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
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
