Missing Numbers

Always on the lookout for the reasons “why I went wrong” I was reminded recently about my ineptitude at mathematics. Sure I can add and subtract. Multiplication, percentages and even long division are skills I can just about perform. But I went through my formative years regarding mathematics as being much too technical, much too boring. As a result I possibly missed out on both great wealth and, strangely, some (almost incompehensible) element of pleasure.

I could, for instance, have become skilled at computer programming. I would have learned the different forms of Basic, C, C++, the two great aunts (Fortran and Ada), and thence to HTML, Java, and so on. After all this is an area which hardly existed when I was born, and which has developed through my lifetime. As a bookseller I sold the books which inspired the Internet boom of the nineties, but I failed to pay attention to the content of those books and totally missed any opportunity of becoming a dot.com billionaire.

And then there is the Square Mile. Could I have been an Investment Banker, a Hedge Fund Maestro, a Stock Market King? Again, probably not. I’m not good enough, or interested enough, in the maths. This week I leafed through a new book on technical analysis, Marber on Markets. Here are the charts that define good trading. The “head and shoulders” peaks, the different variations, the clouds, the bounces. And Brian Marber explains all these with the rather fetching enthusiasm of a man who really enjoys what he is doing. Whenever I select a share (I don’t do commodities, currencies, bonds, etc.) I act as if I’m on a racecourse looking for a horse to back. “Ah, this one is a snowy white grey (like the older brother) and is drawn on Mum’s birthday – I’ll back that”. Never will I check the form book, the breeding, previous timings and draw numbers. Marber was the first man to run an Investment Fund entirely through Technical Analysis and he prospered. Not only that, but he enjoyed himself.

The good Captain Aubrey in Patrick O’Brien’s novels, may have been a swashbuckling, fast-living, Boys Own Magazine hero. But he was also a keen mathematician, and wholeheartedly enthused about the subject which, as a navigator, was essential to his career. Only yesterday a septuagenarian neighbour told me how a long coach journey taken a few weeks ago had afforded the opportunity “for me to teach Barbara calculus – such fun!”

Maybe I’d better stop fighting with Sudoku puzzles and try and learn some healthy trigonometry instead. A little strenuous mental discipline would probably do me good.

St Pancras

Sightseeing with the wife in London and a good time to have a look at the re-vamped St Pancras Station. It really does deserve all the praise it is getting. Okay the champagne bar may be the longest in the world, but it was packed end-to-end. The roof is a marvel and the building combines its three functions – as a public space, as the new Eurostar terminal, and as a normal London railway terminus (with trains to Nottingham and Sheffield and the like) extremely well.

I'm a bit confused about St Pancras himself (there appear to have been two of them). Anyway one or other gave his name to an area of London. There was a church once but it seems to have disppeared by the fourteenth century. Ipswich has a Roman Catholic church dedicated to St Pancras and, according to Wikipedia, there is a village of St Pancras in Northern Holland.

I suppose the only let-down to St Pancras station is the tube connection. The ticket hall for the underground station may be an engineering marvel, but it isn’t big enough to cope (another ticket hall is in process of construction). And when you descend for the Victoria or Northern line there is all the bleakness of an under-funded transit system (unpainted, unclean, pipework wrapped in tinfoil endlessly waiting for someone to finish a refurbishment started many moons previously).

But I ramble on. When the redevelopment of St Pancras as the new Eurostar terminal was announced I thought the idea was bonkers. The terminus at Waterloo seemed to do the job well enough and to my eye is much closer to Paris, as well as being wonderfully convenient for central London. Appararently 84 million passengers used the now empty Waterloo platforms and I hope they get re-used sensibly. I'll eat my hat over St Pancras - it is a masterpiece of refurbishment.

Remembrance Sunday

In the same way as bonfire night is celebrated over a six-week span, people (particularly TV presenters) start wearing poppies in mid-October nowadays. But, despite all my moaning, it is still a very important occasion and the Royal Albert Hall commemoration was particularly well done. The BBC have found in Chris Stewart a wonderfully solemn voice for the big occasion. How extraordinary to see Harry Patch (the last surviving Tommy from the First War’s Western Front) wheeled out – aged 109.

In my odd way I found myself on Remembrance Sunday, at the 11th hour on the 11th day, in a lay-by off the main Dover-Folkestone road as I hurried in pursuit of a ferry. Other cars had stopped for the two minutes silence including (slightly to my surprise) a French motorist.


