So, according to this morning's business section, said Alexander Stubb. Alexander Stubb? He's the prime minister of Finland. But when I looked more closely at the article I saw that it wasn't apples he was blaming for the parlous state of his country's economy, it is Apple.
It seems to me that the Finnish economy is based on two things: mobile phones and paper. Nokia is one of the leading manufacturers of mobile phones but, according to Mr Stubb, has been badly hit by Apple's iPhone. Finland having vast expanses of trees, soft wood trees, they have a great newsprint industry, although I'm not entirely sure that they actually make paper. I think they simply export the timber for other countries' paper mills. But Mr Stubb asserts that this industry has been hit by Apple's iPad.
Just how much truth there is in those assertions is something I couldn't say, but the whole thing reminded me of the last ten or so years of my working life. I had been employed to act as general manager of a newspaper company. It was just a small company which published only the one title, a religious newspaper for a church of which I was not (and still am not) a member. But, as the chairman who employed me said, they wanted professionalism before piety. The entire board of directors, bar one, was non-executive, the one exception being the paper's editor. He and I more or less ran the company as a partnership, the editor's role being to see that the white spaces in between the advertisements were filled and to hire and fire the editorial staff. All other aspects of the business - advertising, distribution, printing, accounts, staff management, premises management, company secretarial duties - all fell to me. This did have the advantage of giving me a varied job which, for most of the time, prevented the onset of boredom.
My first chairman - and, indeed, his successor - were keen on the Newspaper Society, of which our company was a member, the NS being the trade association of the local newspaper industry. I duly stood for and was elected to the council of said society, which opened for me several interesting doors such as access to invitations to royal garden parties and, on one occasion, a reception at Windsor Castle. It also meant that I would be included in the annual lunch just before Christmas each year hosted by one of Finland's leading wood pulp companies. And I can still remember the story of the Finnish snowbird as related by the chairman of that company at one lunch.
The snowbird lives deep in the vast forests of Finland and during the long winter months, can suffer hunger because food is scarce. One particular snowbird had found itself having to fly further and further each day in the search for food and one day simply fell from the sky, completely exhausted.
A wolf saw the bird fall and was on its way to enjoy a snack but it so happened that a Finnish ox-cart driver also saw the bird fall and, being a kindly soul, stopped to see if he could help. He realised that the bird was hungry and cold, so he scooped up a handful of warm, steaming ox dung and wrapped it round the bird. He placed the bundle back on the ground and went on his way. The wolf smelled the ox dung and went on its way as well, not wanting to eat that.
Later, the bird regained consciousness but was unable to fight its way out of the ox dung, which had by then hardened into a shell, but the ox cart driver returned, broke open the shell and released the revived bird.
And the moral of the story is that your friends not only dig you out of the shit, but they drop you in it in the first place.
Tuesday, 14 October 2014
Monday, 13 October 2014
Early mornings
At this time of the year I quite often watch the dawn - provided I am in France. From the kitchen window we get a good view of the sun coming up and an even better view if we step out into the courtyard. Like this:
I tend not to see the dawn here in England as other houses block the view. But there was a time when I did see it quite often.
It seems a lifetime away now, but during the last few years of my working life I would leave the house at six in the morning so as to be at my desk at about five past eight, thereby beating the worst of the rush hour. I had pretty much forgotten what it feels like to be one of the few on the streets before full daylight, what it is to watch lights coming on house by house as people get up and get ready for another busy day. Or boring day, as the case may be. But today I was reminded of all that.
The Old Bat had a hospital appointment for more tests - the doctors think they know what the problem is but they want to be sure - and was due at the hospital for 11.00. Parking at the County Hospital here in Brighton is abysmal and the Old Bat needs a wheelchair to get about the hospital so we had arranged for Patient Transport Services - part of the NHS - to send an ambulance. That means being ready two hours before the appointment time. In any case, the Old Bat was to have neither food nor drink after seven o'clock. So I was up just after six, serving her breakfast in bed by a quarter to seven, then out with the dog by half past.
I must be a bit peculiar in the head or something because there's something I like about being out and about before the world has woken up. Not that I plan to make a habit of it. Just the once will see me through for another three or four years.
I tend not to see the dawn here in England as other houses block the view. But there was a time when I did see it quite often.
It seems a lifetime away now, but during the last few years of my working life I would leave the house at six in the morning so as to be at my desk at about five past eight, thereby beating the worst of the rush hour. I had pretty much forgotten what it feels like to be one of the few on the streets before full daylight, what it is to watch lights coming on house by house as people get up and get ready for another busy day. Or boring day, as the case may be. But today I was reminded of all that.
The Old Bat had a hospital appointment for more tests - the doctors think they know what the problem is but they want to be sure - and was due at the hospital for 11.00. Parking at the County Hospital here in Brighton is abysmal and the Old Bat needs a wheelchair to get about the hospital so we had arranged for Patient Transport Services - part of the NHS - to send an ambulance. That means being ready two hours before the appointment time. In any case, the Old Bat was to have neither food nor drink after seven o'clock. So I was up just after six, serving her breakfast in bed by a quarter to seven, then out with the dog by half past.
