Category: Me

The importance of ignoring economists

One of my already broken new year’s resolutions was to stop worrying about the economy.  This is on the grounds that I’m occupied pretty full-time worrying about things  in my own life that I can at least hope to change, without putting in extra hours fretting about things that  are beyond my control.

It’s quite hard not to worry about UKPlc’s GDP, though, especially if you’re woken every morning  by the massed doom-mongers of the Today programme (I loved  Chris Addison’s description of Today this weekend as: “Grumpy Old Men without jokes. If Today had a face it would look like Walter Matthau sucking a lemon”, and so it would)

So, when I am overwhelmed by the looming disasters and scary predictions about interest rates being peddled by Humphrys et al, I will try to remember this:

The future  performance of the economy, the passage from good times to recession or depression and back, cannot be foretold.  There are more than ample predictions but no firm knowledge.  All contend with a diverse combination of uncertain government action, unknown corporate and individual behaviour and, in the larger world, with peace or war.  Also with unforeseen technological and other innovations and consumer and investment responses.  There is the variable effect of exports, imports, capital movements and corporate, public and government reaction thereto.  Thus the all too evident fact: the combined result of the unknown cannot be known.

That’s JK Galbraith , who knew what he was talking about, on economists.   He seems to agree with my friend Philomene – although in rather more thoughtful language.  “Economics a science?” she once screeched at me in  disbelief.  “Witchcraft is more scientific!”

Laughter and madness and Grim-all-day

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi  is a theatrical history containing tyrannical parents, insanity, insolvency,  alcoholism, depression, debtors’ prison,  child stars, singing ducks, performing dogs, and ruinously expensive tours of the provinces.   (I’m enjoying it so much that I’m writing this to put off finishing it.)  More than anything  it’s a study of outrageous artistic excess.

To cash in on Nelson’s popularity as national hero after the Battle of the Nile, the management of Sadler’s Wells turned the theatre’s cellars into a huge reservoir, tore up the stage and built a huge “wooden bathtub” in its place which could hold 65,000 gallons of water  and in which they re-fought naval battles with miniature ships.  On opening night:

 from downstage the miniature fleet floated to the front, its sails and pennants shifting in the wind, processed before the orchestra and fired a salute to the audience that put them ‘in an extacy’… The ships readied for battle.  Deafening volleys were fired on both sides as custom-built fireworks rained down… puncturing sails, dismasting ships and punching holes in enemy hulls.  shipwrecked children struggled in the waves, mimicking drowning with their feet planted firmly on the bottom of the tank… smoke rolled out  into the auditorium… [and] when it cleared revealed the coup de theatre, a calm sea bobbing with flotsam and the Franco-Spanish fleet smashed and beaten.

I’d have paid to see that – or to have seen Grimaldi go on a balloon ride: through the proscenium and over the heads of the audience. 

Proving that there’s nothing new under the sun, Stott describes a publicity stunt  in which  clown Dicky Usher:

sailed from Southwark Bridge to Cumberland Gardens in a washtub drawn by four geese. Landing two and half hours later he swapped his tub for a carriage lashed to eight tomcats which he then intended to drive to Waterloo Road.

I had no idea about any of this:  that before the Victorians got their hands on it pantomime was both artistically vibrant and politically subversive; that performances could be so volatile  that Sadler’s Wells had spikes fitted to the front of the pit to stop members of the audience rushing the stage; that threats of price rises in 1809 led to months of rioting.

A re-fighting of the Battle of the Nile  is my suggestion for the Olympic opening ceremony – a surefire crowd pleaser (possibly not for the French, but it was a long time ago and hey, we’re all friends now).  I wish I had the money to bid for the film rights.

Waiting for the cat in the hat

The sun did not shine/ it was too wet to play/ so we sat in the house/ all that cold, cold, wet day.  I sat there with Sally/ we sat there we two/ And I said, “How I wish we had something to do“.

It’s been a cold, grey, pinched and anxious December.  Gloomily overcast during the day and properly dark by mid-afternoon.  It’s been too grim to want to venture out, even to escape our drafty old house, which never heats up properly in mid-winter.  I have shivered through the month wrapped in a fleece hoodie – surely the least attractive garment ever invented – plus thermal socks and leggings, clutching a hot-water bottle. 

I’ve been trying to devote myself to the necessary job of re-focusing the business plan, thinking up alternative sources of income to fill the gap  left by public sector cuts.  But in all honesty, at the moment it feels like whistling in the dark and it’s hard to keep plugging away at it.    I need a break – an odd thing to say after the relatively idle few weeks I’ve just had – but for once I’m going to make like an office-worker and knock off for Christmas.  Time to stop worrying about work and money – or the lack of them – and enjoy what looks like is going to be a properly snowy Christmas with the family.

Christmas time is here, by golly

It was the “‘Tis the season to be shopping” card nestling next to the “Merry Christmas Suckas!” one which bought on my annual bah humbug rant this year.  Brother, here we go again.

PS.  There is a version of this on YouTube which uses Tom Lehrer’s voice with the words written up on screen.  Badly.  Without a single apostrophe or indeed any other punctuation.  I discover it pains me too much to use it.  Does this say more about them or me?

