Letter from Warwick: 34 of 2008

My dear Family & Friends, 27 October

After my last letter my friend Greg Marsh in Cape Town offered to bear witness to the fact that I did indeed predict a world financial crisis sparked by excess credit years ago. Greg’s a lawyer so you’d better not contradict me.

In all seriousness though, I’ve been watching the European and US governments throwing more cash, credit and misplaced guarantees at the problem, and it reminds me of Nick Leeson’s more and more desperate bets that eventually brought Barings Bank to its knees in 1995. The problem now, as then, is the human flaw of thinking that you can get something for nothing, or that somebody else should pay the price for your gamble.

Let me put this into a personal domain. Last week we got a letter from our new landlord. The new landlord is our old landlord’s sister. The house we live in is one of many owned by the wider family. She wanted to increase our rent by nearly 50% “due to the fact that the mortgage on this property has increased” – this despite the fact that we have a lease that runs until April next year. I then called the letting agent to establish what our rights were, and she called the new “property manager” to explain that we actually have a legal and binding lease. I then called Hipesh, the property manager, to reinforce our position and he “offered” to keep the rent the same.

Now it wouldn’t be great leap of imagination for those of you who know me fairly well to jump to the conclusion that I told him fuck off and take his family with him. In which case, you’d be wrong. All I can offer in my defence is that I’m getting older and that approach would simply have taken far too much energy. What I said to him was: “Actually, we have a contract. We can discuss it again next year.” End of conversation. What I was thinking is irrelevant. The result of this episode is that we have been looking at rentals in the local papers as well as the windows of the local estate agents. My conclusion is that we should offer less than we are currently paying when the lease comes up for renewal next year. And if that doesn’t pay the landlord’s bond, then she goes bust. It’s not personal; it is simply the unacknowledged element of risk. The possible returns to risk are exponential, but SO ARE THE LOSSES. I’m not paying for somebody else’s risk. We’ll find something else if needs be. I don’t know how long it will take for the full effect of the years of speculation to feed into property prices. What I can say is that the bust is going to be spectacular, particularly here in the UK.

I have many other fears of what the consequences of this crunch will be. It’s one of the major reasons for why we’re here.

But that was just one event of our week. In a completely different vein, I drove down to Oxford last Tuesday in order to visit a shop on the outskirts of the city which sells South African goods. I was missing Lunch Bars and Bar Ones (I don’t really like Mars Bars) and Granadilla Twist. I spent over £20 on chocolates, cold drink and Mrs Balls STRONG chutney (the one with the green lid). I only discovered later in the week that Lunch Bars are almost identical to Picnic bars.

Having driven all the way down to Oxford it would have been a waste not to park the car and stroll around the town. It took all of two minutes for Edgar to introduce me to another South African. I reckon South Africans can pick out a Rhodesian Ridgeback at 500 paces. I suppose it makes me more aware of the South African accents around me. I discovered last week that Sarel van der Merwe (the racing driver) lives on the outskirts of Leamington Spa (according to the South African test pilot for Rolls Royce that I met at favourite coffee shop No.3.) I hear a lot of Afrikaans around and about. Not long after we arrived here Lucia and I overheard one side of a heated telephone argument in Afrikaans at a shop in Leamington Spa. I couldn’t contain myself and exclaimed “Sê vir hom” as we passed by. The rest of the argument was conducted in much lower tones hidden behind a hand cupped around the telephone. Ag shame, nê.

That said, I really enjoyed the Granadilla Twist, and Bar Ones go particularly well with Port.

Our weekend was another adventure that took us down to London for Becky and Katie’s wedding. (You may remember from my last letter that we met Becky in Zanzibar two years ago.) It’s the first reception for a gay wedding we’ve ever been to and the party was just the same as any other. The newlyweds are off to Curação for their honeymoon for which I envy them greatly. The reception was held at Searcy’s House in Knightsbridge (http://www.30pavilionroad.co.uk; http://www.searcys.co.uk.) We partied late into the night. Pictures in the usual place at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones.

