A Bit More Positive Today

After yesterday’s rather gloomy posting, things are a bit better today. J and I went to bed on New Year’s Eve, long before the New Year was rung in and so we had a great sleep and woke to brilliant sunshine. The cats were lying in the sun. Shadow was doing likewise and even the fish were sunbathing at the top of the pond. I didn’t make any rash New Year’s resolutions, in fact I didn’t make any at all and so I wont get depressed when I break them. The children are in Ireland with their father and there’s not a soul about. Apart from the odd shotgun trying to kill something on the other side of the valley, it was quite idyllic.

It’s not unusual for us to spend New Year’s Eve at home. Some years we have people over for a late dinner and occasionally we’ll go off to a friend’s house but this year we decided to spend ‘the bells’ at home, reflecting on a very good year (financials aside) for both of us.

The early part of the year was completely dominated by our wedding and my memories are of my beautiful bride-to-be walking up the aisle with her sister whilst I waited at the desk, fully kilted with my brother (in France you get married in the town hall). Thereafter, things were a bit hazy as I fully enjoyed myself with my family and friends who had flown over from the UK to be with us.

The ‘honeymoon’ to Florida and New York was wonderful and I especially loved showing the kids round The Big Apple, although Tiffany’s and The Apple Store competed admirably for their attention.

The builders were back in March, April and May completing work to our house and then summer took over. Twelve weeks of dry and not-too-hot weather allowed me to do quite a bit of work in the ‘garden’ with my pride and joy being a rather dark, dismal corner which has been transformed into an oasis of shade-loving plants.

J and the kids went off to Spain for a few weeks in July and my mate Steve and his partner Debbie joined me for a long weekend of chat and socialising. It was fun and I keep on at them to ‘get back out here asap’.

My weekend in Glasgow in October was terrific and it could be the last time I see my son, Timothy, before he heads of to help quell the Taliban in Afghanistan. He’s desperate to go and I’m happy that he’s happy to go off to war, but we all hope that he keeps out of harm’s way. Having said that, Timmy could start a fight in an empty house (and frequently tries to) and I fear that he’ll start a major uprising as soon as he hits that foreign land. The Taliban have absolutely no idea what’s about to hit them!

The final weeks of the year were dominated by my ‘little problem’ which I’m pleased to say has been fixed by the excellent French Health Service. Thanks to all the people who have passed on their best wishes and the thousands of jokes which have flooded into my e-mail in-tray.

And so another year ends. A good year, but one which passed very quickly. 2009, in theory should be another good year but as I look at the clouds massing over the sea – who knows. I’m sure you’ll all read it here first. 

Happy New Year

 A Happy and Prosperous 2009 to everyone. I hope you all have a great new year.

At this stage though it looks gloomy. It’s raining outside and very miserable and the euro continues to get stronger against the pound day by day. The stock market crash has not only reduced my investments by some 60% (thanks mining companies) but my pension fund, out of which we were hoping to build a new house at the bottom of the garden, has also fallen by some 20% - not bad when you consider the Footsie has dropped by 31% but a blow nonetheless. My pension has also dropped by around 25% per month as the euro has grown stronger and stronger but luckily I took a bet on my pension some months ago and am still getting €1.25 to my pound. Eventually, that will change though and I’ll be in the same (sinking) boat as everybody else.

J and I will undoubtedly weather the storm and we should be able to ‘muddle through’ until the euro falls when the European Central Bank eventually decides that its member states are in the same mess as everybody else and it reduces interest rates down to a much more reasonable level. The problem is that J continues to spend and therefore the French economy looks strangely strong when, in fact, it’s as bad as the UK’s. I keep telling Sarkozy that he’s got a false picture of his country’s economy, but he wont listen – he’s still besotted by his model wife an only has eyes for her – not the population struggling to get along.

The French mortgage system is also not helping the overall picture. In France, as long as you can show some sort of income, virtually no matter your age, the banks will lend you money to buy a house confident in the knowledge that your heirs will pay off the loan when you pop your clogs. Consequently, most French people can afford their loan repayments and there are not the repossessions you get elsewhere.

The ‘live-by-credit’ culture does not seem to exist here. Non-housing loans are quite difficult to get and the banks keep a close eye on your accounts so defaulters are not so common.

The overall picture to the French Treasury therefore is one of ‘it’s tight but not at crisis point’, and so interest rates have remained high. It’s only the manufacturing recession in Germany and Italy which will force the bankers to reduce rates and hopefully, that will be later this month. Once that happens, the Euro may become weaker and the pound will rise.

The main losers are, of course, the pensioners who choose to live here but have their UK pension sent over month by month. They have seen their monthly amounts reduce by some 25% over the last few months and there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it. The less than sympathetic commentators who say that these people chose to leave the UK and therefore need to ‘struggle along’ don’t take heed of the fact that many of these people have been here for over twenty years and are now at the stage in their lives where re-locating back to the UK is not really an option. These are the people I am sorry for but hopefully, in the next few months we’ll be back to maybe 1.10 or 1.15 but only after the currency speculators have managed to achieve parity. The halcyon days though, when you got €1.64 for each pound, are long gone.    

To some extent, I support the decision of the UK Labour Government (and the Tories before them) not to join the single European currency because if they had, the Bank of England would not have had the chance to cut interest rates to 2%  - they’d be at the higher ‘European’ rate. On the other hand, if we’d been in the single currency, maybe the European Bank would not have allowed the UK to get into the credit boom mess it’s in now where people regularly sign up for a new loan simply to pay off an old one.

But hey – it’s a new year and the stock market is a fantastic buying opportunity right now. I suppose nothing will curb my capitalist instincts!

 

 

Leonard M P Mackie R.I.P.

My ex-wife’s father, Leonard, died on Christmas morning. It was expected as he’d been seriously ill for a week or so and his life support systems had been switched off but nevertheless, I’m sure it was a very sad time for all when his wonderful life finally ebbed away. Fiona (my ex wife), will miss him immensely as he’s been a constant in her life since she was born, latterly living with her and her husband George on their farm just outside Glasgow.

I first met Leonard, known as Gumpy to his various grandchildren, when I started dating Fiona some 40 years ago. I was welcomed into the family immediately and when we started getting serious, I was offered a spare room in their magnificent mansion, located on the south side of Glasgow. Often, after the whole household had retired for the night when I would try and sneak across the landing into Fiona’s room, Leonard would be standing by his bedroom door and all he needed to say was ‘Tommy, and where do you think you are going?’, and I would shuffle, embarrassed back to my own room. Nothing was ever said in the morning.

Despite being a protestant and a Rangers supporter, the catholic Mackie family welcomed me with open arms and a wonderful friendship started. Leonard, Paul (his youngest son), and I all started attending football matches, one week at Rangers and the following week at Celtic. We’d have a few beers after the game and then invariably, Gumpy would take the whole family out for dinner. My only responsibility at this time was to cook an enormous 12 item breakfast for about 10 people, each Sunday as the whole extended family descended on Ossian Drive. They were great big family occasions and I loved being part of it.

When Fiona and I married, Leonard kindly provided us with a loan to buy our first house and when we moved two years later, into a larger house five doors down from ‘the Mackies’, Leonard again just asked me how much I needed. Thankfully, I had joined IBM by this time and was able to repay him quite quickly so our relationship never suffered the way many do when money is involved.

In those days, Gumpy and I were not father-in-law and son-in-law, we were mates. On a Saturday morning after he’d finished work, I would head into town to meet him in a pub called the Virginian where they played trad jazz over lunch. We’d have a meal and quite a few pints as we enjoyed the music and then we’d get on our little Honda 80cc mopeds and rather shakily race each other back to Langside. Invariably, the one who was able to hold onto the handle of a moving bus the longest, won the race, albeit at the risk of falling foul of the law...... or even just falling!  

Of course, it was Leonard’s liking for a pint of beer which led to me missing the birth of my first born son (Stephen). When he and I had rushed up to the hospital after Fiona had been admitted with a complication, all Leonard had to hear was the midwife saying that it would be ‘a little while’, for him to eagerly accept my invitation of a pint. Several pints and a great football match later, Leonard and I headed back to the hospital only to find out that it was all over – Fiona was sitting up in bed cuddling a rather light (3lbs 14 oz) Stephen before he went off to the incubator for 4 weeks.

I didn’t see Leonard for quite a few years after I left Glasgow  in 81 and then we met up at my son’s 21^st birthday party. We had a few pints, sorted things out and mended a few bridges which had become broken with my divorce from Fiona, his beloved daughter.

As the years past, Leonard became infirm and had to move in with Fiona despite him wishing to retain some degree of independence. When I saw him a few years ago he didn’t really know who I was but he still had that shine in his eye.

