professor was more contrite.

“I accept I made an error of judgment and took the wrong course of action...The government guidance is unequivocal, and is there to protect all of us,” said the naughty professor.

Voodoo science?

Almost every day, there is a new twist on the supposed characteristics of Coronavirus and the official advice on protecting ourselves against it. Three months into the pandemic nobody is still sure if wearing a mask is any good with not only different countries adopting different policies but different local governments in the same country going their separate ways. And all citing scientific advice to back their policy.

In Britain, the central government has suddenly changed its advice from it being optional to wear a mask to becoming almost mandatory in crowded and “enclosed” places though the term “mandatory” is still not used leading to a lot of confusion.

Scientists too are all over the place on this, as they are on the issue of which age-group is more vulnerable to infection. Until now, the conventional scientific wisdom was that the virus doesn’t attack the young. But a new study claims that people of all ages are potentially equally at risk.

Meanwhile, a senior British scientist Graham Medley who advises the government has spilled the beans admitting that the mathematical models behind much of the official strategy are largely based on “educated guesswork, intuition and experience” rather than hard evidence.

New word

“ Lockstalgia”—the word for when it’s all over one day and we might begin to feel nostalgic about the lockdown.

And, lastly, the UK Government has changed its advice to its citizens from “Stay Home” to “Stay Alert” as it begins to ease lockdown restrictions, but Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland say they will stick to the simpler old advice.