Brian Bollen's Blog

RIP Captain Tom Moore

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-captaintom/uks-record-breaking-fundraiser-captain-tom-moore-dies-aged-100-idUSKBN2A216E

RIP, Captain, Sir Tom. RIP.

RIP Captain Tom Moore

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-captaintom/uks-record-breaking-fundraiser-captain-tom-moore-dies-aged-100-idUSKBN2A216E

RIP, Captain, Sir Tom. RIP.

I thought vaccine was going to be a 'get out of jail free' card

Almost since the start of the Covid-19 hysteria, we have been told that vaccine is THE ANSWER.

But I have been reading articles this weekend that suggest that even if 80% to 85% of people are vaccinated, we must still carry on with the ridiculous 'anti-social distancing' measure that forces people to converse while standing the best part of eight feet (in old money, you younger readers) away from one another.

This is not natural but a new wave of hype is starting about the new spike in deaths (1,000 to 1,500 a day in the UK according to some calculations) that will follow if we don't carry on with the practice till at least the end of 2021.

If vaccines are not going to enable something vaguely resembling normality to return, what is the bloody point of the expense and effort involved, I ask myself. Cue trolls.

But there is the rub. I have said from the start that governments around the world who have accidentally acquired total dominion over the everyday life of every citizen under their iron fist without firing a shot are not going to sacrifice said dominion.

We live in a new permanent. I, for one, feel I am going slightly bonkers, but that matters not a jot as we must accept endless privation of liberty so our various health services will not be overwhelmed.

And remember, as the late great Frank Herbert told us: An immobile population is easier to control.

 

Boris Johnson clearly hasn't been paying attention

If Boris Johnson, the current prime minister of the UK and Northern Ireland, thinks that a visit to Scotland by him will calm down tension being created by the Edinburgh parish council (copyright former prime minister Blair), then he clearly has not been paying attention.

All other issues aside, you and I are under house arrest, because to go outside our home will cause people to die and overwhelm the NHS, but Johnson can undertake travel that is clearly not necessary with legal and medical impunity?

Following the science? I don't think so.

Investor confidence decreased in January: State Street

State Street Global Markets has today released the results of the State Street Investor Confidence Index (ICI) for January 2021.

The Global Investor Confidence Index decreased to 100.7, down 3.8 points from December’s revised reading of 104.5. The fall in Investor Confidence was driven by a 7.3 point decline in North American ICI to 96.0.

Green energy sources now create more electricity than fossil fuels

I just saw this headline in The Times this morning:

Green energy sources now create more electricity than fossil fuels

Might that explain why we had two micro power cuts yesterday?

A quick explanation of bitcoin

What is bitcoin? I often ask myself that question.

I am not an economist, but I have spent my entire adult life in and around the international financial industry and I will unhesitatingly label bitcoin and other so-called cryptocurrencies a crock of shit.

If you are ever tempted to 'buy' bitcoin, because everyone else seems to be doing so, then go and lie down in a dark room till the urge wears off.

Have you ever stood and watched a bunch of street hustlers separate a larger bunch of mugs from their money by persuading them to buy a bag that they are clearly told has nothing in it?

I have, and fell for it, once. I don't think I have ever felt so stupid in my life, and believe me, I have felt stupid more times than I care to remember.

That, in essence, is bitcoin, without the honesty.

A brown paper bag with nothing in it.

I would not touch it with someone else's bargepole.

Doesn't Nicola Sturgeon look exhausted?

Watching Scotland's 'first minister' Nicola Sturgeon on the news yesterday evening, one thought sprang immediately to mind: does she not look exhausted? Absolutely exhausted?

 

For the record, I am following coronavirus restrictions to the letter, not least because going out for any reason at all has become a very unpleasant experience.

But I continue to question the underlying assumptions behind the restrictions, which to my mind owe more to medieval superstition than 21st century science.

I can't help notice that a goodly number of British people are doing the traditional gold-plating of restrictions and standing further apart than the two metres plucked at random out of the air (in Germany and elsewhere, it's 1.5 metres, rather undermining the claim that it is a scientific measure) and almost literally jumping out of your path when you are about 100 metres distant, although families with young children and dogs, and young people in general, will not give an inch and expect YOU to do all the jumping out of the way.

Others are virtually sitting on one another's laps while sipping Costa coffee.

And am I really the only person who finds it odd that scientists who are telling us we must not leave our homes, or everyone will die, have in fact left their homes in order to appear at a press conference telling us not to leave our homes?

As I keep saying, I despair, I utterly despair.

I noticed that Boris Johnson's ludicrous attempt to hype up Covid-19 panic levels even further contained at least four conditional words: may (which really should have been 'might' or 'could'), some and appear.

Call me a pedant, but those do not sound like core components of a statement of certainty that we are all going to die of this blasted virus.

Welcome to the 21st century, where people in Britain are being fined for organising a funeral. Pelion upon Ossa springs to mind...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-55772495

It was 28 years ago today...

Apologies in advance for those of you have heard the core elements of this story already, possibly more than once, but it is 28 years ago today to the very day that I left the Financial Times building at Number One Southwark Bridge for the last time as a full-time staffer (Friday, January 22, 1983).

I was at my desk when the phone rang about noon, and I learnt on answering it that my redundancy cheque was ready for collection. I stood up, got my coat, said my goodbyes to my colleagues on the capital markets desk and Peter Martin, our desk editor, since deceased.

As I went to Newspaper House, just off Fleet Street, it started to rain, lightly at first but building up to a steady drizzle.

I collected the cheque and went out into the fresh air as a full-time freelance (or what passes for fresh air in London). I then found myself wandering around Bloomsbury, near the British Museum, growing colder and wetter, before I realised that I no longer had to wait till 6pm to head for Euston Station.

