The Long Road

Lest we forget how far these kids have come.

Eitan considers his mock GCSEs, exams he will take in 18 months. He will sit 12 subjects and must today choose three electives. No easy task, deciding one's future. You will be hearing a lot about the GCSEs, dear reader. Stay tuned.

Eitan: "Didn't somebody once ask you in an interview what vegetable you would want to be?"
Me: "Brussel sprouts. Nobody would eat me."
Madeleine: "I would want a vegetable that gets respect. Like broccoli."
Me: "Broccoli?"
Madeleine: "Beetroot doesn't get any respect."
Klara: "What about a tomato?"
Eitan: "Good one only it's a fruit."
Madeleine: "If I was a fruit I would want to be a passion fruit. No, wait, a guava."
Me:
Madeleine: "So I would be living in the tropics."
Me: "I'm glad we've got the fruit and veg covered."

Race Day Collage

Wimbledon Common 

Madeleine runs a x-country race on Wimbledon Common competing against 100 girls or so.  The 3K race starts on a flat green "but then winds its way through a horrible muddy terrain" (says Madeleine). She now tells me that her strategy was to "charge through the puddles and mud swamps while the other runners went around them."

I watch the final push - go Madeleine! - and she finds an extra gear to pass 4 girls (pictured) to finish an unofficial 13th (first for her new club Hercules Wimbledon).

Madeleine: "It felt like there was a knife in my shoulder and my asthma was super-bad." (Dad's note, Madeleine races with an inhaler which she uses during and after running and any exertion)

Goal Posts

The kids cooperate on Gracie's holiday present

From one muddy pitch to the next, Eitan plays center mid field against Worster Park on a cold, wet and dark day in a concrete town on the outskirts of London. The morning made worse by the outcome: 4-2 them (Eitan scores one, misses another). It should have been a draw but those are the breaks. Madeleine wisely stays in bed.

Now I am in Paris and despite the date it still feels like Christmas. The lights and ornaments remain along Faubourg St Honoree and carols fill the hotel. Are the retailers trying to eek out a few more holiday sales or the French unwilling to let go? (Sonnet took everything down December 31).

Madeleine, doodling: "It's an animal. And a pineapple."
Me: "Oh?"
Madeleine: "Its a pinanimal."
Me:
Madeline: "This one is a Frankenstein dog. A Frankendog."
Me: "Cool."

Surrey Cross Country Championships

Teamwork

 We sit around the kitchen listening to the rain on a dark Saturday morning. The kids running a cross country race. Even Rusty hesitates in these conditions. I have become that parent who talks about walking six miles in the snow to get to school. Well .. my and Katie's swimming galas went from the crack of dawn to late evening or night. Madeleine rolls her eyes.

We arrive at Lloyds Park in the Borough of Croydon (awful, Kate Moss is from here) to find the various clubs doing their pre race preparations and I think: Military. I take the dog for a tour of the course and it is unrunnable in the mud without spikes.

Madeleine's race, 3K, off first - bang! - and the many legged beast heads for the first turn, lost from site over the hill and into the common.  There is a strange loll while the spectators seek a new vantage point (I head towards the finish line) then there they are - at least the front runner, covered in mud grimacing, in effort - racing down the final incline towards the finishing shoot. Madeleine is in hot pursuit, maybe 30 yards outside. She finishes, clutching her inhaler, in 12:25, good enough for a top place.

Final leg

Eitan sits around for 1.5 hours before his starting gun. He competes with the U15s which get an extra kilometre for the 4k race. Cross country new to both kids and Eitan surveys the course beforehand.

Eitan off like a rocket, settles in and finishes in the middle of the pack.

Both kids satisfied/ relieved when it is over. In the car Madeleine devours a 'bacon buddy' and Eitan a muffin and bag of crisps. Bravo.

Me (kids dive into pizza): "Say something about the race."
Sonnet: "Everybody has to have a piece of broccoli!"
Madeleine: "It was very tough."
Eitan: "The puddles made it fun."

Napoleon In The House

Napoleon's Coronation, which we saw last month at the Louvre

Sonnet and I begin the New Year with War And Peace, ten hours of it, broadcast on Radio 4 all day, New Year's day. It is a wonderful production, abridged of course, and brings alive the book I read several years ago.

W&P, Vanity Fair and Les Miserables (which I read following our visit to the Paris sewers) each cover the same period of history focusing on Napoleon's failure in Moscow or Waterloo. Tolstoy, Thackery and Hugo create epicness by making the wars a major character in their tails while writing their stories 50 or 60 years after the demise of the French army.  It is a window into a different era that changed the future of Europe.