I must be a bit peculiar in the head or something because there's something I like about being out and about before the world has woken up. Not that I plan to make a habit of it. Just the once will see me through for another three or four years.
Sunday, 12 October 2014
Battered raspberries
Sometime I might explain the reason for my unnecessary and almost hysterical outburst yesterday but now it's time to get back to what passes for normal in this part of the woods.
That title - Battered raspberries - has nothing whatsoever to do with the favourite fast food (or so I am unreliably informed) of Glaswegians, deep-fried Mars bars.
Whether or not deep-fried Mars bars really are nasty I couldn't say. I've never even seen one, let alone eaten one. But no, battered raspberries are not the fruits of my garden smothered in batter and . . . Yuck!
We have been subjected to some pretty strong winds on and off this past week but worse than that has been the rain. I suppose in true meteorological terms I should say showers, for that is what they have been for the most part. But what showers! the other morning I set out with the dog under blue skies. Five minutes later, the rain started and within a hundred yards both the dog and I looked like drowned rats. That has been the pattern: beautiful blue skies, then suddenly we are experiencing monsoon-like rain with spatters of hail.
Friday I was duty bingo caller. The venue is a block of retirement flats about 4 miles away. I usually allow 25 minutes to drive there so as to be ready to start at the appointed hour of 7.30. But the city was gridlocked due to flash floods, so I simply turned round and came back home.
It is at this time of the year that my raspberries should be in peak production and I should be picking at least every other day. Not this week. I did go down there this morning to see what was left and did manage to salvage a few fruits, enough to serve as a dressing with the cheesecake we shall be having tonight for dessert. But several canes have been knocked to the ground, and much of the fruit that should have been picked has been simply battered into nothing by the rain.
Although it seems calmer today, we are promised more rain for tomorrow. What larks, Pip, what larks! as Charles Dickens had it.
That title - Battered raspberries - has nothing whatsoever to do with the favourite fast food (or so I am unreliably informed) of Glaswegians, deep-fried Mars bars.
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| Picture: AS10 - the top ten nastiest foods in the world |
Whether or not deep-fried Mars bars really are nasty I couldn't say. I've never even seen one, let alone eaten one. But no, battered raspberries are not the fruits of my garden smothered in batter and . . . Yuck!
We have been subjected to some pretty strong winds on and off this past week but worse than that has been the rain. I suppose in true meteorological terms I should say showers, for that is what they have been for the most part. But what showers! the other morning I set out with the dog under blue skies. Five minutes later, the rain started and within a hundred yards both the dog and I looked like drowned rats. That has been the pattern: beautiful blue skies, then suddenly we are experiencing monsoon-like rain with spatters of hail.
Friday I was duty bingo caller. The venue is a block of retirement flats about 4 miles away. I usually allow 25 minutes to drive there so as to be ready to start at the appointed hour of 7.30. But the city was gridlocked due to flash floods, so I simply turned round and came back home.
It is at this time of the year that my raspberries should be in peak production and I should be picking at least every other day. Not this week. I did go down there this morning to see what was left and did manage to salvage a few fruits, enough to serve as a dressing with the cheesecake we shall be having tonight for dessert. But several canes have been knocked to the ground, and much of the fruit that should have been picked has been simply battered into nothing by the rain.
Although it seems calmer today, we are promised more rain for tomorrow. What larks, Pip, what larks! as Charles Dickens had it.
Saturday, 11 October 2014
Friday, 10 October 2014
Post boxes
Most people pass straight by street furniture with scarcely a glance but I happened to notice a rarity which, for a short time, got me looking more closely for other examples of post boxes.The British post box is well known across the world. Those red pillars have hardly altered in design for nigh on a century. In fact, for more than a century. But what many people outside Britain - and possibly quite a few in Britain - don't realise is that they can be used as very approximate measures of the time it takes a town to spread. You see, each post box carries the royal insignia, the insignia of the sovereign on the throne at the time the box was installed. The earliest carried the insignia (or is it monogram?) of Queen Victoria. Then we have Edward VII, George V, George VI and, finally, Elizabeth II. But, just for a few months in the 1930s, there was another - Edward VIII. And it was a post box with his insignia that I had spotted.
And so, for a little while, I looked out for the different insignia in an attempt to photograph each one. I never did find VR, but those are mainly in town centres and I rarely get there. I got the rest, though - including this slightly unusual model:
Do you think this would qualify me for membership of the Dull Men's Club?
Thursday, 9 October 2014
The Dull Men's Club
Yes, it really does exist, and to prove it, they have produced a calendar for 2015. Featured in (or should that be on?) the calendar are:
And so on and so on.
