A chill wind is gently blowing in the financial district: bonuses are down, budgets are flat and haunted-looking strangers riding the elevator down from the 47th floor mumur of bears glimpsed prowling the far away corridors of the C-suite. Quite nasty-looking bears
Oh there's nothing certain, but still, but still : headhunters are no longer calling up vice-presidents with talk of silly salaries, hiring is curtailed and plans for dreamy beach houses on quiet Long Island shores are shelved
But, Hey! Not everything in the world is gloomy. One of our friends tells us she has commissioned a bronze bust of, well, of her bust; and I have a new squeezebox :-)
I never heard of such a thing before - have I spotted a new micro-trend?
When it's completed, I wonder whether it will be polite - or not? - to comment on the quality of the likeness.
13 February 2008
10 February 2008
The American Way
If it was Super Tuesday it was New York City.
At JFK, very late at night, I squinted, bleary-eyed into the webcam and pressed my left index finger hard down on the glowing red fingerprinting square: the visa waiver programme is no longer the shoe-in it was in the nineties. "I am English" I murmured, "You know? The only country on your side in the War on Terror? Now introducing Sharia Law in the Home Counties?"
The crew-cut young immigration official remained unimpressed
- "Business? So what do you do?"
- "You work for a bank, OK, but what exactly do you do?"
- "Waddyamean, 'indescribable'?"
Reader, I tried to explain but it was no use; eventually we settled on 'rogue trader', my passport was stamped and I was in, yellow-cabbing excitedly toward the Mid-Town Tunnel, tracking my progress, while updating my Facebook profile, on the on-board cab computer.
I love America!
Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, and also domain of No Loitering Laws.
So how does that work? You can be arrested for standing still?
I didn't stand still. After work I had to visit Abercrombie and Fitch (again). All the way to 57th Street and back in time for dinner.
You can eat a lot of dinner in New York, and in Dos Caminos on Wednesday night, I ate a lot of dinner. I was excited! I think I have found the perfect Margarita. I asked our wait staff person the secret - was it the more expensive Tequila she had upsold us? No, she said, it was the very freshly hand-squeezed lime juice. How fresh? Well let's just say twenty bucks changed hands and we were led, with some trepidation, down to the basement where we found a team of sub-prime borrowers squeezing limes for minimum wage. It's the American Way, she explained: needs must and money talks.
Back in the office, time is money, and I saw the coolest labour saving device ever: A digital photo frame with a remote control. You never need to lean forward again. Only in America.
What will those crazy Americans think of next?
At JFK, very late at night, I squinted, bleary-eyed into the webcam and pressed my left index finger hard down on the glowing red fingerprinting square: the visa waiver programme is no longer the shoe-in it was in the nineties. "I am English" I murmured, "You know? The only country on your side in the War on Terror? Now introducing Sharia Law in the Home Counties?"
The crew-cut young immigration official remained unimpressed
- "Business? So what do you do?"
- "You work for a bank, OK, but what exactly do you do?"
- "Waddyamean, 'indescribable'?"
Reader, I tried to explain but it was no use; eventually we settled on 'rogue trader', my passport was stamped and I was in, yellow-cabbing excitedly toward the Mid-Town Tunnel, tracking my progress, while updating my Facebook profile, on the on-board cab computer.
I love America!
Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, and also domain of No Loitering Laws.
So how does that work? You can be arrested for standing still?
I didn't stand still. After work I had to visit Abercrombie and Fitch (again). All the way to 57th Street and back in time for dinner.
You can eat a lot of dinner in New York, and in Dos Caminos on Wednesday night, I ate a lot of dinner. I was excited! I think I have found the perfect Margarita. I asked our wait staff person the secret - was it the more expensive Tequila she had upsold us? No, she said, it was the very freshly hand-squeezed lime juice. How fresh? Well let's just say twenty bucks changed hands and we were led, with some trepidation, down to the basement where we found a team of sub-prime borrowers squeezing limes for minimum wage. It's the American Way, she explained: needs must and money talks.
Back in the office, time is money, and I saw the coolest labour saving device ever: A digital photo frame with a remote control. You never need to lean forward again. Only in America.
What will those crazy Americans think of next?
02 February 2008
Ward Wars
You thought the class war was over? Well, not on the Flower Blossom Paediatric Ward, which is nothing less than a Level 1 Conflict Zone. All between the patients, of course.
