Time for Me Yet?
If Colonel Gaddafi can do it at 67, then perhaps I can do it at 62.
On the other I couldn’t afford five hundred beautiful girls, but at least I’d give the handful I could afford something a bit for readable and useful. I would also allow a much more relaxed, or some might say racy, dress code.
Seriously though, why do we pander to dictators like Gaddafi?
Is it because he is such a charming host or because he has lots of oil?
Belle de Jour Comes Clean
I first came across Belle de Jour‘s blog in about 2005, when I was writing a book about the Internet. I found it well-written, amusing and above all true. But it is not something that I read regularly, as quite frankly I prefer real and proper relationships with women. To me these are all about doing so many things together; seeing a film, enjoying a meal, having a walk on a beach, sorting out your mutual troubles, exploring interesting places and sharing a bed with all that entails.
Now she has decided to come clean in the Sunday Times.
She is a research scientist by the name of Dr. Brooke Magnanti. In some ways this alone will upset the literary establishment, as scientists aren’t supposed to be able to write. I’m a scientist/engineer and I was told at school that my writing was abysmal in every way.
In my life, I’d have three brushes with prostitution. I should say that it was all on a purely non-sexual basis, as quite frankly, I want a proper relationship with a woman and I had one of those for more than forty years. So if I have another relationship hopefully it’ll last an equally long time. If I could achieve that it would take me past my century and I would love to do that!
I was in Boston in perhaps 1980 and I needed to take a taxi back to my hotel. I got in one door and a very attractive lady a few years younger than me got in the other. I said sorry and made to get out, but she stopped me and asked where I was going. I said I was going to the Copley Plaza Hotel and she said that would do her. As we drove along, she was nothing less than honest and said that she was a hooker and would I like to enjoy her body. I said no, but I was a stranger in the city and would she have a drink and perhaps lunch and show me the sights, as I had about four hours before a meeting. It was the days before mobile phones and she said that she would have the lunch, but she’d have to phone her agency afterwards to see if she had any work. I had a pleasant lunch and for perhaps an hour she showed me around the shops by the waterfront. I did hear a lot of her life history and felt that with a bit of luck and without a rather nasty boy-friend, she’d have done well. Perhaps she did sort herself out. I hope she did.
A few years ago, I needed financial advice and went to see a very eminent accountant. He told me how he helped prostitutes do proper accounts, so that they could buy houses and eventually set themselves up securely. I’ve mentioned this several times to other accountants and I’ve got a few knowing smiles, so perhaps this is not as rare as you think. It’s certainly a better way to remove some of the worst aspects of prostitution.
But perhaps the most interesting brush happened a few months before I sold my first major company in 1985. I was travelling to London on the train from Ipswich and I was sitting having breakfast in First. Opposite me was a very well-dressed lady in perhaps her late forties. You’d have said she was a lawyer or perhaps a secretary to the Chairman of a major company. From about Manningtree she quizzed me about what I did and I told her how the company I had started with three others, had developed world-beating project-management software. I said how we sold in about fifty companies world-wide and were very big in Norway, Australia, the United States, and the Far and Middle East. It was about Chelmsford that she told me what she did. She was a madam and fitted up companies with beautiful, intelligent girls to ease the pain of getting contracts agreed and signed. Who’d have thought it?
So when people say that prostitution should be banned, there is absolutely no way, that the desired outcome will happen. It is just too ingrained in society, business and life.
Dr. Magnanti has also proved that if you want to blog and be anonymous you can do it. A little bit of scandal and sexual tittle-tattle may be one thing, but we’ll see blogs written from the inside of politics and other sensitive areas in the near future. And the great and good, will be unable to stop or even censure them.
An Uplifting Idea
When you live alone as I do, you sometimes get up in a miserable mood. You wonder why you bother and perhaps a better idea would be to get another bottle of cyder, sink back under the duvet and listen to the radio. I don’t often, in that I have the responsibility of a basset hound, who has to be let out to do her business.
This morning wasn’t one of those mornings, but a friend pointed me to this item in the Daily Mail.
Ruth Amos was just 16, when she designed the StairSteady, a device to help the elderly and infirm get up the stairs more easily. It looks very good and I suspect it will do very well. Good luck to her!
I speak with grim experience. My late wife’s cancer meant that in her last days she couldn’t climb the stairs to bed. Her pride said she was going to sleep in her bed and she came down every day until the day before she died. But our house has innumerable short stair cases and installing a stair lift would have been impossibly expensive, as we’d have needed three short ones. But it would not have been difficult to install three of Ruth’s devices.
If you read the comments on the Daily Mail article, some are saying it is expensive. It is not, as I suspect most have to be individually made-to-measure and designed to be robust. For instance, if the person using the device stumbled, it would have to support the weight of the heaviest. Strength never comes cheap!
But, because it is cheaper and more adaptable than a stair-lift, I suspect that in many cases, it will be cost-effective to install the device in a house, to keep the user in their own home.
Ruth and her idea have really got my day off on a high!
I shall be watching the progress of the StairSteady.
The Late Busway
They’ve just announced on BBC East that the planned opening of the Cambridge Busway on November 29th, may well be put back, as the busway has not been handed over to the operators yet. There is a detailed news item here.