And Napoleon, for his part, rose from the French Revolution of 1789. He dominated European affairs for two decades, leading France in the  Napoleonic Wars and seizing control of most of continental Europe before Waterloo 1815. One of the greatest commanders in history, his campaigns are studied at military schools worldwide and he remains simultaneously one of the most celebrated and controversial political figures in European history.

In civil affairs Napoloeon put in place many liberal reforms across Europe summarized by British historian Andrew Roberts:

"The ideas that underpin our modern world—meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on—were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire."

"Imagination rules the world."-Napoleon Bonaparte

A Lull In The Action

Family Portrait

We enjoy the lull of the holidays, sleeping in, going to yoga and eating cheese and chocolate. Drinking red wine. Reading. But all good things must come to an end and we drop Auntie Katie off at T2. With a hug and a smile she returns to Manhattan.

An add for "Alpecin Caffeine Shampoo" tells us that 2 million bottles sold in Germany last year which makes me wonder: is there a faster way than coffee?

Eitan sells the six antique chairs sitting in the garage on eBay (they were otherwise to the dump). He discovers a new business model and now selling one of my shirts.

Me: "Are you shaving your legs?"
Madeleine: "OMG."

Sonnet: "So what kinds of snacks should I be getting you?"
Eitan: "Cereal."
Sonnet: "Oh? What kind?"
Eitan: "Crave."
Madeleine: "Cheerios."
Sonnet: "Now we're talking."
Eitan: "Wheat-a-bix."
Me, Madeleine:
Sonnet: "He is British."
Me: "Frosted Flakes."
Madeleine: "Lucky Charms. Oh, I love Lucky Charms."
Sonnet: "We are not getting Lucky Charms."
Me: "What's Crave, anyway?"
Eitan: "It's, like, cereal cubes with creamy chocolate inside."
Me: "That's basically candy."
Eitan: "Yes but you can have it for breakfast."

Camden

Camden Market

At Madeleine's request, we spend the day in Camden Town to visit the market, which has been going since 1974 when a small weekly crafts market operated every Sunday near Camden Lock. It eventually developed into a large complex of temporary stalls.  Now it is London's fourth-most popular visitor attraction drawing 100,000 people on the weekend.

Madeleine and Eitan head for the clothing stalls and shoe stores: they each buy a "Vans" sweatshirt (arguing who saw it first) and Eitan gets some fresh Puma's.  They both have an eye for the thing.

Me, wearing a tight cotton turtle neck: "Can you see my nips?"
Madeleine: "Dad!"
Me: "I thought we could talk about anything."
Madeleine: "We can. Just not everything."
Me: "So nips are out. What else?"
Madeleine:
Me: "Guys. Can we talk about guys?"
Madeleine: "OMG. This is so embarrassing."
Me: "I'm just trying to understand the boundaries."

Holiday Spirit

Train to Camden

Boxing Day comes and goes. We host a small party for our local friends then wrap up the afternoon in front of a couple of movies: Leon (for me) about an assassin who takes in a 12 year-old Natalie Portman which provides plenty of action and gore, just perfect for the holidays, followed by The Avengers for some more action, though this time mindless. Hollywood's focus on gay comic book heroes has become a bore.

I run the Parkrun 3 mile race in Richmond Park (every Saturday, 9AM) and complete the course in 20:56 or 27 out of 215 runners.  Eitan elects to sleep in, fair enough. The winning time is 17:31 or the difference between me, now, and twenty years.

Photo by Katie.

Cheer

New puppy slippers and a rooster hat from Auntie Katie.

Christmas Day starts surprisingly late around 10AM. Gone are the days when Eitan and Madeleine up at the crack of dawn pestering us downstairs! Downstairs! Downstairs! Eitan needs his sleep which even trumps presents.

We watch the movie Big which has the the kids' attention, especially the scene where Tom Hanks arrives at the office Christmas party in a white tuxedo then acts like a general weirdo. Eitan: "It's just like a kid acts at a party!"

Madeleine burns a napkin with a table cable, which gets a scolding from Sonnet. Madeleine: "Dad what would happen if I put my iPhone in the fire?"
Me: "You'd be without an iPhone?"
Madeleine: "Would it melt or something?"
Me: "Or it might explode."
Madeleine: "That's what I thought. Just wondering."