Once in France I marked the day by stopping for rather more than two minutes at the Etaples Commonwealth Military Cemetery which has 12,000 graves of Commonwealth soldiers, mostly from the First War, and the almost inevitable Lutyens memorial. A few years back the cemetery was vandalised by yobs with paint spray canisters, but now it looks immaculate. The French were treating the day with just as much respect as the British and the locals had laid wreaths alongside those from Britain and the Commonwealth. Sad though that our troops are still involved in active warfare. Peace on earth would be a very good idea.

Waste of Time - Waste of Money

Oh heck, I'm starting to rant again.

First the poor old Jeep had to be returned to its maker. I'd ignored the first "urgent recall" letter but the rotters tracked me down through DVLA and I agreed to let them do their worst on Tuesday after an hour-long dentist appointment on the outskirts of Portsmouth. "It won't take more than an hour" said the Jeep main dealer - who lives on a modern estate devoted entirely to "main dealers" (Audi, VW, Mercedes, BMW, Seat, etc., etc.) on the other side of Portsmouth, "so you can wait, if you like".

So I waited, and waited, and waited. The first hour passed by okay, I suppose. I had some phone calls to make, a book to read. Like posh car dealerships everywhere I had access to free coffee, a water machine, and the droning of BBC News 24.

There were newspapers and magazines (an odd selection ranging from Harpers and Queen, to Jeep News and 4x4 magazine by way of Esquire and Hello). But I was getting bored. Did Tchibo pay for the coffee machine to be installed, or did the dealership? Does Eden Springs give a bulk rate to all the dealerships on the estate for providing water machines. Every so often Mr or Ms Car Salesman would come by in search of water or coffee - I tried guessing if they were "Jeep" people, or "Mercedes" people (as Mercedes shared the showroom).

Two hours had passed and I thought about blogging about the delay. I even went outside and took a snapshot of the dealership premises. Thank heavens I had taken the day as official holiday. Even so the wife had TV aerial people fiddling with our connections and would doubtless be impatient for my return. I found the viewing area overlooking the Mercedes service area (very clean, lots of diagnostic kit, boring). Having been reassured that work was progressing on my car I sidled off to check the parking area (might my car still be where I had left it? No).

I then started a patrol of the new Jeep salesroom (rubbish), the second hand parking lot (rubbish), and for good measure checked out the other dealerships(all rubbish unless you have £20,000 or so that you are absolutely want to waste unnecessarily).

Pshaw! The three hour mark arrives and there is news: "They've finished your car and it is now being washed". Washed? My car is there for an essential repair at no cost so what are they trying to do by removing the mud and dust camouflage? It'll be another fifteen minutes and so I start photographing the water cooler and coffee machine, I give up! Never again will I visit a Jeep main dealership, unless ...

And then there is the "waste of money". The new laptop I bought myself comes replete with the new Microsoft Vista operating system. What Mr Compaq and friends never told me was that Microsoft Vista is totally incompatible with Orange Livebox technology (which powers my broadband at home).

Sure Orange are apparently working on "drivers" which will lessen the problem, but you cannot buy a new PC today without Microsoft's new Vista operating system pre-installed. So you are stuffed. Somewhat miraculously (and with help from the father of my latest grand-daughter) this blog has come off the new machine, but Holy Cow (to pardon my French)!

Optimism

Still feeling as if bits of me are falling apart (housemaid's knee, tennis elbow, a left hand that has stopped working in sympathy with the mail workers, neck a bit troublesome, and the recently done dental work beginning to come apart), but, as the song goes "always look on the bright side of life ... tee-tum, tee-tum"!

Yes, I've been trying to figure out ways of marketing a rather handsome little book on optimism to the widest UK market. Word-of-Mouth is the key phrase in any book's marketing campaign, so the first thing to do is to blog about it.

Every year something comes along (usually a book, or a film, or something on TV) that makes you "think", something that stirs the grey cells, and which leaves something of a mark. This year's "something" for me was actually a radio broadcast (or at least the bits that I heard) that comprised the annual BBC Reith Lecture - Jeffrey Sachs' four-part Bursting at the Seams. Here was an extremely intelligent man talking positively about the world's problems, rather than negatively. I was thus pretty impressed to find that Nick Inman's 'The Optimist's Handbook' acknowledges and quotes Sachs extensively.

