Brian Bollen's Blog

Anyone out there fancy a cycling challenge?

Once upon a time I might have thought about attempting this, but those days are behind me now...or are they?

Anyone care to join in?

 

The Lauterbrunnen Valley

If you haven't seen it for real, take a look at the breathtakingly beautiful Lauterbrunnen Valley in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland, courtesy of Rupert Maas.

Back on form with pizza

After a couple of disappointments over the past few days, this home-made pizza marks a return to form. One of the best I have ever personally made (from complete scratch). One of the best I have ever tasted.

Home-made stuff

I've been busy making edible things in the past two or three days.

Including a pizza, tablet (a traditional Scottish sweetie) and an attempt at Strathaven Toffee that hasn't turned out quite right, but is still frighteningly edible.

I am sure you all know that the important fact about today, April 19, 2024, is that it is exactly 100 years since Airdrieonians FC won the Scottish FA Cup for the only time, beating Hibernian 2-0 at Ibrox Park on April 19 1924.

 

Hail, Populus, a parable from Rome for modern times

Title: Populus

Author: Guy de la Bédoyere

Pages: 468 including appendices, glossary of terms, notes, suggestions on further reading, list of illustrations and index

Publisher: Abacus Books

Price: £25.00

Published: April 2024

ISBN 9781408715154

Who other than Guy de la Bédoyere would start a history of life in ancient Rome with the tale of a tomb made in the shape of a stack of bins for kneading dough? He immediately explains the context, that it is the resting place of the ashes of a successful baker, Eurysaces, who made a small fortune from a state contract for supplying the dole and  'was keen for everyone to know it for eternity'.

Anyone who is aware of the author from his years as the de facto expert on matters Roman on the Time Team television archaeology programme will appreciate his ability to share knowledge in an instructive and entertaining manner.

Anyone who read his previous book, Gladius, from the same stable, will look forward to digging into more of the same in Populus (which he translates very helpfully as 'ordinary people').

A paragraph later he moves effortlessly from the ordinary people to the not-so-ordinary people at the top of the pile, writing of the halls and vaulted chambers where emperors had lived, 'some wisely, others with absolute barbarity, some for decades and some for only days or weeks.

He tells us how on his first visit to Rome, at Easter 1975, his most compelling thought was of the Roman people themselves who crowded into the Circus Maximus to cheer for their favourite charioteers, jeered at the defeated gladiators in the Colosseum, jostled, argued, idled at the forum, worshipped at the temples, rioted, fought and feuded during elections. He makes it all sound rather like the modern day, and effortlessly so, which is one of the gifts of the very good history story teller.

“In our own troubled times, there is something reassuring about discovering how much of the human experience is common to other ages,” he then writes, anticipating the above comment.

He even makes the organisation of trade guilds interesting, and thoroughly modern. “Roman trade guilds were notorious for their factionalism, rivalry and their increasingly dominant role in day-to-day urban politics,” he writes, provoking a stab of recognition in the consciousness of anyone who has lived in the UK in the past 60 years.

”The most important guilds were also closely involved in local politics, with the freedmen members playing active roles in make sure their preferred candidates were elected to office and would thus promote their interests,” he observes. Later he draws on the work of the satirist Lucian about a religious charlatan fiddling prophecies that had not been fulfilled so that it looked as if he had been right all along. Nostradamus meets the Bene Gesserit in Dune, one is tempted to add.

And there is a very real warning embedded in the history, pertinent to the gullible of today. “A slave manager of a farm estate should not allow 'fortune-sellers and sorceresses' onto the farm where would inveigle 'unsophisticated people' into handing over money in return for a useless prophecy,” he writes.

Next he tells of a man called Cosmus in Rome, who loitered on the thresholds of the Temple of the Divine Augustus and Temple of Minerva, where the crowd gives him the scraps he barks for. Does that not also sound terribly 'modern' in terms of everyday experience?

The writer ends, as he began, with specific reference to an 'ordinary' person, in the form of Agilia Prima, also known as Auguria, who had died following her 20th birthday. The funerary text celebrated her chastity, modesty, and frugality, and exhorted her husband not to mourn her because she has preceded him to the grave. 'Death is the nature, not the punishment of mankind. Whoever chances to be born, therefore also faces death'.

The inscription finishes thus: 'Be well, those who live above, and all men and all women'. A lesson deftly delivered to today's Populus.

In summary, Guy de la Bédoyere is uncommonly good at putting a human face to what in other hands would often be tediously dry historical fact. Though the fact that this reviewer misread 'underpins' as 'underpants', leading him to make a mental note to place an advance order for the author's next work on the topic before finishing the second page of the introduction to Populus, possibly says something about his own mindset...