There also seems to be a problem with joy-riders and other low-life on the bus-way. As it runs through open country and is generally unlit, I suspect that all sorts of things will happen.
But I hope not!
BBC Expenses
There is a lot of adverse comment about the money spent by Mark Thompson, especially on a trip to Las Vegas. He went to one of the prime media shows, which I would have thought was something we would complain about if he hadn’t visited.
Years ago, I used to go to Comdex at Las Vegas. If you didn’t book the previous year, rooms were impossible to get and I suspect although it may be better, you don’t have the option of affordable rooms unless you book months ahead. Unless of course you want to stay in Lake Mead. And that’s miles away!
I sent this e-mail to Victoria Derbyshire to further explain.
To get a decent room in Las Vegas at one of the big trade shows, you normally need to book for the whole week or at least a year before. I paid $500 for one night nearly twenty years ago at Comdex in Las Vegas. I stopped going because I didn’t want to be ripped off any more.
Mark Thompson got better value than I did.
On the other hand those trade shows are probably a must see for someone like Thompson. We would probably be complaining a lot more, if he hadn’t gone and missed the launch of something important.
Expenses should be kept to a minimum, but how much BBC time is spent asking questions? Especially, when many of those asking the questions have other agendas.
The British Way of Military Death
I have a strong sense of history and want to try to make sure that we learn from the past and don’t make the same mistakes again.
I first noticed when we went to the cemeteries on the River Kwai, that every British grave has a personal message. There were a lot of Dutch graves on the Kwai, but they were plain and identical except for the name. I found the same messages at immaculate cemeteries in the Gambia and on the Somme.
And now we have the respect shown at Wootton Bassett, a town through which all the British victims of Afghanistan pass on their final way home.
There are some things in this country that we do very, very well.
An Unprofessional Letter
Gordon Brown has difficult things to do and especially nothing is more difficult than dealing with death. I know from awful personal experience, how you can upset some people by making one simple mistake in a letter or an e-mail.
He has caused a lot of hurt and stored a hornet’s nest with his letter to the mother of Jamie Janes. But as a son of a Church of Scotland minister, he would have had no intention of causing any distress.
When I write an important note, I always use a computer and write and rewrite sections until I get everything exactly as I want it. I know it is tradition that notes of this nature are handwritten by Prime Ministers, but I know that I would not hand write such notes.
My handwriting is very poor! And so is Gordon Brown’s.
What I would do is write ninety percent on a computer and put a strong personal touch in by hand. That way, the letter would be exactly right.
Brown was just very unprofessional. Do we really need an unprofessional Prime Minister? I’m afraid not!
Oxford Street Gets a Cross
In 2005, there was an article about putting a monorail along Oxford Street. I wrote the following, which was then picked up by the Evening Standard and was published as a letter.
I read with interest an article in the Evening Standard yesterday and feel I should comment about a proposed monorail for Oxford Street.
I should explain that I am an engineer with a lot of experience of transport projects around the world, mainly because the software I wrote, Artemis, was used to plan them.
I am also an inveterate traveller and have experience of a very large number of cities around the world. That experience is usually as a tourist and includes the Sydney monorail, the escalators of Hong Kong and the underground walkways of Perugia. I should also say that I visit the Oxford Street area at least once a month for shopping, eating or business.
I will agree with the plan, where the monorail gives the whole street a connection and a focus, but I believe that a moving walkway suspended over the street below would be much more flexible and inherently better.
- It could be built in stages, with perhaps a spectacular star over Oxford Circus as a first phase to move people from say Regent Street North to Oxford Street East and West without getting involved in the fearsome crowds at road level.
- Walkways are basically hop-on and hop-off. So if you see a shop or something else that interests you, then all you do is wait to the next hop-off point and exit.
- As the walkway progressed down Oxford Street, it could rise and fall so that it was level with the floors of the major stores. How much would John Lewis pay for an entrance at first floor level?
- Stops would be much more frequent than a monorail.
- Walkways are a fail-safe system in that when the motor breaks, the system is still walkable. What happens when a monorail breaks down as the Sydney system did when I rode it?
- Walkways can add spurs as required to Conference Centres, attractions and also to move people well away from Oxford Street.
- As they would run effectively from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch, they would take the pressure off the Central Line.
- Just as in Hong Kong it would be covered in a clear plastic roof. Video screens could be included under the roof to sell advertising.
- Security is important and I’m sure the Police would like a high-level walkway from which to view the crowds below.
- Bulges and platforms could be attached to the walkway, so that cafes and other attractions could be setup. If access is provided to stores on route, there would be no problems as to servicing these cafes.
- The whole system has to be commercial. Imagine a platform just by Selfridges which sells the Wallace Collection, with a down escalator pointing that way.
I also agree with the views of making Oxford Street a two way bus-only lane. But they must be Heritage walk-on walk-off buses. i.e. Routemasters. They should be free and they could turn at Marble Arch and Centre Point.
Best of luck with the project anyway.
But I still say a moving walkway would be better and infinitely more flexible.
I now see that Oxford Street has a Japanese-style crossing.
This looks interesting!
The Anonymous Widower 