The value of loyalty in hard times

Flickr:LucyFrench123

I’ve been a member of my gym for five years, go three times a week (honestly)   and have a personal trainer – I’m a good customer, paying top whack every month.  And I’m starting to feel like a  mug.   As the Christmas Party/ New Year’s resolution season  approaches all gyms, mine included, are bending over backwards to think up  membership offers to tempt the lardy of arse over the threshold.  As a new member I could join my gym for half of what I’m currently paying.

At no point during the last five years has my gym expended a moment’s thought on  how to keep me  handing over my £60 every month. There are no discounts, cut price offers, special access to trainers.  No reasons to make me feel that they value my custom and want to hang on to it. The  occasional promotion offering  a bit off my membership if I can entice a friend to join  just makes me feel like an unpaid member of their sales force on work experience.

The  basic  business model seems to be based on a really fast churn of members as people get fired up to get fit, start exercising, lose enthusiasm and leave . Everything is focused on getting new recruits wobbling through the doors.  It seems to be much less important to hold on to members once they’ve been hooked – which seems odd, given the relative difficulty of attracting new members compared with the advantages of retaining the ones you’ve got.    It’s not just LA Fitness that’s missing a trick.  As far as I can see there are no loyalty schemes currently being offered by any of the big gym chains to try to keep their members sweet.  Fitness First seem to have tried something a while ago which didn’t last – at least if it did I can’t find a reference to it.  They do  have a loyalty scheme aimed at their personal trainers, but nothing for us, the sweaty and slightly breathless customers who  keep them in business.

My own inertia shows why they don’t  bother – they don’t need to.  Why cut into the profit to be earned from a customer who  shows no sign of going elsewhere?  But times are getting harder and people don’t have money to chuck around unthinkingly anymore.  If they can’t be loyal to me,  I won’t  be loyal to them either.  If they won’t do me a deal on membership  then I’ll take my abs and glutes somewhere cheaper, which would be a shame because I really like the gym.

03.16am

 “I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”— David Benioff (City of Thieves)

 

 “Insomnia is a variant of Tourette’s–the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance–as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.” — Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn)

Here are 42 tips for curing it.  And if all else fails:  

If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying.  It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.  – Dale Carnegie

In search of plan B

Flickr: Ms.Tea

I was talking to a friend who is packing up her London home and buying a Christmas tree farm in Sussex – presumably on the grounds that of all the types of farm she could possibly have this one will need least in the way of  feeding, breeding or early morning milking.  Part of her motivation is a vision of the future so apocalyptic that she wants to make herself  self-sufficient before the Second Great Depression hits  (she’s planning to grow veg and keep chickens as well, I don’t think she just wants to be self-sufficient in Christmas trees).

It struck me as I listened to her that  I need a plan B, too.  My own Christmas-Tree-farm-equivalent which I can pour some energy into while the economy implodes and the bits reform into something recognisable again.  Now all I have to do is work out what it is…

High Anxiety

Evidently training to be a Zen Master, my nine-year old son has declared that I should stop worrying so much by ” removing the meaning and feelings of worry from your mind”.

That’s easy for him to say. 

I come from a long line of pessimists and worriers and was brought up from an early age to  “hope for the best and expect the worst – that way you’re never disappointed”  Much as I’d love to be one, I just don’t understand optimists.  Don’t they realise that unless you worry about everything, constantly, even in your sleep, something terrible might happen and you won’t be prepared for it?

 

The big society – a work in progress

Overheard while queueing to get into the Lido at London Fields on the hottest day of the year.  Young Man (mid-20s?), young boy in tow, on mobile phone:

YM:  No, I forgot the sun-cream  He’ll be all right.  He’ll just have to keep his t-shirt on in the pool… (pause)… I am NOT going to ask a complete stranger for sun-cream… (pause)… I’m NOT GOING TO ASK… (pause)… Because all they’ll do is tell me to go and get my own fucking sun-cream… (pause)… Because that’s what I’d say if a complete stranger asked me.

Shoulders down, back straight

Fed up of swearing and wincing in pain every time I get up from my old office chair, I went to buy a new one the other day.   Apparently it’s not just the chair, it’s the desk, my husband (he’s too tall, so the desk is too high for me – although it’s still too low for him), my computer (laptops are notoriously bad for giving you a bad back) and the length of my arms that’s wrong.  So I don’t just need a new chair, I need an electronically adjustable desk, a chair with a gas-lift, a laptop arm, a wireless keyboard and new mouse, a footrest and possibly a new husband before I can rise gracefully from my desk again.

If I had a decent employer I’d threaten to sue and have occupational health round faster than you can say compensation.  As it is, I’ll just have to scrabble down the back of the ergonomically unsound sofa for some spare change and put up with the fact that the corner of my house that serves as my office will soon look like the flight deck of a space ship.

For anyone else with the same problem, here’s some advice about how to sit (it sounds so simple…).  If your problem is marital incompatibility I’m afraid you’re on your own.