That said, it's a pretty difficult book to market. For a start "optimism" is not a bookshop category, it is not an Amazon category, there is no convenient pigeon-hole in library or bibliographical subject indexes, indeed the very idea of "optimism" would be rather frowned upon in many bleak university bookstores. The book cannot be classified as humour (it is serious, intelligent and above all interesting) and has little to recommend it as being news-worthy, or controversial (unless you are a born pessimist); it has no Richard-and-Judy endorsement, the author lives in France and is not a famous personality (so no Parkinson or Jonathan Ross), and it does not have a publishing leviathan's sales force to get it stacked high in Tesco. But on the other hand ... "always look on the bright side of life ... tee-tum, tee-tum"!

If Ben Schott's Almanac can do it (spectacularly), then Nick Inman's book must be given every chance. Tomorrow I'll see if I can get it into art gallery and museum shops as a Christmas pick-up, ditto the National Trust. I'll press forward with production of a bookmark for free distribution in bookshops -using some of the great quotes included in the book:

'Twix the optimist and the pessimist
The difference is droll;
The optimist sees the doughnut
But the pessimist sees the hole.
- McLandburgh Wilson


Trust Allah! But always tie up your camel.
- Arab Proverb

I'm an optimist, but an optimist who always carries a raincoat.'
- Harold Wilson

So, rather than complain about the "housemaid's knee, tennis elbow, a left hand that has stopped working in sympathy with the mail workers, neck a bit troublesome, and the recently done dental work", maybe I'll take the Robinson Crusoe approach to life this week:

Evil: I have a bad knee, a painful hand, and a dental repair job that's gone pear-shaped.

Good: But your other knee works just fine, ditto with your hand, and all the other dental repair work is in excellent shape.

Crocked

I'm beginning to feel sympathy (as opposed to irritation) with England's sporting heroes and their constant injury problems. Flintoff, Owen, Wilkinson, Terry - there doesn't appear to be a single sporting hero who hasn't been on a long-term sick list recently.

For myself, I survived the Blackpool adventure more or less intact, but fouled up my right knee trying to clean out-houses in France. Add to that my hauling every single box of books returned from the Conservative Conference from a pallet store in Alton back to the Petersfield offices on Thursday and Friday (four jeep-loads), and then spending most of Saturday unpacking every box, sorting the books by publisher and then repacking them, I have additional difficulties to moan about: left hand non-operational (recurrence of finger-sprain), right hand okay apart from a chunk removed from fourth finger in tussle with trestle table), left leg knackered as it has to do all the work of the right leg (effectively dead). Thank heavens that the neck hasn't decided to join the party.

Today is Sunday, and I will rest up. I'll reflect on last night's remarkable rugby. I may read a book for an hour or two. I'll see if I can lure the wife into a local hostelry for a proper roast lunch. She'll have to cut the food up for me, but a pint of ale, a bottle of red wine and a snooze should set me on the road to recovery.

Depression, Depression, More Depression

Being born under the sign of Cancer isn't much of a help. Every time an important decision comes along I start the sideways manouevre, shuffling about in the sand, delaying and prevaricating, um'ing and ah'ing, a bit like an erstwhile employer of mine of whom it was said he wouldn't say "yes" or "no" until the bullet had left the barrel and was about half-way to his chest.

The principal decision to be made concerns the house in France. It has to go. I need the money. Simple - decision made. So we go to France with every intention of having an estate agent's board outside before our return to England three nights later. And what happens? Well I'm unhappy about my first choice of estate agent. I'm unhappy about the likely price. And, of course, I'm miserable as hell at the prospect of losing my one real refuge.

I dutifully swept out the "grange"; I got on my hands and knees to make the arachnid-infested (and mosquito-infested) gite look rather accomodating; and I drove to the nearby town of Hesdin to see if there was any chance of the first-choice agent coming over to inspect/value the house. Inevitably the gite-cleaning meant that my right knee is no longer functional, and the response from the estate agent was a resounding "Non" (as if I wouldn't have realised that one has to book an appointment at least two weeks ahead). Bah!

Still we collected up the last of a bumper crop of bramley apples, some good-looking pears, and some eating apples. And we forgot to bring back the holly bush, and I got a right bollocking from the wife - "you mean we came all this way to put the house on the market, and you couldn't even manage that. The house will have fallen down before you get round to ...", and for good measure, "You still haven't even managed to sell that Jeep of yours after all these years. You cannot afford even to fill it up with petrol; imagine what happens when something goes seriously wrong with it!"

Oh woe, and more woe. And it's back to work tomorrow and I don't feel too hot about that either.