OK, so many of us (most of us?) might think it a little odd - to say the least - to collect milk bottles or traffic cones but I'm sure many or even most of us do something that the world at large would consider dull or boring. I have almost religiously kept records of mileage and fuel put into my cars for years - yawn, yawn - and a friend of mine has for some time been collecting model buses - yawn again.
The Dull Men's Club has its own web site here.
- the president of the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society, who spends his weekends travelling around the country photographing roundabouts and turning his pictures into books and calendars;
- a man who has sent the same Valentine to his wife for the last 35 years. The novelist, who designed the card himself, first presented it to wife in 1979 and has reused it every year since;
- drain spotter Archie Workman, from Cumbria, who works as a lengthsman maintaining verges and ditches and watches out for unusual drains;
- a man who has spent 30 years collecting more than 20,000 milk bottles. Every April he likes to spring clean his bottles which he houses in an 80ft museum in his garden.
- then there is the man who has the world's largest traffic cone collection. He began collecting in 1986 and now has more than 500 around his house.
And so on and so on.
OK, so many of us (most of us?) might think it a little odd - to say the least - to collect milk bottles or traffic cones but I'm sure many or even most of us do something that the world at large would consider dull or boring. I have almost religiously kept records of mileage and fuel put into my cars for years - yawn, yawn - and a friend of mine has for some time been collecting model buses - yawn again.
The Dull Men's Club has its own web site here.
Wednesday, 8 October 2014
Stereotypes
I'm not sure that the root cause is really xenophobia, but we English have for many, many years seen ourselves as reserved and slow to anger. And definitely rather superior to "foreigners". We have tended to stereotype other nationalities in a patronising manner. The Scots, for example, are tight-fisted, the French smarmy, the Germans bombastic, the Spanish greasy, the Italians cowardly, the Greeks duplicitous, the Japanese inscrutable, the Americans boastful, the Australians brash, the New Zealanders . . . Remind me, just where is New Zealand?
Perhaps there is, or once was, a grain of truth in all that but we all know that there is an immense range of personalities in any nationality. All the same, Kate Fox, a social anthropologist, has twice published a book about watching the English in which she attempts to define the English character. Yes, I did write "twice published". Her book, entitled Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, was first published in 2005 and a new edition has just - or is just about to - hit the shelves.
Class is just one of the subjects covered by ms Fox. To quote from one newspaper review: Here’s a good class-test: when talking to an English person, deliberately say something too quietly for them to hear you properly. A lower-middle or middle-middle person will say, ‘Pardon?’ An upper-middle will say ‘Sorry?’ (or perhaps ‘Sorry - what?’ or ‘What - sorry?’). But an upper-class and a working-class person will both say, ‘What?’ (The working-class person may drop the t - ‘Wha’?’ - but this will be the only difference.)
But to sum up the English in one word, just say "typical". She claims the word is “quintessentially English”, and can be used in the event of all disasters ranging from “burnt toast to the outbreak of the Third World War”.
“But you have to be able to say it in a way that sounds simultaneously peeved, but also kind of stoically resigned, and at the same time smugly omniscient - almost pleased that your predictions have been fulfilled,” she said. “Everything may have gone completely pear-shaped, but you weren’t taken unawares.”
So now we know.
By the way, would you qualify to be a British (not just English) citizen? If you fancy your chances, just try one of the sample tests that applicants have to pass. Here's the link: The UK Test.
I'm not going to admit how many questions I got wrong.
Perhaps there is, or once was, a grain of truth in all that but we all know that there is an immense range of personalities in any nationality. All the same, Kate Fox, a social anthropologist, has twice published a book about watching the English in which she attempts to define the English character. Yes, I did write "twice published". Her book, entitled Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, was first published in 2005 and a new edition has just - or is just about to - hit the shelves.
Class is just one of the subjects covered by ms Fox. To quote from one newspaper review: Here’s a good class-test: when talking to an English person, deliberately say something too quietly for them to hear you properly. A lower-middle or middle-middle person will say, ‘Pardon?’ An upper-middle will say ‘Sorry?’ (or perhaps ‘Sorry - what?’ or ‘What - sorry?’). But an upper-class and a working-class person will both say, ‘What?’ (The working-class person may drop the t - ‘Wha’?’ - but this will be the only difference.)
But to sum up the English in one word, just say "typical". She claims the word is “quintessentially English”, and can be used in the event of all disasters ranging from “burnt toast to the outbreak of the Third World War”.
“But you have to be able to say it in a way that sounds simultaneously peeved, but also kind of stoically resigned, and at the same time smugly omniscient - almost pleased that your predictions have been fulfilled,” she said. “Everything may have gone completely pear-shaped, but you weren’t taken unawares.”
So now we know.
By the way, would you qualify to be a British (not just English) citizen? If you fancy your chances, just try one of the sample tests that applicants have to pass. Here's the link: The UK Test.
I'm not going to admit how many questions I got wrong.
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