There was only four beds there in the small ward last Thursday evening, but the noise was defeaning. A Wii Tennis tournament conducted in Bay 1 competed with seventeen partying visitors in Bay 2; the whole crowd determinedly drowned out by the coach party visiting Bay 3 for Eastenders at volume 11.
On our side of the curtains three of us were huddled around the patient, offering comfort and support. I cheered everyone up by bellowing exerpts from Paradise Lost
It was a Dot Cotton monologue. I remembered watching one of those twenty years ago.
Our patient was miserable; We had a TV on a trolley and inserted a DVD; on other side of the curtain Dot Cotton was boosted to 12. In the next ward a parentless baby cried alone, and somewhere far away an alarm bell rang.
I pressed the nurse call button but no one could hear.
There was only four beds there in the small ward last Thursday evening, but the noise was defeaning. A Wii Tennis tournament conducted in Bay 1 competed with seventeen partying visitors in Bay 2; the whole crowd determinedly drowned out by the coach party visiting Bay 3 for Eastenders at volume 11.
On our side of the curtains three of us were huddled around the patient, offering comfort and support. I cheered everyone up by bellowing exerpts from Paradise Lost
It was a Dot Cotton monologue. I remembered watching one of those twenty years ago.
Our patient was miserable; We had a TV on a trolley and inserted a DVD; on other side of the curtain Dot Cotton was boosted to 12. In the next ward a parentless baby cried alone, and somewhere far away an alarm bell rang.
I pressed the nurse call button but no one could hear.
24 January 2008
Tut Tut
It's not easy getting from West London to the Dome on a Saturday when there are no trains through Richmond and Twickenham.....and no Jubilee line to North Greenwich.
So we drove
....and no Limehouse link either, just one large traffic jam from Tower Bridge to the Blackwall tunnel.
In two hours on a French motorway you can travel 200 miles - I know, I have done it. Two hours after we left home we were in Wapping. We had eaten all the Werthers, spotted four Stobarts and two Norberts, and retrieved all the CDs from the floor and sorted them into two piles: scratched and unscratched. We had played both the unscratched ones twice.
The only thing that could possibly make it worse was a car crash, and sure enough on the Highway a texting imbecile ran into the back of us. Before you could say whip-lash injury Mrs Botogol had leapt from the car to handle negotiations. In the driving mirror I saw bundle of tenners changing hands - urban fashion - and we were on our way again.
"Do you think there really is a curse?", asked one of the children, afterwards in Starbucks, knocking my Americano all over my newspaper.
21 January 2008
Zombies
Wifey wonders how she slipped so easily from one persona to another; last week I was wondering whether I had a persona at all, or whether I was rather a multiplicity of different selves co-existing in a single body united only by a common set of memories,
I asked Mrs Botogol: "Do you think each of us is a coherent single self, or do you think we all contain a multiplicity? Different people, if you like, in the same body?"
"Please don't call me Mrs Botogol when we are at home, dear" she said.
At the ICA opinion was mixed: Rita Carter believed she has no free will and no self. "I, zombie" if you will - I am a zombie and so is my avatar. I didn't agree, but it's such a nihilistic viewpoint that is rather difficult to take issue with: arguing with a self-identified zombie is like arguing with the SatNav. I wished I hadn't praised her book, but comforted myself that perhaps I probably couldn't help it.
On the panel Raymond Tallis gallantly declared his faith in Rita Carter "I believe you have a self" he said and I was surprised to find myself on Tallis's side, arts against science, as Carter frowned at him (rather ungraciously I thought, but then it must he hard for her, surrounded by unthinking zombies acting mechanically and without imagination. A bit like being at work)
I jotted down random nuggets from each speaker. The most intriguing was the idea of different-sized selves (mania being swelling of self, and depression a diminution). The most confounding was the question of whether we are still ourselves when we dream...ouch.
The most amusing factoid (ie it appeals directly to my prejudices) is that, apparently, when a Myers-Briggs test is repeated there is only a 25% chance of finding the same personality type.
That would explain it then.
I asked Mrs Botogol: "Do you think each of us is a coherent single self, or do you think we all contain a multiplicity? Different people, if you like, in the same body?"
"Please don't call me Mrs Botogol when we are at home, dear" she said.
At the ICA opinion was mixed: Rita Carter believed she has no free will and no self. "I, zombie" if you will - I am a zombie and so is my avatar. I didn't agree, but it's such a nihilistic viewpoint that is rather difficult to take issue with: arguing with a self-identified zombie is like arguing with the SatNav. I wished I hadn't praised her book, but comforted myself that perhaps I probably couldn't help it.