Katie: "There are a few things the Brits do better and some things the Americans do better."
Eitan: "I know."
Katie: "The Americans do better teeth. And better skin." 
Eitan:
Katie: "The Brits do better gardens, flowers and tea. And better accents. The Americans have better food."
Me: "I'm not so sure about that."
Katie: "Bangers and mash?"
Me: "I like the French. For food."
Eitan: "The Americans can't play football."
Katie: "We have more land! We have more land!"
Eitan: "You don't have to gloat."

Xmas Eve

Barnes track

We sneak into the Barnes field which used to be not sneaking but now there is a fence and gate which impedes our entry. It has become a Christmas Eve event.  Sonnet prepares gravlax and we have bagels for dinner, as is our custom.

Katie's Op-Ed Project is going great guns. In 2014, she and her colleagues visited seven countries and worked with over 25 universities. She says "Booyah!"

Des Egouts

Following our visit to the Musee Des Egouts De Paris, also known as the Paris sewer museum, I decide to read Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables."

Paris's first sewer system BTW was built in the 1200's: It consisted of open troughs that ran down the center of each cobblestone road. It was not esp effective and contributed to the spread of the Black Death.

The first underground sewer was built in 1370 beneath the Rue Montmartre, and drained into the Seine. The Sewers were expanded slowly during the next 400 years. However due to a lack of coverage beneath the city and widespread disrepair the sewers remained a problem. ..

Napoleon Bonaparte finally brought the sewers up to speed. In 1805, Bruneseau was commissioned to undertake the building of 182 new miles of sewer:

"The complete visitation of the subterranean sewer system of Paris occupied seven years, from 1805 to 1812. While yet he was performing it, Bruneseau laid out, directed and brought to an end some considerable works; in 1808 he lowered the floor of the Ponceau, and creating new lines everywhere, he extended the sewer... At the same time he disinfected and purified the whole network. (Les Miserables, Jean Valjean; Book II, Ch. 4)"

No other city has a sewer network that that of Paris whose tunnels stretch 2,100 kilometres. It houses, in addition to the drinking and non drinking water mains, telecommunication cables, pneumatic cables and traffic light management cables.  Every day, 1.2 million cubic metres of wastewater have to be collected. Every year, 15,000 cubic metres of solid waste are taken out and disposed of.

Me: "The first line of Les Mis .. ."
Kate: "Which is?"
Me: "In the year 1815 Monseigneur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne."
Kate: "That's an auspicious start."

More On Hair

Vampire

Here’s an advertisement by Oxford BioLabs for hair loss:

“Hair loss can be a nightmare. It can make you look less attractive, and also lead to disadvantages within your career and limit you in your partner choice. It can lead to depression, loss of self-confidence and even identity change.”   

Who knew?

Fortunately my hair has got me to where I wish to be: married, a career of some sort, and male.

Eitan has nothing to worry about as his mother’s father had a full head of thick and heavy hair.  I remember Stan's slicked back pompadour from another era - it was very becoming, esp when perched on a bar stool with drink and fag, animated in some story. Indeed another time.

Paris Montage

 Eurostar

Madeleine finishes "To Kill A Mocking Bird" while Eitan re reads (perhaps my favorite) "Lonesome Dove." Sonnet attacks four back issues of the New Yorker. I work away on the train trying to finish up various emails and projects by the end of the year.

 Notre Dame

Eitan: "Is that Notre dame?"

Me: "You're killing me. That's like being in California and asking what ocean that is."

Eitan:

Me: "You know it's the Pacific, right?"

Eitan: "Is it a church ?"

Me: "Ug."

 The Marais

Madeleine: "How much would you give me if I jumped in the Seine right now?"

 The Pantheon, 5e

Auntie Katie Arrives

At the Natural History Museum in Paris. Madeleine: "Did they have to kill all these animals to get them here?"

Me:  "Yep. Unless they were road kill."

Madeleine: "This is why I have a problem with natural history museums. It's so unfair."

Me: "Not if you're a taxidermist."

M: "Huh ?"

Me: "Stuffing the animals. It's a pretty good living."

M: "Whatever, Dad."

Me: "It just depends on your perspective. As with most things in life."

 Eiffel Tower

Madeleine sees the Eiffel Tower: "Woa! I didn't realise it was right there."

A Normal Interaction

Last Sighting

That sucker is gone.

Blast Off

Johnny pushes the button

We launch the "The Payloader" 2,000 feet into the windy atmosphere never to be seen again. Well worth it.