Our problem though was the zoo. I had no idea that it would be school holidays until I tried to book them into kennels for our overnight sojourn in London. We were rescued by one of Lucia’s colleagues Shayla, a Canadian, who offered to come around to our house and let them in on from the garden and feed them on Saturday evening, and let them out again on Sunday morning. Thank you, Shayla.

We stayed at the Express by Holiday Inn on Belgrave Road in Pimlico. The hot water wasn’t, the bed was hard and we couldn’t figure out how to turn the heating on. We didn’t sleep well, if at all. This was compounded by the fact that clocks went one hour back at midnight. So what felt like 6am was actually 5am. It was a long night.

Sunday dawned cold and raining. We had arranged to meet friends of Lucia’s, Tim and Patti, near Kingston-on-Thames at 11am, but we were up early (or should I say that we gave up trying to sleep on the cold, hard bricks that “Express by Holiday Inn” had covered with a thin duvet. But then maybe it was just Room 406. Fuckers.)

After a breakfast of tea and toast (well, that’s what I had) we ventured out into the soft drizzle of Pimlico to discover more of London. (We should have driven down; there was LOTS of free weekend parking in Pimlico.)We walked down Belgrave Road, past the Pimlico tube station towards the Thames. The drizzle turned into rain. The more we walked, the more I was convinced we had to come across a coffee shop ... soon. The rain turned into a squall as we walked from Vauxhall Bridge towards Lambeth Bridge next to the Palace of Westminster. Lucia snuggled in close as we took shelter behind a plain tree. Across the river the curtains of rain driven up the Thames on an easterly wind blunted the sharp edges of the MI5 building on the South Bank. When the squall passed, we continued our stroll up Millbank past the Tate Britain, across Lambeth Bridge, and then back towards Vauxhall on the south bank. I finally spied a Potuguese café-bar near the railway station, and we ducked inside to escape the inclement weather until it was time to catch our train.

We met Tim and Patti at L’Amandine, in Teddington, one of a small franchise of French boulangeries around London. Lucia had been wanting to meet up with them ever since we arrived in the UK at the beginning of the year, but it’s difficult to make plans when you live 100 miles apart. Patti also suffered a serious stroke last year and is confined to a wheelchair. I can’t remember how long we stayed chatting at the café, but we had to drag ourselves away to get back to London to catch our train home. Lucia said “I knew you’d get on with them” as we walked away. And indeed I did. I look forward to meeting up with them again soon. I hope they feel the same way. (My perennial fear is that I meet someone and afterwards they say: “Jeez, I never thought he would shut up.”)

I’ll leave it there for another week.

Love, light & peace
Llewellyn

Letter from Warwick: 33 of 2008

My dear Family & Friends

I don’t write a diary (unless you regard this letter as a type of diary, in which case, yes, I do write a diary.) My theory is that if I can’t remember what happened or what I did, then it’s not worth writing about. What that means is that I don’t have much to write about this week. But that doesn’t mean that nothing happened though.

High on the event scale was a trip into London for dinner last Tuesday evening. Lucia had to go into the city for work, so I emailed Becky (whom we met in Zanzibar two years ago) to find out if she and her partner, Katie, would be free for dinner that evening. Becky and Katie will be celebrating their civil union this weekend, and we were particularly keen to meet Katie before the big day. We had tried to meet up before, but circumstances had mitigated against this. So, after a couple emails backwards and forwards, we agreed to meet at a pub called The Woolpack near London Bridge station.

I caught the train into London in the afternoon to take advantage of the cheaper rate. The return fare for arrivals in London (from Leamington Spa) plus a London Travelcard before 10h00 is £75, from 10h00 to 14h30 it’s £29, and after 14h30 it’s £21. Travel is very expensive in this country. Anyway, I arrived in London some time after 16h00, leaving me with just over an hour to kill before I met Lucia outside the Yahoo! offices on Shaftesbury Avenue. I took the tube from Marylebone Station, the London hub for the Chiltern train service, to Picadilly Circus, and then zigzagged my way through Soho, Chinatown, around Leicester Square and Covent Garden to the Yahoo! building. I walked past the building several times; given the company’s profile on the Internet, I had expected it to be emblazoned with big neon signs advertising Yahoo!’s presence, but it was actually all very English and understated. You had to know what number you were looking for on Shaftesbury Avenue.