On the panel Raymond Tallis gallantly declared his faith in Rita Carter "I believe you have a self" he said and I was surprised to find myself on Tallis's side, arts against science, as Carter frowned at him (rather ungraciously I thought, but then it must he hard for her, surrounded by unthinking zombies acting mechanically and without imagination. A bit like being at work)
I jotted down random nuggets from each speaker. The most intriguing was the idea of different-sized selves (mania being swelling of self, and depression a diminution). The most confounding was the question of whether we are still ourselves when we dream...ouch.
The most amusing factoid (ie it appeals directly to my prejudices) is that, apparently, when a Myers-Briggs test is repeated there is only a 25% chance of finding the same personality type.
That would explain it then.
17 January 2008
Hot and Bothered
"Are you all right, Botogol?" asked the Head of Human Resources, Strategic Operations & Shared Services Division, EMEA (excluding Russia), for it was she, standing behind me in the queue at the Starbucks kiosk.
Absorbed as I was in my new mp3 player, on to which I have podcasted an entire week's programming from Radio 4, I hadn't noticed her.
On the one hand I was pleasantly surprised to hear evidently genuine concern from someone in Human Resources; on the other I was a little miffed at the implications. "Of course I am", I said, brightly, "I've been to the gym, is all. It just takes me a little while to cool down"
She appraised me suspiciously. It was 8:30am, I was outside without my coat and I was (OK, I concede it) a trifle pink.
As I smiled, a bead of sweat ran down the side of my face.
"Don't I look well?"
"To be frank", she said, not unkindly, "I thought you were having a diabetic induced hypo"
We stared at each other for a moment and the barista coughed, gently "Gingerbread, Cinammon Dolce Latte with a caramel shot?"
Absorbed as I was in my new mp3 player, on to which I have podcasted an entire week's programming from Radio 4, I hadn't noticed her.
On the one hand I was pleasantly surprised to hear evidently genuine concern from someone in Human Resources; on the other I was a little miffed at the implications. "Of course I am", I said, brightly, "I've been to the gym, is all. It just takes me a little while to cool down"
She appraised me suspiciously. It was 8:30am, I was outside without my coat and I was (OK, I concede it) a trifle pink.
As I smiled, a bead of sweat ran down the side of my face.
"Don't I look well?"
"To be frank", she said, not unkindly, "I thought you were having a diabetic induced hypo"
We stared at each other for a moment and the barista coughed, gently "Gingerbread, Cinammon Dolce Latte with a caramel shot?"
13 January 2008
Shakespeare on Life Planning
The Botogol family know what's hot* and what's not, and on Saturday we eschewed the black market demand for our tickets and went to the Donmar warehouse to see OthelloJealousy, scheming, race, deception; Yes, yes, yes, Othello is all of those, and very good indeed it is too, but the bit that struck me (perhaps the £800 we supposedly could have got for our tickets was preying on my mind) but the bit that got me was Iago's unequivocal advice to the love-lost Rodrigo:
No, don't drown yourself, says Iago, but instead:
[...] Put money in thy purse;Roderigo, thou shouldst have lived at this hour! and thou shouldst have have had an indescribable job in the City, for it's the start of every City worker's plan: Moving out? moving on? moving up? Staying put? New house, extra house? Trading up? Trading down? Mid Life Crisis? New Bike? New Car? New Boat? Interior designer or writer of the great 21st Century novel? Whatever.... just two more bonuses should be enough....
follow thou the wars; defeat thy favour with
an usurped beard; I say, put money in thy purse. It
cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her
love to the Moor,-- put money in thy purse,--nor he
his to her: it was a violent commencement, and thou
shalt see an answerable sequestration:--put but
money in thy purse. These Moors are changeable in
their wills: fill thy purse with money:--
[...],
she will find the error of her choice: she must
have change, she must: therefore put money in thy
purse. If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a
more delicate way than drowning. Make all the money
thou canst: if sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt
an erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian not
too hard for my wits and all the tribe of hell, thou
shalt enjoy her; therefore make money.
[...]
RODRIGO:
I am changed: I'll go sell all my land.
"It's the only bit of honest advice Iago gives to anyone in the whole play", I remarked, sagely in the interval much to the spluttering amusement of the Botogol daughters whom I sometimes think have received a sight more education than is good for them, "Yeah, right", they said, once they had mopped up their J2O "Thus do I ever make my fool my purse"
* Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor, that's what's hot. Oh, yes, and Shakespeare.
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