In these days of continuous assessment, how do you know where you stand? For folks in the City you could do worse than look into the Liber Albus 2015 (White Book 2015). So what am I to make of this contribution to the book?
A bit frightening that I appear to be increasing the City of London Corporation’s repair bills. Perhaps I’ll fare better in next year’s annual review.
To order a copy – CITY WHITE BOOK 2015 – ORDER FORM
Samuel Johnson’s famous remark went – “Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
Johnson made this remark to his biographer, Boswell (who interestingly lived in Scotland throughout their relationship), on 20 September 1777. Not a lot has changed. My dear friend and former mathematics teacher, Bill Joseph, retired to London citing three big reasons, Gresham College (intellectual), the National Health Service, and free Transport for London passes. Same idea as Johnson’s I’d guess.
So 239 years later, how does London look for the world weary? Johnson may have been correct about “tired of London”, but that doesn’t mean you can’t easily become “tired in London”. What an exhausting and interesting month for us. So exhausting that this piece is more a photo album of things we did than any form of essay. First, we got out of London in early May, up to Boswell country in Scotland, and spent the election day (yes, did a postal ballot), revisiting things since the last Scottish trip (which coincided with another election, the Referendum).
Eric Smith, “I’m standing on the engine … not much use for anything else …”
Eric Smith, pictured above, delivered a great engineering experience around the idea of sailing, though with 45 knot winds, five degree weather, and a diesel engine that knew more about breathing air than combusting air, most of the time was spent either sailing a nine-tonne boat onto a berth without power or down in the fumes of the engine room than sailing ‘towards’ Campbelltown for some whisky tasting. Perhaps next year, on a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry.
Then more engineering as my daughter and I went to see the state of the “Mail Rail”. I first saw the Mail Rail working in 1986 underneath the old General Post Office headquarters, now the King Edward Building, on St Martin’s le Grand. I’ve been a (minor) patron of getting this rail working again and am delighted that the British Postal Museum & Archive have succeeded in raising the funds to do so.
It will be a major tourist attraction in a couple of years, whisking people on a 15 round-trip journey. Though as my daughter explained it’s really for tourists – “Daddy, as Londoners we see a lot underground platforms”.
On 14 May there was a magnificent celebration of the 800th anniversary of the London Mayoral Charter (9 May 1215) and of the 800th year of the Magna Carta, a nice counterpoint to some Magna Carta Gresham talks I arranged earlier in the year. The commemoration was a service held in Temple Church, then Middle Temple for drinks, then Inner Temple for dinner. Moving choral services, touching sermons, and fantastic hospitality (and wines). In the lectures earlier this year, Lord Igor Judge emphasised the pivotal role of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, in the Magna Carta, so it was very touching to have this event with him entombed in Temple Church beside us. I hadn’t fully appreciated the central role of Temple Church and the Templars in the Magna Carta negotiations.
The Temple Church was built by the Knights Templar, an order of military monks founded in 1118 to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land. Here in the Temple the Templars had their Church, two halls, cloisters and domestic buildings, leading in the 12th century straight down to the River Thames. The Round Church was built soon after 1160; it is the earliest Gothic building in England. In the crisis of 1214-5 King John had two London headquarters: the Tower in the East; and the Temple in the West, where he was safe under the protection of the Templars. The Round Church was in use by 1162. It is the earliest Gothic building in England. It was modelled on the circular Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the site of Christ’s death, burial and rising; to be in the Round Church was, to the medieval imagination, to be in Jerusalem, at the holiest place in the world. Here’s the timeline in full (courtesy of Geoff Pick, Archivist, City of London Corporation):
It felt only appropriate to round this tiring month off to check on what those Royals are now up to, with a visit to Buckingham Palace for tea:
My Queen
Whew!
Had The Vapours had their hit a few years later, who knows how it might have gone. I went with my friend Mark Yeandle to launch Global Financial Centres Index 17 (yes, 17 since we started in 2005 and published from 2007) in Busan on 23 March. It was an exciting trip, though I felt rather guilty about 44 hours travel for 36 hours there. I haven’t been to Busan since the financial meltdown of 1997 and what a change it is. The city’s population has shrunk slightly, but wow has the quality of life surged – more parks, more recognition of the need for environmental protection and sustainability. Here we are with some of our hosts after the launch event with the mayor.