And so a dynasty has gone. Leonard was one of those great father figures of days past. Not a ruler of the family, but a figurehead to whom everybody looked up and respected. He was loved by everybody who met him. He will be greatly missed.

  

Riverdance

One of the great things about Xmas is all the ‘specials’ they show on the TV. The films you’d thought you’d never see again. The shows you loved in the past and which they run again, and the spectaculars, one of which was Riverdance.

Now I’ve seen countless ‘Riverdance Specials’. Riverdance – The Beginning. Riverdance in Beijing. Riverdance – The Dancers. But on Saturday they showed a compilation of all the best bits of the shows and I took the opportunity to record it to show in my bar when people get fed up of Girls Aloud, Madonna or Club Ibiza.........which they do .......frequently.

Let me say at this point that I have no great affinity with/for Ireland, or to be more precise Eire, despite the fact that J has tried to trace my family tree and found that us Cupples’s may actually originate from Eire as opposed to good old France which is what popular myth says.

Anyway. I don’t know what attracts me to Riverdance although I have a vague memory that one of my ex’s took me and I thought it was great but it could be that I like strong, rhythmical music. I could watch those girls dancing all night long with their arms, rigid by their sides and their long hair swaying to the rhythm of the drum beats. I wont say anything about the guys in case you get the wrong idea but they’re quite cute too.

With a compilation show, you get all the lead dancers of course, but by a country mile, the best were Michael Flatley and Jean Butler, who co-developed the original 7 minute act at the Eurovison Song Contest in Ireland which started this global phenomenon. Flatley has gone on to be a multi-millionaire achieved through his ‘Lord of the Dance’ productions, but many people do not know that he was born in Illinois, USA and was a boxing champion and a proficient flautist before he became all-Ireland, World Dance champion. He also held the Guinness World Record for the number of ‘taps per second’ at 28 then 35 (that’s taps per second – not his age). I saw a film of Flatley recently and he came across as a total big-head which I suppose is only to be expected if you are worth in the region of £350m.    

Jean Butler, who was also born in the USA, and who was heavily involved in the original Riverdance productions presented the compilation show and came across as a really nice girl, but then she’s a redhead and all redheads tend to be gorgeous. Oooops – sorry J!

So back to where it all started at the 1994 Eurovision Song Debacle (sorry Contest) which was staged in Ireland because they had won it the previous year. The interval came along and then the stage went dark. A mournful songstress appeared in the gloom but after two minutes of what the global audience must have thought was a rehearsal for a funeral, Jean Butler started dancing, followed within a minute by Michael Flatley. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

See the 1994 Eurovision interval which introduced Riverdance to the world at the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Mc03_rlWo

Go Further With The ….The Lipo Car

Now you may think this is a monumental wind up, as I did, when I read the article. I thought it must be April 1^st, but no – it’s for real – read on and weep or laugh or be sick – whatever.

US authorities are investigating a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon who claims that he used fat he removed from patients in liposuction operations to power his "green" four-wheel-drive car. California's public health department has opened an inquiry into claims made by Dr Alan Bittner that he had turned fat removed from his patients into biodiesel. Mr Bittner wrote on his website: "The vast majority of my patients request that I use their fat for fuel - and I have more fat than I can use. "Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly, but they get to take part in saving the Earth." US business magazine Forbes reported that Dr Bittner used the "lipofuel" to power both his Ford Explorer car and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator.

When I picked myself up off the floor after rolling about laughing, I thought about the article and its implications.

Should Dr Bittner set up a cooperative which collects lipo fat from the various cosmetic surgeries in his state and set up a proper business where he can produce Lipo Fuel in greater, more economic quantities?

Would this business get to the stage where clinics pay patients for their Lipo Fat instead of charging them an ‘arm and a leg’ for their operations?

Should he move the business to Hawaii where the people are rather larger than average and there would be no shortage of Lipo Fat?

When he drives his car, what is the by product of the internal combustion process – does it smell like a KFC take-away?

When he does a lipo-operation is he tempted to suck all the patient’s fat out leaving them looking like a dried up mummy?

Does his car ever suffer from hardening of its cylinders or high cholesterol on its valves and will it eventually die of a heart attack or engine failure and does his car go to a heart surgeon rather than a garage for it service?

OK – by now you’re probably feeling rather queasy so I’ll stop but just remember, if you know anyone who has had the old lipo business then unknown to them they could be helping Dr Bittner and his girlfriend drive to the ‘eat all you like’ diner just down the road.