The Week

If this were The Week, it would be a particularly thin publication.

My cultural activities have been limited this week, although I did have book club. Book club is four girlfriends getting together for a yummy supper and discussing (slightly briefly on this occasion), Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. We all agreed it's a lovely book - the descriptions of the New England countryside and even the bitter, snowy winters have a certain romance - but thoroughly depressing and women don't come out of it particularly well. Having said that, nor do men, or at least, not all men. Ethan is definitely a 'good' man, but has been dealt blow after blow by life until he's tactiturn, physically broken and hobbling and resigned to his uninspiring fate.

Anyway, my book choice for the next book club is An Education by Lynn Barber. In part, this is because I'm keen to take book club on tour to the cinema! The film, for which Nicky Hornby wrote the screenplay, is one of those that I've kept hearing about and has sufficiently intrigued me that I want to read the book on which it's based and watch it. The film was released in the UK yesterday. This may seem heretical for some book club participants, but I'm a big believer that films can enhance your reading of a book. I've watched a number of films before reading the book, such as Captain Corelli's Mandolin and it only enhanced my reading of the book. It made me more observant as I compared it to the film and appreciative of just how much better it was than the film. Not a hard job in this instance. We'll see with An Education. Expect a posting soon.

I'm also hoping to post on Anish Kapoor's Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, as I plan to go along in the not too distant future. Stay tuned!

Credit means Trust

As I sit here listening to the 10 o'clock news about bankers' bonuses, last night's play, The Power of Yes, seems so poignant. 


It's a funny play, actually funny at times, but just slightly odd and quite serious at others. It's quite an aim: to write a play charting history that is so recent and ongoing and, most significantly, about financial markets. The play tells the story of the credit crunch through the principal commentators of it, including "hedgefund manager and global philanthropist and philosopher" George Soros; journalist, business man and welfare adviser, Sir David Freud; the former and current head of the FSA; headhunter Paul Hammond; a city lawyer; FT journos; a former Lehman's banker and so on. Starting in the summer of 2007 when the first rumours of city discontent began and covering the whole ghastly affair with lowlights such as Northern Rock, Lehman's, Iceland and Fred the Shred.


Even a masterful playwright like David Hare struggles to make financial markets exciting and engaging the whole time. Clever production helps him, but some of the novelty wears off, as we go for yet another financial lesson about securitisation, credit derivatives and sub prime.


However, the key messages are clear. Greed and hubris led us to this situation and to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are responsible to a point. We all lived beyond our means in the good times, whether thanks to our mortgage, credit card or cheap loan. I would like to discount myself largely from the greed, but then I know I eyed up Iceland bank accounts because their interest rates were so high and I didn't associate that with risk. I'm materialistic. I see people with lots of money and I want to be a part of it. I hope and believe I wouldn't do anything too reckless to achieve it, certainly not to the detriment of others, but I'm a product of the booming 90s and noughties, as are so many of my generation.


The bankers don't come off well in The Power of Yes, but they don't come off terribly. Their portrayal is not gratuitous and it is accurate. One 24 year-old banker bemoans the disappearance of the bonuses just as he has started work and proclaims that he's off to Hong Kong. Virtually all my friends in banking (who are in their mid-twenties) feel like this. I find it hard to stomach. As someone earning considerably less than them, bonus aside, I have a real sense of "they just don't get it" (oft-quoted, including in this play). In an attempt to be understanding, I suppose that they feel they have worked very hard to earn as much as people have in previous years and they resent that they're not. What I resent though is that they can't associate their banks' astronomical losses with their bonuses. Why should you get a bonus if the company you work for has lost £17 billion? How does that make any sense? Nor does it appear to occur to them that those people who have helped keep them in work and back up their employers' shortfalls, are ordinary taxpayers who earn nothing like them.


I also find it hard to stomach that, as the current bonuses scandal demonstrates, the bankers have emerged from this whole terrible situation - of their collective making - unscathed. Meanwhile, some people close to me have lost their jobs, are struggling to find jobs and are worrying about their precarious financial situations. 


As Hare concludes, when the market collapses, it isn't the makers of the collapse who feel it. This is unfair. Well, people may say that life's unfair, but, to coin a phrase from the play, we now seem to have a system of socialism for the rich. How much more unfair can you get? How much more do the rest of us have to put up with?


And now it seems, as so often when thinking about the credit crunch, I've become angry and this is probably a good time to go. In conclusion, The Power of Yes is not a play's play, the credit crunch doesn't "become" a play, but, as with all good theatre, it certainly provokes a response.