Perhaps the most interesting bit of the trip was seeing how they focus on greeting visitors. Busan is geared to having a single administrative area where new businesses are whisked through the variety of offices they need to visit in a single day in a single area. Two particularly interesting items for businesses thinking of coming to Busan were a 1:2000 and also a nearby 1:4000 scale model of the city. Here’s a photo of the 1:2000.
Further, the Korean Stock Exchange, which evolved from the traditional rice market trade in the port, is headquartered here. Unlike certain London exchanges, they have a fantastic museum for the public.
Though talking about comparable tourism among financial centres does give me an opportunity to plug the City of London Walk of Commerce & Finance Z/Yen helped create – free ebook for the public. Heading home was hard, as I loved the food and the hospitality of our hosts, though I won’t miss some extremely, too extremely, fresh octopus.
On the flight back, I cracked open a thriller written by a friend, Blue Eye by Tracy Elner, only to find that it is set on Lake Baikal – look at what was outside the window of the Korean Air flight home.
We were delighted with today’s BBC1 coverage of Lady Daphne in Heir Hunters, Series 9, Episode 5 (of 20), “Morris/Evans” (09:15, Friday, 27 February 2015). Not only did they have a great case to solve with Robert Evans, and made it interesting, but also included a lot of footage of sailing barge history:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054b4pq
“After the heir hunters race to find her, one heir visits the home of the relative she never knew. Surprisingly, it is just ten minutes down the road from her own house.
Whilst on another case, the heir hunters experience a strange sense of déjà vu. They find themselves tracing heirs to an estate of a lady whom they have met before, and their search uncovers the remarkable history of Thames bargemen.”
iPlayer link – http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b054b4pq/heir-hunters-series-9-5-morrisevans
I do remember it was a cold and wet afternoon back in October 2013 when we did the filming – yes, nearly 18 months till airing. It was great to meet Robert Evans, who seemed really pleased to learn about his family history. Anyway, if you just want to watch Robert and “Mike”, the other star, with the grand old Lady, our section starts at 30:00/43:50.
By the way – Lady Daphne available for bookings from 1 April! – www.lady-daphne.co.uk
Voltaire said, “Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is absurd.” I was asked to share my ignorance by speaking about uncertainty and finance at the Calculating & Communicating Uncertainty Conference on 27 January 2015 at BIS, London. The event was sponsored by the UK Ministry of Defence, Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (DSTL) and Public Health England, and organised by the University of Southampton. You can read the full talk, “Where The Numbers Meet The Road – Uncertainty At The Frontiers Of Finance”. As my highlight, I would point out how much I enjoyed sharing with the audience my concept of “Knightian Ignorance”.
University of Chicago economist Frank Knight (1885–1972) distinguished risk and uncertainty in his 1921 work Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. Risk is something you can assess by knowing impact and likelihood. Uncertainty is something you realise might happen, but can’t quantify. Black Swans and unknown unknowns are popular party points today. To explain the conjunction of known unknowns and unknown unknowns I remembered the UK Conservative Party’s crude slogan under Michael Howard in the 2005 general election, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” I could explain known unknowns and unknown unknowns as Knightian Ignorance, “Are you not thinking what I’m not thinking?” Enjoy!
What a most interesting talk to give. My dear friend, Robin Sherlock KCLJ MA, former Chief Commoner of the City of London Corporation, asked me to speak at the Ladies’ Dinner of The Dulwich Club where he has been Senior Steward the past year. The Club, founded in 1772, is one of the oldest dining societies in the world. Elisabeth and I found the entire evening a delight. Haberdashers’ Hall was rebuilt after the fire of 1666 and the bombing of WWII, yet the Company made a brave decision to open one of the most tasteful modern halls in 2002, a true architectural gem opposite St Barthomew’s.
Giving a talk to The Dulwich Club was no easy task, as they’ve heard them all before. I was a bit trepidatious, particularly as the Junior Steward, Bruce Purgavie made clear my ignorance of football yet expected me to show some rocket science skills the night after Guy Fawkes. What can one say? Well, this was it:
Sir Thomas Gresham: Tudor, Trader, Shipper, Spy
The Dulwich Club – Ladies Night Dinner
Haberdashers’ Hall
Thursday, 6 November 2014
“Senior Steward, Junior Steward, my Lords, distinguished Guests, Ladies. When Robin suggested that I have a dinner with the Ladies of London’s most exclusive dining society, I was particularly pleased. When he suggested I bring along my Lady Elisabeth, while delighted of course, I began to realise it wasn’t my looks – I would be lecturing for my dinner on behalf of the Visitors.
