Why All This Fuss About Harry Potter?
I’ve never read a Harry Potter book or seen any of the films! And don’t intend to either!
To me, the only good thing about the phenomenon is the jobs, money and tax revenue that it has created in the UK. I’m also interested in how J K Rowling wrote the book in a cafe in Edinburgh. It is the better story as it is all about getting yourself out of a hole by doing something creative.
Is The News of the Screws Too Powerful For Advertisers To Boycott?
I haven’t read the News of the Screws in years. Advertisers are boycotting the paper because of their hacking of mobile phones.
But is this counter productive and against the best interests of the so-called readers of the paper? Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert has said on Radio 5, that he will to continue to write a column for the paper. He stated the reason was that as a crusading journalist, who fights against financial abuse, the best way he can get his message over is in the largest circulation, English language paper in the world. He also said that this week his column would carry a message deploring the hacking.
I admire his stance and understand his point. After all, if you’re a crusading journalist it matters to you, whether you get your message over or not.
It’s the same with the Central Office of Information, who are one of Britain’s biggest advertisers. Should they pull their advertising of such things as benefits and valuable public information from the paper? I suspect they should, as probably News of the Screws readers are too stupid to understand it.
It’s a difficult area and I suspect the best solution would be to impose sanctions against the paper, if any wrongdoing is proved.
The Beautiful Blonde Brazilian on a 38 Bus
One of the good things about London, is often you get into spirit raising conversations on the bus.
Take today, when I was returning from the Waitrose at the Angel for the second time, because they didn’t have any of my preferred brand of yoghurt the first time, I ended up sitting next to a young lady, or was it a girl, with long blonde hair. As I always do, when I sit next to someone of the opposite sex, I always ask if it is OK to sit there. I may have lots of faults, but I was brought up to hold doors, give up my seat on buses and tubes and generally be polite. I’ve found it to be to my advantage in life.
We chatted until I got off and found that she was a Brazilian student from the far south of the country. She was liking her stay in London and she was pleased at her reception in the city. As a Londoner, I was pleased we’d welcomed her so well.
Despite being a wreck I must still have something left, as she didn’t think I was some old groper and turn her face to the window. But neither did the lady on the 141.
So there might be some hope for me!
The Various Extremes of Phone Hacking
I say extremes here because I’m defining the various limits.
For instance, if the Police hack the mobile phone of a missing person or a suspected criminal, to see if they can solve a serious crime, then that is probably acceptable, providing everything is recorded and it is performed under a set of legal rules. In some cases they may be required to get similar permissions as they do when they tap a phone.
On the other hand, if say I lost my mobile phone and needed to retrieve the various voice messages on that phone and I asked someone who said he could hack the phone and tell me what was stored, then no offence would be committed. It wouldn’t actually happen, as I know how to retrieve my messages from another phone and frequently do.
I’ve also changed my pin, so for an individual to hack my phone and read the messaes would be fairly difficult. But then who would want the secrets I don’t have.
Much more important to me are my text messages and I can’t remember anybody being accused of hacking these. In fact, I suspect that the Police probably use text messages to find out if a mobile phone is working or switched on. I know I send text messages to people I want to contact from my desktop and when I get an acknowledgement they’ve answered, I might ring them.
So did those people get hacked because they didn’t change their pin number? If you look at them, a lot fall into the group of people who have twenty four legs and an IQ of 12. i.e. Z-List celebrities and/or politicians. So I suspect that many were partly to blame.
The Choosing of Judges
The Times today is arguing that judges are generally male, white and Oxbridge and that this is wrong. I will probably agree that we need a broader judiciary, but not with a lot of their reasons.
My late wife was a reasonably successful barrister and she was asked many years ago to take the first steps to becoming a judge. At the time, she was happy in her work, and as she had other responsibilities like breeding racehorses, that fitted well with her career, she declined.
As The TImes argues we may choose our judges from a rather limited pool, but how many of the really creative legal minds, much prefer to form their own career, outside of the legal mainstream. I know one very capable barrister, who went into commerce, chaired a large plc, and now acts as an international mediator. He may or may not have made a good judge, but like many he found the confines of the traditional law, a desert for his creativity.