I'm back... and let's hope for a while

A new year and a new start.

OK, OK, so the new year started a little while ago... but I've turned over a new leaf with regard this blog. I am going to make it more focused in its content. My job involves monitoring blogs and what I notice is that the most entertaining, most informative and hence most popular blogs are those which have a theme, or a cause and a level of expertise or at least enthusiasm for their subject.

Like most working people, I spend more time at work than virtually anywhere else. Whilst I enjoy many aspects of my job, I can't honestly describe it as my driving passion and I can't claim that it's the most worthwhile of jobs. I have pondered this situation and what I really want to do is to make my work worthwhile, make it count and make it something about which I'm passionate.

One area in which I am particularly interested is social enterprise, work which can be profitable, but also makes a positive contribution to society and promotes the right things for both the environment and society. Only today, David Cameron was promoting social enterprise as the way to make capitalism popular again.

I see a great and exciting future for social enterprise. It's an area I want to explore more and those explorations will be shared on this blog.

Happy Earth Day!

This March marked the tenth anniversary of the BTCV Green Gyms. These gyms were not something I was aware of until I heard a report about them on Women’s Hour over the Easter weekend, but they seemed such an eminently good idea. Being a mild environmental pioneer, recycling as much as possible and encouraging / bossing / guilt tripping my housemates to do likewise, I decided to look into this a little further. I’m now thinking that I would like to attend one of the London green gyms with some of my colleagues, who, like me, are on our company green team.

The idea of the gyms is to incorporate exercise and becoming a little fitter with a worthwhile environmental task, be it clearing a woodland path, slashing weeds, or trimming a hedge. The free gym session starts with some basic warm up exercises, followed by instruction on how to use the tools at your disposal and information about the conservation task you’re going to do. To finish off, there are a few cool down activities. The whole “workout” lasts approximately three hours.

There seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment for these dual-serving positive initiatives of encouraging a healthy lifestyle, whilst also promoting going green. A new swimming pool in Harrow is to be filled by rainwater alone. Reuters News and The Times have both recently focused on the need for town planners to create environments that encourage walking and cycling, rather than driving. This is so obviously the way we have to go, if we’re avoid to becoming obese monsters who use up all the earth’s resources and drown in the icecap meltwaters… which may serve us right, but would not be very enjoyable!

It makes so much sense to create as many initiatives as possible that promote a healthy lifestyle (fighting the current obesity “epidemic”) and environmental awareness (encouraging us to think about our lifestyles and how they impact upon the planet). So much of healthy living is, by its very nature, green. Walking or cycling as opposed to driving, eating natural and locally grown produce, which has not been transported miles, pumped full of conservative agents and heavily packaged. I look forward to being inspired by the next such initiative.

News and views

First thing’s first, given my last, rather old now, post, I guess I should mention how very sad it is that Shannon’s stepfather, Craig Meehan, has been charged for possessing indecent images of children. However, for all those who contributed to her search, I still think it was so wonderful that she was found alive and well.

And, despite Zimbabwean elections (when will Mugabe be got rid of – it’s so close now and yet still feels so far away), BA PR disasters (what were they thinking?) and pro-Tibet riots when the world is supposed to be “uniting” around the Olympic torch (the riots being a really good and important statement); there are still bits of news that show human nature in its most positive light.

One of these last week surrounds the tragic air accident, when a Cessna jet crashed into a house in Farnborough, Kent on Sunday 30 March. The owners of the house which the aircraft destroyed, Ed and Pat Harman, were so admirable when they visited the wreck of their house. All they could say was how sorry they were for the family and friends of the accident’s five victims (David Leslie, Richard Lloyd, Mike Roberts, Christopher Allarton, and Michael Chapman) and how grateful they were to be alive. Hardly a word did they mention about their – not comparable to the victim’s family and friends – but definite loss, the house in which they had spent the majority of their married life and brought up their two sons. I find this selflessness in the light of a general horrific tragedy, which was in a small part theirs, incredibly impressive and reassuring about the good and resilient side of human nature.

A proper reason for a party

I am so, so happy that Shannon Matthews has been found alive and well.

