I missed the latest example of law firm meanness just before Christmas. HBJ Gately Wareing, according to Legal Week, asked its legal staff to contribute towards (I take it this means pay for) presents for the support staff. I love the idea that the firm stressed that the scheme was voluntary: aren’t they always! Must be the Scottish influence. Not surprisingly, the scheme was well received by secretaries and support teams.
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).
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.
Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog 