Credit Management March 2020

VIEW FROM THE SEA FRONT
AUTHOR – David Andrews
mean…’) recently retired roofing contractor
Michael looked out across a glassy Med and
pronounced that life, post-effing Brexit, is not
bad at all.
‘Geezers all saying that’s it, we might as well
turn the lights out now, well, they was wrong,
wasn’t they?’
‘I mean,’ he said, pausing to take a long glug
of a rather appealing pint of San Miguel, ‘the
lefties was all saying that we are all going to be
f***ed, that our economy would collapse, that
the banks would be stopping giving credit, that
our pensions would not be paid……what the
f**k was all that abaht? Eh?’
As the light of the warm Spanish sun danced
around the moistened – now perilously near
empty - pinto glass, Michael gave a broad grin,
uttered a low-level belch, and signaled to a
chirpy waiter for ‘another one of your finest
please Manuel….’
Michael, like so many of the expat
community in Little Britain, as the Costa del
Sol is also referred to by sun blushed local
exports, may well have breathed an inward
sigh of relief. While many of the prejudices
and pre-conceived resentments towards our
erstwhile membership of the EU are no doubt
still harbored by many who prefer the southern
European daily sunshine to the intemperate
Why are you so
fragmented?
Why do you lot
loathe each other
so much? What
happened to your
legendary sense of
national unity, the
bulldog spirit?
greyness of our own shores, this post Brexit
idyll now looks to be remarkably untroubled. It
is as if it never happened.
GOING IT ALONE
In other news...more and more people are
going it alone, and with the prospect of a
strengthening economy, a keener interest in
entrepreneurial venture is bound to follow,
as sure as night follows day. Recent ONS data
reveals that there are around 4.8 million selfemployed
workers in the UK. Apparently the
most common reason to go it alone is freedom
from the 9 to 5 routine and the opportunity to
make a lot more money than as a grunt on the
payroll.
But while it is commendable to want to
jettison the Mother Ship, most of us need
a regular income. Bills must be paid; food
needs to be put on the table. Yet the scourge
of late payment continues. It’s irksome. When
companies withhold payment, there is no
excuse. Cash flow? Get out of here. Spread the
love. Play the game.
Then we can all go forth and prosper, to
misquote some bloke with pointy ears.
David Andrews is freelance writer
Advancing the credit profession / www.cicm.com / March 2020 / PAGE 29