Turbulence ahead

This year will be different to last year. No doubt very obvious but the real difference is that this year people are prepared to talk about hard times coming; and they are. If property is an indicator of recession, then we are already well into one. In the South West the developers stopped buying land some months ago, and a number of transactions that with a fair wind would have completed well before Christmas were turkeys long before that. It is not all bad news. Read Luke Johnson’s The Entrepreneur column in today’s FT. I am sure we are at his grim moment of reckoning, but he quotes Euripedes, “There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change”. As for whether the experience (of a more sober and testing time) could be character forming, probably: but don’t forget that a lot of us have been there before, and are even now getting out the T Shirt.

NFN

Another example of raising revenue by pleading climate change. Norwich City Council are reported as about to introduce a scheme under which drivers of longer cars will face higher parking charges. This, the council claims, will help reduce carbon emissions. Quite how they reach this conclusion is beyond me. Clearly another instance of NFN (Normal for Norfolk).

Red Letter Days

2007 has been the year we have started birdwatching in earnest: see A Birdie Year. We are very lucky living where we do: Yarner Wood, the best place in the South West to see Pied Flycatchers, is 15 minutes down the road. 15 minutes in another direction will take you to the High Moor (Golden Plover at this time of year; Skylarks and Meadow Pipits for much of the Spring and Summer; and always the magical Ravens), or to Soussons Woods or the Fernworthy Plantations. Only a little longer and we can be on Dawlish Warren, watching waders along the Exe, or Slavonian Grebes and Common Scoters off shore.

We never know quite what we are going to see, and rarely set out with the intention of finding a particular bird. We don’t have life lists, and such records as we keep are more to help us remember what we have had the good fortune to watch, than to boast of our sightings. I see each day we are out as a red letter day, but some this past twelve months have been the reddest of such days: the afternoon of 14 April, with leafbreak just happening in Yarner and the first Pied Flycatchers arriving; the Ravens on Snowdon as we came off the Bwlch Main in very early May; the trip to the lighthouse at the tip of the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge on Nantucket Island in October. These are days that will live in the memory.

To desire some good friends. . .

As I look forward to 2008, and consider what resolutions I should perhaps make, I realise that Samuel Johnson said it all before, and that I can do no better than follow him:

Not to marry a young Woman.

Not to keep young company, unless they really desire it.

Not to be peevish, or morose, or suspicious.

Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.

Not to be fond of children.

Not to tell the same Story over and over to the same People.

Not to be covetous.

Not to neglect decency, or cleanliness, for fear of falling into Nastiness.

Not to be oversevere with young People, but give allowances for their youthful follys and weaknesses.

Not to be influenced by or give ear to knavish tattling servants, or others.

Not to be too free of advice, nor trouble any but those that desire it.

To desire some good Friends to inform me which of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, & wherein; and reform accordingly.

Why choose Eversheds?

Lovely mention in Lucy Kellaway’s not-to-be-missed column in the FT today, awarding Eversheds the Martin Lukes Creovation gold award for using some quite astonishingly awful copy when looking for trainee lawyers. Apparently Eversheds want people who are knowlivators (knowledgeable motivators), proactilopers (proactive developers) and five other clumping concepts that sound more like dinosaurs than legal eagles. I rushed off to the Eversheds website, to see if this was really true, but got no further than the “Why choose Eversheds” page. Apparently they hire people who have personality and a sense of humour. I can only assume that whoever wrote the advertisement for trainees (if that is what it was) had been exercising the latter; and if he or she hadn’t, that the Eversheds board does!