Isolation Lessons from London Lockdown

Hi there and I hope you are still keeping safe and well.

I ignored government advice to take a staycation and was lucky enough to spend last week in the South of France. However, I received an email bombshell on Friday which had my family and I scurrying to get out. Ever curious (like all good finance business partners), I have taken another light-hearted look at lessons which we can learn from the situations we currently find ourselves in. Click on the video image link above to see what I’ve learned this week.

After an apparent easing of Lockdown in the UK, certain specific local areas have experienced a reintroduction of local lockdowns. Travellers returning from certain counties overseas where the infection rates are on the rise, have also experienced requirements to self-isolate for 14 days on their return.

It was into this situation which I was potentially thrust a few days ago. The UK Government announced that all traveller returning after 4 am on Saturday would have to go into self-imposed isolation. I am not sure why they announced it this way rather than saying from this point onwards travellers from France need to isolate but that was the requirement and therefore if you wanted to avoid quarantining you needed to get back to the UK before 4am on Saturday.

With hindsight, the likelihood of this happening was not completely unexpected, but despite this I had made no contingency plans to put in place should it happen and this was my mistake. I could have easily booked some refundable earlier flights but chose not to do. This led me to have to spend a few hours trying to work out how to get back to the UK via another route as within minutes all direct flights from France were fully booked. If you watch the video you can see whether I made it back before the deadline.

I ended up missing a day’s holiday and spending 12 hours on some pretty expensive flights. The lesson for finance business partners is that we should always plan for the unexpected and if it happens, we simply invoke plan B rather than descend into chaos like I did.

Also, thanks for all your comments and feedback and if you have any this week, I am sure people would love to hear them.

 Stay safe

 Sean