You’re **** - Je Ne Comprends Pas

The guy is pretty much at the top of his profession. He’s probably paid about £2.5 million a year and is on a long-term contract. His company is in England and all of his business is conducted in English ……. but he doesn’t speak a word of it! Nice work if you can get it.

Yup – we’re talking football again.

I missed most of the Saturday night football round-up show as J and I had been invited out to dinner and despite a relatively bad head on Sunday morning, I was awake early enough to switch on the repeat show and see a couple of Spurs teammates pushing and shoving each other.

Now this is not an unknown phenomenon in British football, indeed when it involves a couple of Brits, they are usually punching each other’s lights out, whereas the foreigners, as the two I’m referring to just happen to be, push a bit, back off then approach each other and push a bit more. All very ‘handbags at ten paces’ stuff. One of the errant Spurs players is a guy called Benoît Assou-Ekotto and Harry Redknapp, his manager, summed up this particular, French-Cameroonian thus:

"Benoît is a strange boy," he said. "He's a bit highly strung and hardly speaks English. If you say something to him he's hard work. He hasn't improved his English in the couple of years he's been here."

Asked why his left-back had walked off alone (at the end of the game), apparently unhappy, Redknapp said: "He didn't know the result. He probably thought we'd drawn (when in fact Spurs won the match). He'll turn up Wednesday and play great, but he won't know we're playing Fulham until someone tells him. That's how he is. He's unreal. He walks off (the pitch) and he's thinking about the music he's going to play when he puts his headphones on."

As I say, nice work if you can get it!

However, his claim not to speak any English doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. When a fan called out “you’re shit”, in a game where he hadn’t performed particularly well and Spurs had been beaten, he most certainly understood what was being said and tried to get to the fan. In the absence of video footage of his latest transgression, see him trying to sort out the Spurs fan who let him know how he played that day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPeFUbEi358

Mipim’d in Cannes

It’s the annual Mipim property conference in Cannes.

What does ‘Mipim’ stand for? I have absolutely no idea. I’ve looked and looked and can’t find an explanation anywhere – couldn’t even find one on the Mipim homepage. Still, it’s probably not important – what is important is that our poor beleaguered UK bankers and estate agents can all come down to the South of France and have a jolly good time whilst trying to drum up some more lousy business which will come home to roost in about 5 years time.

Now I don’t like Cannes very much. Like virtually every other French city, it’s almost impossible to park and when the Cannes Conference Centre (actually called ‘Le Palais des Festivals’- pictured) has a major exhibition on, not only can’t you park, every restaurant is full and moving around the Croisette is a nightmare with thousands of delegates wandering around with their plastic carrier bags full of brochures and other marketing material which will be dumped into their hotel waste paper bins as soon as they reach the sanctity of their rooms.

But for the delegates it must be wonderful. All winter long the banking and property sectors have been hammered. Bankers are the most hated species since Estate Agents topped the charts a few years ago and the poor property magnates have lost a fortune as the value of their shopping centres and buy-to-lets have plummeted. So a bit of spring sun, a fancy hotel and a chance to wine and dine with the best of them is just what they need to recharge their batteries before getting home this week and finding out that the Chancellor has shafted them – again! Of course the Brits amongst them might find that they have to stay down here a few more days given the BA strike, not that that will worry them unduly.

What drew my attention to Mipim this year was a report that the Royal Bank of Scotland (84% owned by the taxpayer) and Lloyds bank (47% owned by us) have both rented magnificent ‘hillside villa retreats’ in which to entertain their prospective ‘Mipim’ clients.

Maybe I should have dragged one of my few remaining business suits out of retirement and wandered down to Le Palais and shown some interest in a £1 billion set of London office blocks they were selling (called White Tower if you’re interested). I would then have wangled an invite to one of these fancy villas to discuss my finance requirements over dinner with some people from RBS and Lloyds.

If that had failed I might have shown interest in a £200m collection of shops and offices on offer and located on Oxford Street in London.

If truth be known I’d simply have been happy to just get into one of those villas and watch deals going down over dinner. Sitting there at the end of the table sipping exquisite white wine listening to bankers and their clients discussing whether they needed £900 million or did they need to stretch it to the magical £1 billion? But then I would have remembered that the bankers were being overly enthusiastic with my money and then the wine would have tasted sour.