Madeleine: "Are you going to Paris this week?"
Me: "Zurich tomorrow. But I'll be home for dinner."
Madeleine: "You're going for one day?"
Me: "Yep."
Madeleine: "What's the point of that?"

It's The Oil, Stupid

Williston Basin, North Dakota

A barrel of oil now goes for 57 bucks or a 40% decline since October. Go figure. A price cut of 25% (if maintained) means that global GDP will be roughly 0.5% higher than it would be otherwise. Some countries of course will gain a lot more than that average - In China, a $1 drop per barrel saves the country $2.1bn. So for instance, the world produces just over 90m b/d of oil. At $115 a barrel, that is worth roughly $3.8 trillion a year; at $85, just $2.8 trillion. Any country or group that consumes more than it produces gains from the $1 trillion transfer—importers, most of all.

For the US it will be a mixed bag because America is simultaneously the world’s largest consumer, importer and producer of oil. On balance cheaper oil will help the average Joe but not as much as it used to. Goldman Sachs reckons that cheaper oil and lower interest rates should add about 0.1 percentage points to growth in 2015. But that will be more than offset by a stronger dollar, slower global growth and weaker stockmarkets.

I started my career in First Boston's natural resources group (NRG) before switching to financial services. The former much more interesting.

DC

A Man In His Prime

We spend the weekend with David and Tabitha and their family.

David's consultancy, Macro Advisory Partners, going great guns with 20 clients including big brands, global companies and a few sovereigns. David does the macro and he is a genius: like no one I know he ties the pieces together: politics, risk, financial markets, currencies, geo political issues .. . money.

Holiday Season

Merry, merry

We get into the Xmas spirit with the countdown less than two weeks. Sonnet puts lights up in front of the house and we decorate the Christmas tree.

Dior uses Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" to promote Dior Homme Fragrance starring Robert Pattison. Initially I was WTF but the uncensored version (youtube) is pretty fabulous. Shake for me baby, I want to be your backdoor man.

Bang Bang

And it is Friday. Again.

This week it's the Nordics and I find myself in Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm (Nobel prize being awarded) and Helsinki. It is cold and winter and the sun rises at 9AM and sets by 3PM. Strange life for those who live here yet it is also charming with Christmas lights and storefront candles. I force myself to run in the early darkness and watch the cyclers and commuters brace themselves against the weather. No wonder this part of the world drinks more coffee than anywhere else.

Madeleine: "I love The Kooks."
Me: "Yep."
Madeleine: "Have you heard of the song 'Slim Shady?"
Me: "Of course. That's ancient."
Madeleine: "I was so proud of you when I learned that you knew Eminem."
Me: "Have you heard of the song 'Bang Bang?"
Madeleine: "Of course, Dad."
Me: "What do you think she's singing about?"
Madeleine: "I don't know. Anyway I'm not saying."
Me: "So when she says, 'bang! bang! all over me' what does that mean?"
Madeleine:
Me: "Back in my day, we only listened to songs about bunny rabbits. And cats."
Madeleine (under her breath): "Yeah, right."
Me: "Bang bang! the cute little rabbit jumped over a tree."
Madeleine: "Can I be excused now?"

The Big Hole

Our triumph (1975)

Todd (the one on the right) and I neighbours and best of friends until we moved house in 1977 (eventually Todd's family headed for Healdsburg where we would visit - we hunted frogs on the dried out Russian River banks or shot arrows and BB guns).

In this particular photo we dug a hole in Todd's backyard. Who knows why? but it was deep, eventually deep enough to sink the two of us. Our summer days filled with the work. We found all sorts of bugs and critters with jaws that we put into jars or made fight.

When not digging we were building tree forts. Or making go carts. Constructing battleships from planks of wood. Or (my favourite) drawing posters of Star Trek episodes on paper dispatched from Todd's father's printer (the paper had removable ridges on the sides for the printer to "bite" the paper and move it through the gears). We built plastic models of the Starship Enterprise and the Klingon B'Moth or Amar and then melted them during epic laser and photon torpedo space battles. Good times for a kid.

Today Todd lives in Chico with his wife and two boys. He is a retired captain and firefighter.

Madeleine: "Can I ask Gracie and Moe to get me a BB gun for Christmas?"
Me: "Absolutely not."
Madeleine: "But why?"
Me: "Because it's a gun."
Madeleine: "But in 'To Kill A Mockingbird' Atticus bought Jim and Scout a riffle."
Me: "Nice reference but it's still no."
Madeleine: "So unfair."