I love the vibrancy and feel of London and I’d love to live there if we could – maybe we still will. It would certainly be interesting trying to find a property to support a small family which includes two big dogs. You might then be able to catch the hint of a glint of hope in my eye as I watch property prices begin to slip in the midst of this credit crunch.

When I met Lucia after her presentation, we walked down Charing Cross Road to Leicester Square tube station and caught the Picadilly line to Holborn and then the Central line to Bank in the middle of the financial district. We had intended to catch the Northern Line the two stops to London Bridge from there, but we hadn’t considered how busy Bank station would be at peak hour. It was hot and stuffy and jam-packed with bankers and brokers crowding around the pedestrian tunnels down to the Underground platforms, and so we decided to escape to the open air and walk the last bit instead. Our route took us past the Bank of England and across London Bridge as the gloom of night began to settle in. I had to consult my London map book several times under street lamps to make sure of where we were and where we were going, but we found our way to the pub easily enough.

We had a great evening. We really like Katie, the food and wine were good, and we could have stayed and chatted far longer if we didn’t have a train to catch back to Leamington Spa. The last train from London arrives in Leamington way past midnight, so I had targeted the second last train which departs Marylebone at 21h30. We made it with just a minute to spare.

Let me jump from there to Saturday. We had a longstanding arrangement to meet Richard, Anne and (daughter) Polly at Snowshill Manor, one of the National Trust properties near Broadway in the Cotswolds, for the Snowshill Apple Day. The day was advertised as a big event for Snowshill, but, I must confess, I was expecting a bit more. I was expecting tastings of apple juice, cider and, of course, apples, and a big sort of party atmosphere. What it actually consisted of was two smallish marquees, each with a long table of every type of apple one could possibly find. There must have been more than 100 different types of apples which was quite surprising for someone, like me, whose sole experience of apples was the fruit aisle at the supermarket.

After the apples and strolling through the garden, Richard and I, followed one of the gardeners for a short talk on compost heaps. Did you know that the temperature at the core of a compost heap rises to around 55C during the most active part of the composting process? No, me neither. Make no mistake though, we still enjoyed ourselves; it’s wonderful to be outdoors when the sun comes out and there is a bit of blue sky above you as autumn turns to winter.

From Snowshill we tracked back to Richard and Anne’s home in the little hamlet of Winderton near Shipston-on-Stour for dinner. I loved watching the sun set across the hills from the warmth of their glass enclosed sun room. Over coffee after dinner Richard, Polly and I started an impromptu drumming session on the goat-skin drums that they brought back from SA. I don’t think we were very good, but Lucia and Anne smiled anyway.

And that’s it for the week really. I also started reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the follow-up to Fooled By Randomness. One of his theses that I find particularly interesting is the retrospective distortion of written history – call it 20:20 hindsight. Along with historians, journalists are also particularly guilty of this – after all, you’ve got to fill those pages somehow, and there’s a new page day after day after day. Simply stated, it is that humans have a habit of fitting reasons to behaviour and events after the fact as if those events were then predictable. So, for instance, it’s easy now to say that it was obvious a Credit Crunch was coming, yet most people were still surprised when it arrived. Even though I believed that the crunch was coming, I couldn’t tell Lucia when it would arrive and what would be the spark that lit the tinder. If I’d known that, I would have shorted the shit out of the banking sector and I might have been writing this to you from a palm-fringed beach somewhere in the tropics. But I’m in Warwick and it’s raining outside. I buy lottery tickets every week.

That’s it for now

L

There are a few more pictures at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones

Letter from Warwick: 32 of 2008

My dear family & friends, 13 October

I couldn’t help but watch with a wry smile as global markets tanked last week. Most of you will have had to endure me rambling and ranting on about the extent of global indebtedness since about 2001. I’ve been put down and, worse still, ignored. I was, after all, just some freelance hack in shorts and a T-shirt walking his dogs to the nearest coffee shop every morning as opposed to some smartly dressed investment banker, fund manager, financial analyst or the CEO of a multinational company. But to me it was just so obvious. I’ve always loved history – reading about and learning what happened before. One of my favourite quotes is: “Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.” That history told me that we were in the middle of a speculative boom driven by easy credit that would end in an almighty crash. The evidence was plain to see. What stuns me is how people didn’t see it. I fear that there may be some way to go yet. Now Gordon Brown wants the world to follow his example for sorting out the crisis without a hint of embarrassment or recognition that it was the sort of policies he propounded which led us to this point in the first place. Watch this space.