Degree in Disco Lights

If you've been reading my blog you’ll know that J is doing an Open University degree in Kitchen and Fridge Management and I’m proud to say that she recently achieved a 96% pass mark for her latest assignment. Apparently she had to work out which shelf to put fresh milk on and that lettuce went in the ‘salad drawer’. Successfully getting ice cubes to drop down the chute and into a glass was an optional assignment which gave her some bonus marks. She’s a clever girl!

On Saturday we all travelled down to Antibes to a Lyceé (pictured) which specializes in Computing Science and where Guy might eventually go later this summer if his marks are good enough. Lyceé is the 4^th and final part of the school education system (maternelle, primaire, collège and lyceé) and determines if a student enters the university system.

This particular Lyceé was holding an Open Day to publicise its courses and facilities and I have to say I was quite impressed. As you approached the front door, senior students would accost you and drag you off to the relevant part of the establishment where college lecturers were waiting to explain the various courses and bemoan the selection system which is quite bizarre. The collège (where Guy is now) sends his marks to a central clearing house with his preferences in terms of Lyceé and subject and they simply choose who to send where. No interviews by the college, no understanding about the fact that Guy is a budding IT expert, probably no consideration of where the student lives, just a list telling the ‘clearing house’ how many times he’s missed classes and his marks in the major subjects.

Dragging the IT lecturer into a corner and using my ‘extensive’ experience of IT and networks (who am I kidding?) I started quizzing him on how many students could actually speak English well enough to understand the universal IT language which is – English, obviously trying to push Guy’s excellent bi-lingual capabilities. He rather took the wind out of my sails when he showed me a whole range of network manuals in French but as he flicked through the pages I spotted a section in English – it was something to do with network protocols or whatever and of course I said, ‘ah ha – they’ll need English for that bit won’t they, and when they do the Cisco Accreditation, they’ll need good English for that’. I had no idea whether what I was saying was correct or not but it just seemed strange to me that in a French Collège (in France) there was a large Cisco Accreditation Certificate on the wall - in ENGLISH! ‘Mais oui. Bien sur’, he replied. I smiled smugly and said Guy was totally bilingual. He wandered off. He didn't seem impressed.

I then went off to find J and Guy who had become a bit embarrassed by my rather Anglo-centric attitude and had wandered off to find the ‘first year’ workshop. I strolled in and despite my limited French understood that that the lecturer in this workshop was explaining that all students had to study the workings of washing machines, burglar alarms, telephone systems and disco lights during their first 12 months.

Scuse me – disco lights? Yes! And there they were – strung all along the ceiling of the workshop and flashing green, red and blue. Why hadn’t I seen them when I wandered in?

And so there we have it. If everything works out J will get an MBA in Kitchen and Fridge Management and Guy will get an Honours Degree in Disco Light synchronization. What a house! What a family! What a country!

PS - Nigel's latest posting from New York is now available. Watch out for the bad language.

http://monaconigel.blogspot.com/

A £1.5 billion Shopping Spree – No, Not J !

I bet you don’t think about it. You wander around, eating in nice restaurants, flying around the globe, staying overnight in a hotel or spending money in shops completely oblivious to the fact that the businesses you’re giving your custom to, are owned by some other entity, in many cases, a bank.

Eat in one of Sir Terence Conran’s restaurants and you’re giving your money to Lloyds Bank.

Stay or eat at the Grosvenor House in London’s Park Lane (pictured) and you’re boosting the profits of its rival, the Royal bank of Scotland.

Go to the pictures in a Vue cinema or shop in House of Fraser and you’re again giving your money to Lloyds Bank. Lloyds even also own Rangers Football Club in that they provided the finance to the guy who owns 96% of the shares – if his business was to fold - aaagh! On the same basis, RBS own Liverpool Football Club in that if the American owners ever default the bank will take over the shares.

But then again on a secondary level, if you’re a Royal Bank of Scotland or Lloyds or Northern Rock account holder, not only are you boosting the Government’s coffers every time you pay a charge to the bank, every time you shop, eat or ‘Vue’ you’re adding to the bank’s profits and hence the Government’s revenues, given that they own 47% of Lloyds and 84% of RBS.

Fly British Midland and you’re actually flying with German airline Lufthansa who own the British company. Have a holiday at Centerparcs and your money goes to an American finance house.

And over here in France if I shop at the local Darty TV shop I’m giving my money to Comet, that well known UK company. Similarly, if I buy something in the Castorama DIY store, I’m actually shopping at the UK chain, B&Q who owns them.