So I set off on the first stage of the journey home, to Milton Keynes. I think I walked, but I couldn't swear to it.

When I arrived home, our daughters were home from school, so that means it was a bit after 3pm, and still daylight. I went upstairs to my office, and found there sitting on the fax machine a commission from Will Goodhart, then the editor of Euromoney Corporate Finance magazine, for 3,000 words at £250/1000.

I hit the ground running with that on the morning of January 25 and have, in essence, never stopped since.

It's been a lusty rollercoaster ride at times, but I wouldn't have swapped it for the world. I was never meant to work in a proper office...

A BBC employee or sub-contractor interviewing another BBC employee or sub-contractor, as we see and hear time after time after time on BBC 'news' programmes is not journalism.

It is lazy, lazy and lazy again.

Don't believe ANYTHING in the 'news'. And I write as a blooming journalist. The BBC is a disgrace, passing off mini-documentaries as news and, in the advertising of said mini-documentaries, reusing the same clips several times that the viewers will accept as news. I heard one 'reporter' this morning, 'reporting' from my home town hospital (laughable described as University Hospital Monklands).

He ticked all the usual boxes, interviewing NHS workers, who are of course all under relentless unprecedented pressure and working selflessly and courageously, and people with Covid-19 and spoke of loved ones (memo to the BBC: just because someone is a blood relation does not automatically make them a loved one: what about 'friends and family' instead?)

Then he finished by warning of dark and dismal days ahead. That is not reporting. That is EDITORIALISING.

Home-made sausage rolls

Just made sausage rolls this morning, using puff pastry and Lincolnshire sausages from Aldi. They are delicious, and cost about one-tenth I might pay for an inferior product from the bakery right next door.

One thing re-learnt from lockdown, is that food and drink are much, much better and much cheaper when made and consumed at home. I don't think I'll ever eat out in the UK again, unless I must. 

God Bless Us Every One

“God Bless Us Every One,” said Tiny Tim.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, December 1843.

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy

Title: Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy

Author: Ben Macintyre

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 377 including afterword, notes and index

Price: £25.00

Format: Hardback

Published: September 17 2020

ISBN: 9780241408506

I’ve read and very much enjoyed several books by Ben Macintyre, including Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat. At first, second and third glance, Agent Sonya is a worthy addition to his body of work.

Despite a longstanding interest in books about WWII and associated matters - which began with reading Commando comics, The Wooden Horse and Reach for the Sky in my childhood years and, seeing The Great Escape in glorious Technicolor on a big cinema screen in 1967, when I was about 10 - I have never before heard of Mrs Burton, codenamed Sonya.

The blurb explains that she was born Ursula Kuczynski, was a German Jew, a dedicated Communist, a colonel in Russia’s Red Army and a highly trained spy.

Inter alia, we learn that she planned an assassionation attempt on Adolf Hitler, spied on the Japanese in Manchuria and helped the Soviet Union build the atom bomb.

Her three children had different fathers, one of whom was also a secret agent. Oh, and she baked excellent cakes and had at least one holiday in a Butlin’s camp on England’s south coast. One has to ask why her story has never been told until now.

Ben Macintyre is a good writer, and as a professional writer I don’t say that of many people.

Here’s an early example, from the second chapter, Whore of the Orient, of Sonya/Ursula’s first impressions of Shanghai:

“The first thing that struck Ursula was the smell, the pure hot stink of poverty that wafted up from Shanghai harbour, a miasma of sweat, sewage and garlic….Encircling the ship in floating tubs were beggars, moaning cripples with stumps for arms and legs, children with festering wounds, some blind, some with hairless scab-encrusted heads.”

I suspect some of this came from a diary, but it demonstrates an eye for what my first editor often referred to as the telling adjective, and it whets the appetite for more. There is a picture later in the book, of at least part of the scene, just in case the words don’t do it for you, but I think the word picture is better than the photograph.

There are others, too (spoiler alert), including one of Chinese Communists being executed during the White Terror in Shanghai in 1927, something I had never previously even heard mentioned. It is not an image for the faint-hearted.

The pictures in general are very good, including one of a Russian stamp featuring the notorious British spy, Kim Philby, and Hitler in his favourite restaurant in Munich, Osteria Bavaria, looking almost human, but not quite.

And it might sound a bit silly, but I particularly enjoyed reading the Afterword: The Lives of Others, in which the author gives a brief summary of what happened next to many of the characters featured in the body of text.

This is something more writers should consider doing, especially when there are so many characters involved and it can be easy to lose track of who did what, where and when.

I commend this book, the only one I have ever read that has a dead-letter box in the quiet quintessentially English market town of Banbury, for heaven’s sake. And I suggest that it will make an excellent gift on a certain day in December, even if, as seems likely, the half-witted Muppets currently holding office in the UK government effectively cancel Christmas, in a way that Oliver Cromwell, Adolf Hitler, Uncle Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao could never have dreamt of.

Put it on your list, either to receive or to give: Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy, by Ben Macintyre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plague Fiction

Mrs B and I watched another very interesting cobbled-together documentary on BBC Four comparing Covid-19 with the bubonic plague the other evening. If you haven't seen it, it makes great viewing, even reassuring viewing, not least because it puts Covid-19 in some much-needed long-term perspective.

The Plague in the mid-14th century killed 50% to 60% of the population of Europe, compared to the statistically meaningless tiny percentage dying with Covid-19 today (note: I always make a distinction between dying of, and dying with).

Deutsche Börse acquires majority position in Quantitative Brokers

Deutsche Börse is acquiring a majority interest in Quantitative Brokers, an independent provider of advanced execution algorithms and data-driven analytics for global futures, options and interest rate markets. The fintech company has operations in New York, London, Sydney and Chennai.