Robin suggested I do a serious talk, after all the jokes, about being a newish Alderman, so I naturally thought of ward disputes, governance, compliance, and endless committee meetings to share with you. Robin wondered if perhaps there was something slightly more interesting, so let me share with you one fun project of the Joint Grand Gresham Committee – a biography on Sir Thomas Gresham: Tudor, Trader, Shipper, Spy, born 1519, died 1579.
When I was a boy two-door was what you bought when you couldn’t afford four-door, but Gresham served four Tudor monarchs, managed to keep his head, and all the while made money. Lots of it. He probably died comparatively wealthier than Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. 435 years later his legacy still generates millions for good causes. We have Gresham Street. We have his statue a few hundred yards away on Holborn viaduct, another at the Royal Exchange. We have his Tower 42 Mansion site, Osterley Park, Boston Manor. His grave at St Helen’s Bishopsgate. We have grasshoppers everywhere – on the top of the Royal Exchange, at 68 Lombard Street, on stained glass windows.
Gresham was born on Cheapside and attended St Paul’s School and Gonville College, Cambridge. In 1543 he went to Antwerp to make his fortune as a Mercer. Antwerp then was very cosmopolitan and large for the time, with a population approaching 100,000, double London or Rome. Just 25 merchants accounted for half of London’s cloth exports, and the two biggest exporters were the brothers John Gresham and Richard Gresham, Thomas’s father.
Gresham imported from Antwerp the idea of a ‘bourse’ or ‘exchange’ for intangible items such as ship voyages and insurance. Incorporated into the 1571 Royal Exchange were 150 small shops, called The Pawn, London’s first shopping centre. From within St Martin’s Goldsmiths he experimented with fractional reserve gold stores, cornering markets, and insider trading. His Will, enacted upon his death in 1579, created Gresham College and challenged the ‘Oxbridge’ oligopoly in higher education.
We are commissioning a biography which we hope to publish on the quincentenary of his birth, 2019. But what does a Tudor have to say about contemporary issues? I thought I’d ‘channel’ Gresham on three questions today:
1 – what should we do about our banks?
2 – what should we do about our currency?
3 – what should we do about Europe?
1 – What Should We Do About Our Banks?
Gresham was probably one of the first goldsmiths to issue more certificates for gold in the vaults than he had. Our modern economic terms are fractional reserve banking or leveraged banking. So rather than letting banks such as RBS in 2008 lend 42 times what they had in the vaults, Gresham would probably recommend tight control over leverage. He might have recommended that our quantitative easing continue to the point that our banks were lending little more than they have in their vaults.
2 – What Should We Do About Our Currency?
Gresham explained to Elizabeth I that because Henry VIII and Edward VI had replaced 40% of the silver in shillings with base metal, ‘all your fyne gold was conveyed out of this your realm.’ Colloquially expressed as “bad money drives out good”, Gresham’s Law was attributed to him in 1858 by a Scottish economist. Two awkward bits – the Law is the reverse, “good money drives out bad”, and Gresham’s Law was not his; it was noted much much earlier by many, starting with Aristophanes. The Nobel economist Robert Mundell rephrased Gresham’s Law more properly as “cheap money drives out dear money only if they must be exchanged for the same price”.
In 1551 Edward VI appointed Thomas as Royal Agent in Antwerp. A clever and shrewd dealer, Gresham reduced royal indebtedness from £325,000 to £108,000. He reduced the national debt by two-thirds in nine months. Under so-called ‘austerity’, UK national debt has grown over the past four years by a third. William Cecil put Gresham in charge of recoinage in 1560. To his, Elizabeth’s, and Cecil’s credit, within a year debased money was withdrawn, melted, and replaced, with a profit to the Crown estimated at £50,000.
Gresham stood for an independent pound sterling. He certainly wouldn’t have sold off the national gold reserve. More interestingly, he might also have supported an independent London currency.
3 – What Should We Do About Europe?
A Gresham ship from 1570 was re-discovered in the Thames in 2003; its cannons inscribed with grasshoppers and marked ‘TG’. There are tales of bullion concealed in bales of pepper or armour. Gresham was clearly a “merchant adventurer” with a network of European agents, though the sobriquet ‘arms-dealer’ might equally apply.
The Royal Exchange began as his father’s idea, but the idea behind the exchange and the shops was that London prospers when all who come for exchange are treated fairly.
Gresham was a free trader and Europhile, yet also a realist and a spy, committed to engaging with Europe, vigorously, but for mutual and selfish benefit.
Hop To It
I must end on grasshoppers, in two ways – the family symbol and Kung Fu. The Gresham grasshopper first appears in the mid-1400’s. According to family legend, the founder of the family, Roger de Gresham, was abandoned as a baby in long grass in North Norfolk in the 13th century. A woman’s attention was drawn to the foundling by a grasshopper. While a beautiful story, a more likely explanation is that the Middle English word ‘gressop’ for ‘grasshopper’ resembles ‘Gresham’. I think the Royal Exchange may have taken the theme too far – if you look on the south side just now it reads, “luxury shopping”, but the “s” has temporarily fallen off. Luxury hopping?
And Kung Fu? Well grasshoppers, you’ll remember David Carradine and the 1970 television series – ‘grasshoppers’ are students. Gresham believed in the power of education for all. His Tudor Open University spawned ‘The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge’ after a 1660 lecture by Sir Christopher Wren, then Professor of Astronomy. Today Gresham College hosts over 130 physical events per year free to the public, distributes recordings under a Creative Commons licence, and provides millions of people with lecture transcripts and recordings via the internet.
A century after Gresham’s death Samuel Pepys enjoyed Gresham’s legacies, listening to one of the professors ‘sufficiently learned to reade the lectures’, then strolling through the Royal Exchange afterwards in search of a gift for a loved one, as can you today well over three centuries later. We’re pleased to be setting out on the first proper biography and I hope you feel he is a worthy subject. What I might ask you to do is look around the City and wonder at how we ourselves could leave a comparable legacy for the next half a millennium. We, your grateful guests, know the Dulwich Club will be full of enthusiastic ideas. Thank you!”
And for even more…
Michael Mainelli and Valerie Shrimplin, “Sir Thomas Gresham: Tudor, Trader, Shipper, Spy”, London Topographical Society Newsletter, Number 79 (November 2014), pages 3-6.
Today was one of the most delightful days for me. The Furniture Makers made me, as their Alderman, an Honorary Liveryman. It was a lovely ceremony done both in good taste and a speed just below haste and well above boring. You can see the beaming faces of all the liverymen below.
The Furniture Makers are a more recent livery, though they achieved their Royal Charter last year after 50 years as a livery – http://www.furnituremkrs.co.uk/. What makes them exciting is a wonderful combination of being an active trade, full of people with imagination and good taste. For example, at their Royal Charter and 50th anniversary dinner they had goldfish (gold = 50th) in large martini-shaped glass bowls on the table. The goldfish in front and above me seemed to perk up every time the photographer came by – “here’s my best side” – and went back to lazy swimming the moment he left. The Furniture Makers took care that the goldfish were comfortable and went to good homes immediately afterwards. Despite my earnest attempts at woodcarving, e.g.:
they seem to like people who can shake hands without too many plasters, so I suspect they’ll been looking inward for the real talent. I do hope to do many good things with them over the years to come and thank them for placing such confidence in my membership.
One of the more difficult tasks can be substituting at the last moment in a debating team. It happens more than you wish. You haven’t worked on creating the question and always wish it was different. The person for whom you’re substituting is often the one you’d most dispute. This year I was asked to help the CISI and debate the question ‘Do UK savers and investors get a fair deal?’
“Whether it’s interest rates offered by banks, charges imposed by intermediaries or fees charged by asset managers, we are constantly assailed by stories suggesting that once again, the unsuspecting public is being taken for a ride. So is it any surprise that so many people are reluctant to save through conventional channels and is there any truth in all or even some of this?”
In favour of the motion:
Dr Tim May MCSI, CEO, Wealth Management Association (WMA)
The Rt Hon John Redwood MP MCSI
Against the motion:
Will Hutton, Author and Financial Commentator
Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli, Chartered FCSI, Executive Chairman, Z/Yen
Will was great to work with and I have a lot of respect for Tim and John. In the event, Will and I technically won, but Tim and John actually won, having moved more of the audience to their side. John did some excellent pandering to the audience – “these guys are pessimistic; be optimistic; be selfish; congratulate yourselves”. The pandering was decidedly effective. Probably tells you something about those of us who work in finance. The event was moderated by Stephanie Flanders, Chief Market Strategist, JP Morgan Asset Management and Former BBC Economics Editor. She’s also speaking at our Gresham College January Magna Carta Uncovered event. Anyway, here were my opening remarks:
CISI Integrity Debate 2014
Wednesday, 24 September 2014
Plaisterers’ Hall, London
Fellow Aldermen, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. Tonight I have the distasteful job of biting the hand that feeds me. I must be risking madness because I agree with the Chief Vampire Squid at Goldman Sachs that financial services has the ability to do God’s work. Paraphrasing last week’s St Matthew’s Day sermon, “If love of money is the root of all evil, then the study of money must be the source of much madness.”
In 2005 our Long Finance movement asked “when would we know our financial system is working?” At our 2011 conference on bubbles John Redwood pointed out there that he could show you an economy with no bubbles, North Korea. He’s correct, we don’t want to occupy a bubble-free, scandal-free economy. Yet financial services bubbles and scandals seem to lose our economy at least seven years of growth every generation. We can improve, massively.
Folks in the agrarian countryside, somewhere outside the Circle Line, know the City is the Devil’s inherently unfair machine designed to relieve naïve bumpkins of their money. Kicking off with the 1698 Darien Disaster that determined last week’s referendum, we move swiftly to the South Sea Bubble, and railway shares. In the 1970s we sell the bumpkins Rolls Razor, Bank of Gibraltar, and BCCI. In the 1980s we hawk endowment mortgages, Barlow Clowes, Equitable Life, and Lloyd’s names.
In the 1990s I penned a piece, “How I Learned To Start Worrying And Love The Dot.Bomb.” Castigated for my negativity and browbeaten to chant that “under our new unified FSA there will be no problems”, we opened the millennium with the the supposedly 1-in-300 year onslaught of Waste Management, Enron, Global Crossing, Worldcom, Sunbeam, Dynegy, Nicor, and Halliburton. The authorities sacrificed Arthur Andersen and shored up the remaining four audit firms who managed on their own to produce Adelphia, Freddie Mac, Duke Energy, Kmart, Homestore.com, HealthSouth, ImClone, Nortel and AIG round one.
And then after we really really made sure that scandals were a thing of the past and that every little bit helps a big four auditor or regulator avoid another Tesco, we had precipice bonds, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG round two, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Northern Rock, RBS, Lloyds the bank, Iceland, Ireland, the whole UK, and even the world economy, fortunately saved by Gordon selling our gold. Whew! I thought a ‘fair deal’ was one that benefits both parties. How wrong I was. I have a simple intelligence versus integrity balance. When something goes wrong you are either stupid or corrupt. It’s hard to be both, though possible, but the smart person chooses hypocrisy.
I love all those former bankers and ministers who have found God and their pension payments in retirement, for they have inherited the earth. So many of them shaking their heads and muttering about values, ethics, and standards. Balzac knew them, «Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait.» “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.” [Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), Le Père Goriot (1835)]
Scandal and salvation are staggering, PPI – estimates near £50bn, saving the UK financial system, the IMF estimates an entire year of UK GDP £1.227 trillion. Thank God for QE and recovery, by which I mean LIBOR, mis-sold interest rate swaps, RBS Global Restructuring Group, FX scandals, let alone looming scandals in gold, aluminium, and oil. Heck, even Calpers the other week abandoned the hedge fund sector as a bad deal.
Our opposition may blame the victims. In 2008 usurious savers put 25% of the nation’s cash in the nation’s riskiest financial product – paying 4.5% under 4.5% inflation, zero real return – an RBS deposit account. Our industry can’t advise on basic day-to-day cash management without the government rescuing us, designed by us clever clogs, promoted by trained experts, audited by geniuses, regulated by Newtons, presided over by the Einsteins of politics. We congratulate ourselves on our housing wealth and wring our hands about homeless young families. We’ve managed to so abuse our golden goose pension products we’ve destroyed all defined benefits.
Our professional advice was to speculate, speculate, speculate, but call it investment. We, so-called professionals, left honesty and self-control to neophyte regulators. We failed to regulate ourselves. We took advantage of the weak, the savers and investors outside the Circle Line. Our best friends call us “socially useless”. Your choice tonight? Vote for what we lack – do we lack integrity or do we lack intelligence. Smart – Stupid. Devious – Daredevils.
Tonight be detectives and consider motive, means and opportunity. Motive – we have greed and fear, power and sex, and all of the seven deadly sins. So-called reforms are religious dogma – ethics, better regulation, controlled bonuses – we invoke integrity not intelligence. Financial services chants: ‘regulation failed because you really really didn’t believe in regulation.’ So pray harder. Next time let’s use better pixie dust.
Means – agency problems, information asymmetries, externalities. The one guaranteed way to make money is to convince people that you have a sure-fire way to make money. Leading people into scams is dishonest, but successfully predicting where people will go constitutes honest investment winnings – think the front-running of high-frequency trading. The Tudors knew the second sure-fire way to make money, get a monopoly. Five banks control nearly 90% of the market. Why does the UK have 50 or so retail banks when Germany has 2,000 and the USA 8,000? Auditors, credit rating agencies, and many other cartels. We have a moral obligation to open and competitive markets.
Opportunity – Galbraith believed that, “Speculation on a large scale requires a pervasive sense of confidence and optimism and conviction that ordinary people were meant to be rich.” Why be honest that savings should be invested in producing assets, not lottery tickets? We prey on the stupidity, the gullibility, and to be fair, the greed and fear of others.
Money is a technology communities use to trade debts. A few trillion here or there soon add up to an acute monetary Armageddon. Governments create future tax debts, savers are taxpayers, taxpayers are pensioners, future tax debts are money. The national debt ensures we are all in it together! First and foremost we have an obligation to avoid harming the monetary system.
Second, in a fair deal – we will use our brains for changes that eliminate cartels and challenge leverage, with Martin Wolf a recent convert to the cause.
Third, as Thomas Jefferson said – “Commerce and honest friendship with all.” Fellow human beings, not punters or bumpkins or sheep to be shorn. In a fair deal – we will regulate ourselves not heap blame on government or society.
I’ll quote Warren Buffett, “… Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, ‘I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men’. If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.” [2005 Berkshire Hathaway Chairman’s Letter] I charge us, the financial services industry, as guilty of increasing illegal motion, peddling unfair deals, yet being very clever. To vote that we are all very smart, you have to vote that we’re unfair and lack integrity. Thank you.
Postscript – Of course, just a week later it was revealed that across most of Europe pensions have not delivered – http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21621883-european-savers-have-suffered-terrible-returns-pension-funds-prudence – ” in Belgium, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, the real (after inflation) returns from private pension schemes have been negative for much of this century”.
The observant among you may have noticed that the Mainelli’s spent two weeks of August in Scotland, followed by Wales, and sailing in England. We left in early August when polls for the Scottish Referendum predicted a 22 point “No” lead, and returned to England to hear about a predicted “Yes” lead. Suspicious? Go figure.
Of course, all I’ve learned about political diplomacy I’ve learned from Samuel Johnson, whose Scottish admirer and biographer, James Boswell, 9th Lord of Auchinleck, treasured and recorded such snippets as:
[Boswell:] “Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.”
[Johnson:] “That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.”
[Johnson]: “In England we wouldn’t think of eating oats. We only feed them to Horses.”
[Boswell]: “Well, maybe that’s why in England you have better horses, and in Scotland we have better men.”
Feeling a bit sheepish about the fact that an entire nation seemed happy to never see our family again, I returned with my passport just before the referendum in order to save the nation. Taking a wild chance I sailed the Clyde, along the way buying my dear friend, Eric Smith, a new red duster as a boat-warming gift for his Colvic Watson 28, Serendipity. It also encouraged me. Without a successful exertion on my part, the ensign might have had a mere few days of validity, so it’s good for me that the vote was for union, otherwise I would have been a bit sodium-chloride angry (salt-ire, or is that “sailor rage” or “sea rage”…) if it had been money/currency-union wasted.
And a nice view of Arran Isle too!
One of the joys of restoring a Thames Sailing Barge, our beloved S B Lady Daphne, is racing her. Racing her? Indeed. Thames Sailing Barge racing is the oldest continuous boat racing in the world and, despite the size, slow turns, and wide tacking angles, possibly the hardest in the world. There is a full set of races each year off the east coast of England masterminded by the Sailing Barge Association. On Sunday, 24 August, we were racing off Southend-on-Sea, passing by its famous pier, sometimes quite closely!
I have written a bit about this racing in the past:
And a lot more is contained on the Lady Daphne news area. This year we managed to win the second place trophy in our class, but the privilege of racing continues to astound us. And for those of you who know Southend, you’ll have to admit that it’s a special group of boats that can make the town look this pretty!
[photo courtesy of Mark Duff]