Happy New Year (II)

A postscript to yesterday’s comments on the London Eye fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Cost to the London council tax payers? £1.2M if the papers are to be believed; and I cannot think that there was much off set from letting the BBC film them as (a) the display was public and (b) the quality of the BBC OB was so indifferent that they must have been employing people on work experience. Or perhaps it was yet another case of “insufficient skilled people” (yesterday also saw a somewhat overhonest admission by Network Rail that the reason for the overrun in repair work this holiday is that they simply couldn’t get sufficient specialists contractors in; and why? Because having been kept busy the last five or so years over the Christmas break by Network Rail, they had all decided enough was enough and they were going to see Christmas and the New Year with their families this time.) Back to Ken and his fireworks: if you live in London I hope that you feel that you got your money’s worth.

Happy New Year too!

Reading Charon QC’s Blawg, he was “Impressed by the London fireworks and usually I have no interest in fireworks.” Perhaps he was in the crowd. If he had had the misfortune to watch them on TV (don’t ask: a sad admission that one doesn’t get out and about as much as others), he might have felt differently, not least because the BBC’s OB was very certainly not up to scratch. A banal commentary, camera angles that obscured the display, cutaways to unnecessary shots of fairy lighted pyrotechnicians in rubber dinghies, and no real sense of what any of this was about (other than to get across the subliminal message that this is Ken’s re-election year: but would you re-elect someone who authorised such a hideous waste of money? Thank God I live in the South West). They do it so much better in Sydney!

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).

Say you don’t know

Read The Economist’s article on The Future of Futurology (December 30, 2007), and in particular note the advice, “Think small, think short – and listen”. Some things don’t change: you will still (global warming notwithstanding) find Golden Plover on Dartmoor at this time of year. Other things you know will (more lap tops are sold now than desk top PCs). The difficulty is predicting what. The Economist’s third piece of advice, (the title to this post) is the one I use, even if it sounds somewhat negative when everyone else says they do! But as the Economist says, uncertainty looks smarter than ever before.