* Apologies for the absence of the 'grave' accent on the second 'e' of the author's surname but I simply cannot work out how to translate it from the brain onto the iMac keyboard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't think this was a try

I don't think this was a valid try: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/rugby-union/68395119.

The player's feet were in touch when he put the ball down and one of the first lessons I learnt when starting to play rugby back in 1968 or 1969 was that even being level with the touch line meant you were out of play.

Why on earth did he not just stay on his feet?

Another Mighty Landmark

This week marks another personal landmark, in that it was 40 years ago this week that I made my first-ever sale as a professional writer.

It was of a one-line topical gag, to The News Huddlines, at that time a popular show on BBC's Radio 2, produced by Jonathan James-Moore.

It was the very first time I had submitted any material to the programme and I hit the target, and continued to do so for the next 18 months or so.

I can still remember almost word-for-word what the joke was, and to the penny how much I was paid for it (plus a 65% repeat fee as the show was broadcast on Thursday evening and repeated on Saturday afternoon).

The following evening I had another gag used on Weekending, BBC Radio 4's then flagship topical satirical show., which was repeated on Saturday evening

In the space of that 24 hours I went from being an aspiring international banker at Midland Bank International to knowing that what I really wanted to do for a living was to write.

I knew I wouldn't be able to do it selling one-liners but I started scanning The Guardian Media section on the Monday morning hoping to find something suitable...

Saturday Night With The Cassiopeia String Quartet

I'm not quite sure how to put this, but I spent Saturday evening in a cultural environment, soaking up the Mozart and Beethoven output of the Cassieopia String Quartet at St Lawrence Church in Towcester, Northamptonshire.

The works on offer were Mozart's String Quartet No 19 (Dissonance) K 465 in C major and Beethoven's String Quartet Op 18 No 4 in C minor.

Thank you Lizzie Rowland (Viola), Rosanna Lowe (Cello), Thomas Bentley (Violin 1) and Jacob Gritt (Violin II).

I stand in awe of their technical excellence, discipline and concentration and wish them the best for the future they deserve.

Another Day, Another Freelance Milestone

Today marks 31 years to the day that I left the Financial Times for the last time as a staffer and launched into the freelance world (January 22 1993).

When I arrived home that Friday afternoon there was a commission sitting on my fax machine, from Will Goodhart, the then editor of Euromoney Corporate Finance, for 3,000 words at £250/1,000.

I hit the ground running on the following Monday morning, have barely stopped since and quickly learnt a prime lesson: no matter how busy you are, you never stop looking for work.

I bet the Euromoney rate is still somewhere around that level, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong! 😀

Jam Tomorrow? WHY TIME REALLY MATTERS IN ECONOMICS

 

Title: Jam Tomorrow? WHY TIME REALLY MATTERS IN ECONOMICS

Author: Charles Crowson

Pages: 280 including bibliography and index

Publisher: Whitefox

Price: £16.99

ISBN 9781915635624

“If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, then you don't understand it yourself.”

The first full chapter of this book about the importance of time in economics begins with this quote, generally attributed to Albert Einstein, someone who surely needs no introduction as one of the most talked about theoretical physicists of his generation.

I'm afraid that much of what follows would surely not pass that test.

For example, from page 124: “The nature of money as a thing which has various roles to play but whose roles are often incongruent, if not outright contradictory, only really becomes clear if one admits the centrality of time to the economic decision-making process. The economic experience is essentially indexical. In economic terms this means that economic activity has a point of view and that it acquires its significance from the context in which it happens. For economic value judgements, this indexicality is a temporal one. The economic agent decides and acts from his or her position in the now of the present, and this now stands in relation to the past and the future.”

Do you know any six-year-old who would understand that? At the time of writing (December 11 2023) I am 11 times that age and have spent my entire adult professional working life in and around banking and finance. I had to read most of the sentences twice, often three times, to even begin to have a smidgeon of a grasp of what the author was saying. To say it is a challenge is an understatement. I had never even thought of money as having tenses.

What I can say without fear of personal contradiction is that I have not read so much about and understood so little about the theory and practice of money since I began studying Applied Economics for my Institute of Banker banking exams back in September 1979.

The timing of my being asked if I would like to review the book arguably could not have been better. The book arrived on the doorstep just before the final instalment of the BBC's transmission of three hour-long 'specials' to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the rogue Time Lord broadly known as Doctor Who.