Talking of history, our dinner last Tuesday for Lucia’s team from work appeared to be a roaring success. I had initially been told to expect 21 people, but that was whittled down to 16 on the evening. I had several requests for the recipe of my Portuguese chicken and rice dish, and one of Lucia’s Spanish colleagues said it was the best dish she had eaten here in the UK. My chicken pasta dish didn’t do as well, but I suspect that was because I was a bit over generous with the use of Mrs Ball’s chutney. Leftovers were donated to the dogs. Edgar and Hazel love pasta.

I’ll leap from there to the weekend. I’d seen posters about for a “Steam & Vintage Rally” at the Cheltenham Racecourse. I did my best to convince Lucia that it would be a great day out. It only occurred to me afterwards that Lucia may not have seen it quite that way when she said that she had enjoyed herself far much more than she had expected to. (You can see the pics at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones.) We arrived soon after the gates opened on Saturday morning and spent three or four hours strolling around the exhibits swathed in a haze of steam and smoke. It was the sort of thing that I can place a tick in the box next to it to say that I’ve done that and feel much richer for the experience. We were also lucky in that it was the most gorgeous autumn day with the changing colours of the leaves and gentle breeze providing a picturesque backdrop.

Afterwards we drove into Cheltenham to look around. It’s a lot bigger than Leamington and Warwick and more “sophisticated”. The town centre was all the busier for The Times Literature Festival which started on Friday and carries on all this week. We just walked around for a bit taking in the sights and sounds, and ended up drinking cold drinks in a park before driving home. On the outskirts of Cheltenham we drove past GCHQ (General Communications Headquarters), the big government listening centre that eavesdrops on telephone calls from spy satellites crisscrossing the earth. I somehow expected the location to be far more secret, not perched right next to the A40 between Cheltenham and Gloucester for all to see.

On Sunday, we watched the Japanese F1 Grand Prix early in the morning and then walked up along the canal to the coffee shop at the top Hatton Locks. Again it turned out to be the most glorious autumn day much to our delight. In the afternoon I mowed the lawn and prepared a late afternoon braai (barbecue) for the two of us. Life here is so focussed indoors and inwards that it feels like a special treat to be outdoors when a good day comes along. Afterwards we walked to the Portuguese pub, the Lock, Dock & Barrell, for coffees and bagaçeira (Portuguese fire water), and then back through the park.

Along the way home a car came speeding past us, careened around the next corner with squealing tyres and was followed by the sickening thump of metal on metal as it collided with several other vehicles. Lucia and I dashed up the road to see what had happened and were met with quite some scene of destruction. There were six or seven cars caught up in the melee with varying levels of damage; airbags had deployed in at least two of the vehicles. Lucia and I debated/argued about whether we should hang around to tell the police what we saw. Lucia pointed out that we didn’t actually see anything, only heard it. There were also plenty of other people around who had seen what happened, so we went home. I was just disappointed not to see the speeding (and probably inebriated) maniac get locked up.

Love, light & peace
Llewellyn

Letter from Warwick: 31 of 2008

My dear family & friends

A really funny thing happened last Tuesday. In the morning I walked the dogs to the Pastelaria Portuguesa in Warwick but stopped off at the newsagent first to buy The Times. As usual, I commanded the dogs to “DOWN” and to “STAY” just outside the door of the shop. Returning a minute later with the newspaper under my arm, I saw that Edgar had broken the down-stay command; he was standing, wagging his tail in delight as he spied me coming out of the shop. I was a bit annoyed at him, and commanded him to “WAIT” in my deepest, most authoritative voice. Just at that moment a young lady, who was about to step into the shop, stopped dead, her eyes wide with fright. I couldn’t suppress a sort of half-laugh and told her – as airily as I could – that I was actually talking to my dog, but I’m not sure that she particularly believed me; she wouldn’t step into the shop until I had left.