I have known several judges well. They find the job well-paid and pensioned and in general they enjoy it. But many do find it rather routine and lacking in creativity. And when they are creative, like a judicial friend was, very much to general acclaim, they are slapped down by those that run the Lord Chancellor’s Department.
So in some ways the job chooses the sober line-toeing minds, who want a decent pension and many of those who would make excellent judges make other and better career changes.
What Do Saudi Arabia, Russia and the Vatican City Have In Common?
According to tonight’s Evening Standard, they’ve all had diplomats arrested for drink driving in the last three years in London by the Met. Saudi Arabia had four, so I suppose it’s now alright for expats to drink in that country! In that time, 59 diplomats or their family members were alleged to have committed various offences, including fraud, robbery, rape and other sexual offences. One from Oman, even made a bomb threat.
But of course none were punished, as they all claimed diplomatic immunity.
Isn’t it about time, this arcane law was scrapped.
Visual Basic 6 Programmer For Hire
A couple of times recently, I’ve met people, who have said that my skills in Visual Basic 6 may still be needed, because in the City of London, there are still a lot of important systems written in the language. Hence this post, which is almost an advert to say that I’m looking for work.
At my age and with my hopefully sensible finances, I don’t need a permanent job, but old programmers never give up coding, even if they just do it in their mind. Living alone, I have plenty of time on my hands to spend with my therapist, but sometimes I feel I need to do something constructive. Even if it’s just to prove I still can!
So if anybody is in trouble and needs a good Visual Basic 6 programmer who still has most of his marbles, I’m here just north of the City of London, a short bus ride away.
On the legal side, I have complete sets of discs and manuals, so I would not be working outside of any licences.
Getting The Interface Between Real and Internet Shopping Right!
I recently bought some towels from John Lewis, as most of mine are rather tatty and frayed. I also wanted all of them to be the same dark blue colour. C had bought numerous ones over the years and we had purples, reds, green and yellows to name but four colours.
I needed to buy some more to match my new ones, but they don’t have any serial number on the tag, so that I can order the right ones. The only way to do it, is to keep the packaging or take the towel back to the store. I can’t even login to my John Lewis account and get the details that way.
In this instance it isn’t that serious, but it does mean I’ll have to take one of my towels back, so that I can get the same colour. If it was properly tagged with a stock number or this was available on-line from my account, it would mean that all I would need to do is repeat the order on-line.
Other shops like IKEA and I think a few others have a consistent internet and real shopping numbering system that works. Surely getting it right would mean they got more repeat sales. I know ranges change, but I suspect that a lot of the stuff stocked in John Lewis hasn’t changed at all in years.
Every Picture Tells a Story
I mentioned in the post on house-husbands that I have various skills and strangely one of them is dressmaking. Or it used to be, as I haven’t made anything in years.
But look at this picture of Celia, who in this blog I usually refer to as C, taken at a New Year’s Party in Venice probably in 2002 or 2003.
C at New Year in Venice
It looks like a strapless evening dress or a full skirt with a strapless top. It is neither.
The skirt was luxurious and there was an equally luxurious top to go with it. But when C bought the skirt from Beatrice von Tresckow, the top in her size was sold out, so they said they’d make one for her. Something went wrong and it didn’t fit.
So there we were in a five star hotel in Venice, an hour before the dinner and one of us had nothing to wear! And it wasn’t one of those parties, where she could have gone topless. I hasten to add that she never did outside of the confines of our bedroom.
Depending on where I tell this story, there are various versions. In some she’s in tears and in others she wants to go home, but the truth is probably that although she was upset, she trusted me to have an idea that would work. Her versions of the story used to have a lot of emotional actions, as aren’t most barristers frustrated actors?
She thought I was joking when I asked her for some safety pins. I found two in the dinner suit I was wearing and one in a good pair of trousers. All had been used to attach dry cleaning tickets and after that day, she never ever removed one. But she still referred to it as one of my lazy habits.