There are lots of examples where a well known company you purchase from is actually owned by unknown entities, in many cases anonymous finance houses, but rather more public is Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS to you and me) which takes the biscuit with the largest, most diversified portfolio of non-bank companies. This is one reason why HBOS nearly bankrupted Lloyds who took the Scottish Bank over when the UK banking crisis was at its height.

In a spending spree lasting several years (J, eat your heart out), HBOS (probably the Bank of Scotland bit – we’ll spare Halifax) not only purchased the Vue cinema chain and House of Fraser stores but also Caffé Nero, David Lloyd Leisure clubs, McCarthy & Stone the housebuilders and Crest Nicolson, the commercial premises specialists. The spree ended up with HBOS owning some 80 companies outright but with significant stakes, across Europe in another 900 companies.

This portfolio, bought at the top of the market is now showing losses running into hundreds of millions but predictably, the guy who ran it disappeared off into the sunset, following years of receiving a multi-million pound salary. Oh and his pension was nearly as much as the pilloried, RBS CEO, Fred Goodwin.

Why Didn’t I Think Of It Before ?

Now you’d have to drug me out of my eyeballs to get me on a Ryanair flight. It’s so frustrating to me that that complete moron, Michael O’Leary (CEO of Ryanair, or Dan Dare as it’s often called), manages to run a successful airline whilst showing complete disregard for his customers.

I flew with them once – long before O’Leary started calling his paying customers, ‘idiots’ and treating them like cattle going to the abattoir. As far as I can recall, the flight was ok but I had to laugh that the destination was described as ‘Glasgow (Prestwick)’ – in geographical comparisons, Prestwick is to Glasgow what Chicago is to New York. It’s all a con.

And so for the last 10 years, I’ve been flying Easyjet. Never had too many problems – they’ve put me up in a hotel when the last flight developed a fault and on the odd occasion I’ve had to complain to Customer Service, my complaint has been dealt with reasonably efficiently and to my satisfaction.

So it was all a bit disappointing when I booked some flights for J and myself a few weeks ago. Well, I had hoped to book flights for J, but the vagaries of the website meant that I ended up with all four flights in my name. Not to worry I thought, it’s quite a while before we fly – I’ll get Customer Service to sort it out – after all, as far as I was concerned, it was a ‘bug’ in the website. Really – it was!

Firstly, I refuse to use their chargeable telephone numbers – calling these in the UK is bad enough but when my French calling plan adds another 20p a minute, a typical call can cost almost as much as the flight! So I use ‘contact us’ on their website – ever tried to find it? It’s so well hidden they could use it in an ‘A’ Level exam on website navigation.

Eventually I locate it and send my request to change two of the flights into J’s name. Polite, concise and pointing out that I thought their website needed a bit of clarification, I waited for the reply. I got it next day – ‘high volumes of e-mails’ etc etc etc! I wait and send another reminder two weeks later - ‘high volumes of e-mails’ etc etc etc!

A few weeks later nothing’s happened. I have a brainwave (well I thought it was) – write an e-mail to the CEO but how do I get his address? Luckily his name (Andy Harrison - pictured) is not too difficult to guess for an e-mail format and so I cross my fingers and send Andy.Harrison@easyjet.com a nice, concise, polite request pointing out that his Customer Service organization is not working too well at the moment.

Now Mr Harrison is leaving Easyjet in the summer so I don’t really expect too much in the way of a response but amazingly, I get a reply 8 days later saying he was ‘sorry and that a Lidia Stefanowska would sort it for me – free of charge’.

Two weeks pass – nothing. I send her an e-mail (Andy Harrison had copied her so I knew her address) - nothing. Another two weeks pass – nothing. I send her another reminder – nothing. I send another e-mail to Andy Harrison – nothing. I reckon it’s all been a wind-up.

Then the brain-wave. I Google ‘Lidia Stefanowska’ and find she’s Easyjet’s ‘Customer Experience Manager’ and there are references to her all over the search engine. None however give any real details that I can use.

Then the 2^nd and even more impressive brain-wave. Is she by any chance on Facebook? Yes she is!

I post a message on her Facebook page and guess what? I get a groveling apology the next day with promises to fix my problem which, even more amazingly, is resolved within 24 hours. Needless to say, she didn't accept me as a 'friend'. Result or what?