The big adventure last week was our first trip to the Symphony Hall in Birmingham for a concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on Thursday evening. The programme for the evening included Saint-Saëns Symphony No.3 (The Organ Symphony), which is one of my favourites. Lucia had strict instructions to be home in enough time to allow us to leave by 6pm. Still, I was surprised that it took us over an hour to drive the 25-or-so miles to the centre of Birmingham, and we arrived with just enough time to pick up our tickets at the box office and make a pit stop at the toilets before taking out seats.

The concert was quite fantastic. First, the purpose-built Symphony Hall has near perfect acoustics which allows the audience to hear every nuance of the orchestra. Second, the Hall was filled to its capacity of 2200 people. (Remember, I’m used to the relatively poorly attended concerts of Philharmonia at the City Hall in Cape Town.) Third the performance was electric. The programme started with the Mother Goose Suite by Ravel, followed by Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto before the interval, and finished with the Organ Symphony. I’ve always enjoyed the organ, probably because the sound is just so big. I love the feeling of the big 32ft or 64ft tubes which you only find on the biggest organs; you can’t actually hear them, just feel them. The whole building vibrates. It was such a thrilling evening.

At the interval, we discovered that the tradition is clearly to buy ice cream. While Lucia and I headed to the bar for a glass of wine (we’re from South Africa after all), most of the audience queued at the many ice cream fridges. I reckon that at least half the audience bought and ice cream at £2 each. To put that into perspective for the South African’s, that’s about R33 000 worth of ice cream sold in five minutes – when the outdoor temperature is about 5C. Lucia and I agreed that we would definitely share an ice cream next time. I like ice cream, but in small doses.

Other important markers of the week included entertaining Polly, Richard and Anne’s daughter, on Tuesday evening while Richard and Anne went to a parent’s evening at Polly’s school in Leamington. (Anne is a former colleague of Lucia’s.) Polly recently started what we would call high school in South Africa. She is a bright, intelligent and independent young girl whom I would like to say to say reminds me of me, but I suspect that she is a lot brighter than I ever was. On Friday evening, one of Lucia’s colleagues, Rebecca, and her partner, David, came around for drinks after work. The plan had initially called for Lucia and a few of her staff members to repair to The White Lion on the Radford road for drinks after work, but last minute work demands put paid to that idea.

Then we had a busy weekend again. We went to Worcester on Saturday morning to get a better feel for the city without having to rush home for an important sporting event like a Formula One Grand Prix. I was really intrigued and fascinated by the city. Worcester wasn’t a big target for German bombers during WWII – and it managed to wrong-step city planners of the 50’s and 60’s – so a lot more of the medieval city survives. I find it beyond understanding that city planners after the war simply wanted to condemn buildings that had been around for 600 or 700 years. I can only surmise that their bloody-mindedness represented the same anger and class bitterness that brought us the French and Russian Revolutions. Luckily there were enough individuals with sufficient reverence for history and architecture (and money) who managed to preserve little corners of England for all posterity. Most fascinating was The Greyfriars (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-thegreyfriars), a merchant’s home built in around 1480, which is still standing and is open to visitors.

We also went back to the Cathedral to complete the tour we started last week. I was delighted that the tower was also open and paid my £3 to climb the 258 stairs to the top while Lucia meditated in the church below. Lucia doesn’t really like enclosed places which includes medieval stairways. On this occasion she probably got the better end of the deal though – I could feel the tower swaying in the breeze when I got to the top, which is not really quite the ideal sensation in a 1000-year-old edifice. I wanted to take some pictures of the stunning views, but I was too chicken to let go of the iron railing. I’ll go back and get those pictures sometime when the wind ain’t blowing. We went to the Portugues cafe we discovered last week for lunch, and then drove home via Tewkesbury and Evesham.

Sunday was given over to shopping and cooking. I had suggested to Lucia that she invite some of her staff members around for dinner. I wasn’t expecting everyone. So while Lucia baked some deserts, I cooked three different dishes which will be easy to reheat for the event on Tuesday evening. Please hold thumbs for us that all goes smoothly.

Love, light & peace

Llewellyn

Picture book: http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones