Text Only

We hear a lot these days about the economic impact of the pandemic. Has this been on your mind? If so, tell us what you're thinking.

I don't know where the economic effects of the pandemic will lead us, and I try to live day by day. My immediate family is not too badly affected - many of those I love are retired, so they are all right; most of my cousins have been able to keep their jobs. My sister, who is at the low end of the economic spectrum, has been able to get retail work. The person I worry about the most is my daughter, who is two years out of a film degree. The pandemic has prevented her from making the projects she organized for this year, and for which she still has funding. The pandemic has prevented her from carrying out work she was hired for this year and for which she tentatively is still on board to do next year. In the meantime she's been doing video work, so her skills are definitely in use, but she feels that this is an entire year out of her life in which she ought to have been getting a foot up in the industry, and in which absolutely nothing has happened. And I think she lives day to day as well, because it's not obvious how the entertainment industry will recover - or if there will be any difference for her in 2021. This entry doesn't really address the economy. I think that the entertainment industry, AND the global economy, in general, will recover: things will be DIFFERENT. Perhaps we will become less of a consumer society. Tourism will change. I could have written an entire entry on the aviation industry, rather than entertainment: airlines folding, pilots and aviation workers furloughed with little hope for future work; like entertainment, aviation will be DIFFERENT. But I feel that developments within the next few years will assist recovery. We are all waiting for a chance to work again and we are willing to work.