I then told her to remove the strapless bra she was wearing and replace it with a basque I knew she’d brought with her to wear under another dress, that was a bit tight and needed a bit of an extra squeeze to get into. She’d also brought it because it was New Year and she knew the extra layer added warmth. She also took the opportunity to change from tights to some stockings as a reward to me, which she said she’d remove, if I couldn’t make her respectable.
I then took the shawl that she had brought to wear with the top and skirt and wound it round her securing it with the safety pins. The hotel was warm, so the lack of a shawl wasn’t a problem.
The result is shown in the picture, which was actually taken after the dancing. So it held together without any problems.
I hasten to add, that wrapping the shawl round wasn’t my original idea, but was borrowed from a very old 1950s, TV Series, called Dick and the Duchess. In one episode, Hazel Court, who played the Duchess, got into a scrape as she often did, lost her clothes and ends up in a boiler suit. She then takes a taxi to her couturier, who was played by a very camp, Michael Medwin. To preserve her decency, he wraps her in expensive silk, tucks it all in and sends her home. He orders the boiler suit to be burnt. I never saw the errant top again.
If there is a moral to this story it is to never travel without safety pins! And steal ideas from out of context and old television shows.
Do Successful Women Have a House Husband?
A news item in the Sunday Times today is headed Top women need ‘him indoors’
It goes on to discuss how quite a few of the top women in the City have husbands who are at home.
I will not answer my question directly, but talk about my relationship of forty years with C. Or more particularly our careers.
For the first few years, we were very typical although, some would say that your early twenties are too young to have children. We had three before I was 25 and C was 24. I worked hard to get on and by that time I was starting my first business. I was working at least 24 hours a day, seven days a week and we were living in a fouuth floor walk up flat in St. John’s Wood. So if you have to live in crap housing make sure it’s in a good location. Just north of Regent’s Park can’t really be better.
When I sold my first business, we moved to the Barbican and C went to UCL to do a law degree, as Politics from Liverpool, where your tutor was Robert Kilroy-Silk, doesn’t really prepare you for the world of real work.
For the next fifteen years or so, I was part of the team creating Artemis, whilst C was getting her career together as a barrister. We were both working hard and I got the financial rewards when the company was sold. C meanwhile gained a reputation as one of East Anglia’s foremost family barristers.
When we moved to Newmarket to start the stud, we started to evolve a new way of working together. We still had our individual careers and interests, but I would spend more time on other things, as C was now very much the major wage owner. It allowed me to develop ideas, some of which worked and some didn’t. And then when she moved to Chambers in Cambridge, which was very much Internet based, I became much more of her support at home.
As we didn’t have young children anymore, I couldn’t be described as anything more than home support.
So in some ways we’d almost come full circle.
I suspect our model has not been untypical and I’d recommend it. As the major wage-earner changes over the years, does it really demean the man to be the one who oooks after the house, when his wife can earn three or four times he can.
But we also did a lot of things together.
Shopping for instance. Some of my friends are incredulous, that for most of our life together we did the general shopping together too. When we were in the Barbican, we’d push the children up to Chapel Market next to the Waitrose I now use. So life has now come full circle in more ways than one.
Clothes shopping was often together too. C was better at choosing clothes for me and in many cases the reverse was true. I remember the year she died being in Zara and C was looking at a sun dress on a hanger. She said that it was awful and I then picked it up, realising that it would be just her size and style. She bought it and wore it all the summer. Remember that I am a designer and also an unusual man, who was taught to make clothes by his mother.
If I have any regrets about our relationship, it was that I dodn’t do more cooking. I taught myself in a few days after she died and like doing it.
So I would suspect that although house-husband is too strong a word for it, most successful women and successful men for that matter have a strong partner at home, who can help or even take charge of the mundane and suggest other ways in the serious part of their career. As an example in the latter, I helped in a few of C’s cases, by using my knowledge and experience to improve her arguments and in some other cases, I have suggested ways of improving her returns from the work.
And then there’s the need for a cuddle and more, that we all need!
Living alone is not a choice we would make for ourselves.
The Anonymous Widower 