I have followed this programme on its rollercoaster journey ever since I watched the first episode on a flickering black and white as it was broadcast on the evening of November 23 1963, the day after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

To be scrupulously fair to the author, the publisher and the public relations company charged with securing media coverage, I devoted as much time time as I could to reading the book on the day after the airing of the third of the Doctor Who hours. I'm not sure I could tell you with certainty which experience I enjoyed most or which is more likely to wake me up in the night screaming for mercy.

One of the joys of being older is the ability to contextualise more confidently based on personal experience. Reading Charles Crowson's opus brought to mind a quote often attributed to journalist-turned-diplomat Peter Jay, in response to a suggestion that one of his articles in The Times newspaper was difficult to follow.

Jay (according to Wikipaedia) replied: “I only wrote this piece for three people - the editor of The Times, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

Charles Crowson might be following the same path.

UK is a hub for innovation, but business still struggling to scale up

YFM Equity Partners has released new research today showing that despite the fact that UK entrepreneurs generate £950bn in annual revenue, entrepreneurs in the most innovative regions are struggling to access the funding they need to grow. The findings are included in YFM’s Entrepreneur Economy report. 

 

DHO Journal 2023

The DHO Journal 2023 is now out.

 

Anyone out there fancy a cycling challenge?

Once upon a time I might have thought about attempting this, but those days are behind me now...or are they?

Anyone care to join in?

 

My latest pizzas, home-made from scratch

Just finished making a couple more pizzas following the recipe and methods of Vito Iacopelli on YouTube (grazie, Vito).

I think that, apart from Sina's Pizzeria in Wengen, this one below is the best I have ever tasted. The crust is/was superb. I'm planning to have the other tomorrow.

I think I could easily live off pizza like this, in between porridge, fruit, tablet and macaroon bars...

Macaroon bars and tablet

I have spent most of today making macaroon bars and tablet, two of the core elements of the staple diet of anyone growing up in central Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s.

The components of the recipes for both would give health professionals nightmares and the television advert for Lees Macaroon Bars would do the same for the woke generation.

But they are well worth the effort. 

Braverman must resign

Suella Braverman must resign. Simple as that.

But then, she should have been sacked the moment the story came out in the press that she regards herself as being above the laws that she, as home secretary, is responsible for.

She MUST resign.

Asset-liability mismatching should have no place in banking

We have heard a good deal of uninformed guff recently about asset-liability mismatches in the coverage of runs on banks and the spectacular collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

 

I first became aware of asset-liability mismatches in banking around the spring of 1981 when I was doing a graduate trainee stint in the currency disposals department at the former Midland Bank International, and have been warning against them ever since.

 

Nothing to my mind justifies taking a sight deposit and 'transforming' that into a 25-year mortgage loan. Nothing. What has become an inherent and unquestioned component of banking practice is just wrong.

 

I've been called a Cassandra so many times I have lost count, but in the end, if you recall, Cassandra was proved 100% right.

 

'Banks' have only themselves to blame and should, in my opinion, be left to go well and truly bust, and the survivors to pick over their skeletons.

 

 

Parents stretching the finances to finance private schooling

I found this press release in my inbox this morning, and while it is not directly relevant to anything currently on my work sheets, it resonates with me as someone who bit the bullet in the summer of 1996 and committed to taking both our daughters out of the state 'education' system. I'm running it here not as an endorsement of the company involved, which I have not heard of before this morning, but because it tickles my interest as someone who has 'been there, done that'.

No need to be alarmed, says Bank of England; so why am I suddenly alarmed?

The Bank of England has, I just read in The Times, in effect said in the wake of news that UBS will rescue Credit Suisse, that there is no need to be alarmed about the British banking system.

Why does that send a chill down my spine?

 

 

Blue Blood, Cazenove in the Age of Global Banking

Title: Blue Blood, Cazenove in the Age of Global Banking

Author: Robert Pickering                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Publisher: Robert Pickering in partnership with whitefox publishing

Pages: 369

Price: £24.99

Format: Paperback

Published: February 23 2023

ISBN: 9781915036902; ebook 9781915036919

What do Blue Blood and Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year have in common? One, they both prominently cite Tokenhouse Yard as a location, in Blue Blood's case in the very first sentence of the very first chapter. And two, they cover events with an emphasis on London that seem to be buried in the past but resonate strongly with at least some current readers.

When reading the Defoe tome, thoughts of the hysterical global reaction to Covid-19 are constantly to the forefront of the reader's mind. When reading Pickering's, recollections immediately present themselves of a bygone age before the City of London's so-called Big Bang in October 1986.

Polished mahogany doors, liveried porters in carpeted entrance halls, double-breasted waistcoats and Grenadier Guards cufflinks. Those, at least for some, were the days.