It's so rare for that to be the outcome once a child is missing for over three weeks. The whole situation was beginning to become eerily like that of Madeleine McCann and it would be so awful to go through all that as front page headlines yet again. Also, it was really humbling and inspiring to see all of the Matthews' friends and neighbours, who had taken it upon themselves to contribute to the search for Shannon, properly celebrating her discovery. Whatever controversy concerning her family situation, her abduction and the length of time it took to find her now arises, it feels like those, who for no reason other than huge empathy for her family, took upon themselves to contribute to her search, have been amply rewarded, as they justly deserve. It is inspiring. I am pleased that amidst other elements of the news story, the parties and celebrations surrounding her safe discovery, are being focused upon in such a positive light.

Juan Muñoz at the Tate

I've had such a lovely couple of weekends in London, actually getting out and about and enjoying it. It reminded me of how easy it is not to do much in London over the weekend - just potter from one party to another and deal with the hangovers the next day.

But if you do make that effort - there's so much going on in this fantastic city on every level: culturally, socially, politically and so on. It’s culturally that I’m interested in here.

Last weekend, my youngest sister and I headed to the Tate Modern and Juan Muñoz's exhibition. It was a gorgeous day and lovely to walk along the South Bank. I hadn't been to the Tate Modern for ages and was reminded just how impressive it is. I hear that the architects are from the same company (Herzog & de Meuron Architekten) as that which has worked on the Bejing bird’s nest Olympic stadium, which itself looks pretty incredible, whatever your feelings about the rest of the Bejing Olympics.

Back to the Tate. The crack is definitely worth seeing - wiggly its jagged way across the whole vast Turbine Hall. It's great seeing everyone enjoying it too - adults looking it in, taking photos of it, sitting or lying around it and chatting, whilst children run, jump and fall in it, more or less managing not to hurt themselves. A friend of mine crafted a photo of himself clinging to it for that "cliff hanging" moment, or, to recreate a brilliant birthday card I've seen a few times of a man seemingly clinging to a ledge, which is actually just the pavement post a very heavy night. This friend commented on the success of the crack as its interactivity with its audience. He thinks the only other Turbine Hall exhibition that has matched it was The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson, which incorporated a lingering mist, a mirror over the entire turbine hall ceiling reflecting the space below and a giant semi-circular form made up of hundreds of lamps and reflected to create an impression of a whole sun. First, it led its viewers to respond and react to it more than does most art. The mirrored ceiling prompted people to spend ages looking up, staring at themselves, or lying on the ground and making silly shapes. Secondly, it too was talked about in the media and not just because it required safety warnings!

Last time I went to the Tate – many, many years ago now, it was Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider, which occupied the enormous space. This was the first of the Turbine Hall exhibitions, which were sponsored by Unilever for the next five years. Talking of Louise Bourgeois, I wish I had made the effort to make it to her more recent exhibition at the Tate, which another friend of mine told me was brilliant. Unfortunately, that was during my non-cultured time!

To return to Muñoz, his exhibition was great. I loved the metal, smallish sculptures of spiral staircases and balconies themed on common scenes in Spanish towns, which were in the first room. I could happily have one of those on my wall. However, that did end my desire to own, as opposed to just enjoy, Muñoz's art because his anonymous, almost human figures do become increasingly sinister. They are often hidden or partially concealed so that you can't fully look at them. Or, their eyes are shielded by gill-like covers. They are human enough that they're familiar, but still alien, being either dwarves, or having round bases in place of legs and such like, which is enhanced by their odd expressions. Particularly menacing characters were the two hanging figures, who looked so uncomfortable and contorted. Also, the five seated figures who appeared to be participating in an evil convention.

A friend of mine found the Terracotta Army-esque room very creepy. It is full of huddles of identical figures – 100 in total. They have the same head with the features of an Asian man, the same odd smile and the same clothes, though worn in different styles. I didn't have an eerie sense from them because they were smiling and I found their smiles convincing. Plus, I liked being able to walk around them and look them in the face, which was so difficult with most of the other figures.

It was certainly an intriguing exhibition. I knew nothing about Muñoz. Now I know that most of his sculpture, of which he created a vast amount, was done between 1980 and 2000. He worked in a variety of mediums (iron, bronze, plastic, wax) and in different styles. He was always interested in space and the human interaction with it, which appealed to me with the staircase sculptures, but not the human figures, especially as they were never quite human. Yet he managed to make his work oddly appealing in its purity and its pleasing texture. Having seen the wonderful Henry Moore sculptures at Kew, where you are able to stroke, sit on, walk through and clamber over just about all of them; I was sorely tempted to do likewise to some of Muñoz’s. It was not to be, but I’m very pleased to have gone along in any case.