Peter Nolan

Pinstripe Rambo

In conversation at Canary Wharf yesterday morning

Busy, busy, busy

What a week!  I've been scrambling madly to keep up since I got back from Dublin last Thursday.  Hence no posting at all.  I've been busy, busy, busy.  I didn't even get to see that controversial documentary on Channel Four questioning the science of global warming. 

Today was the culmination, with three deadlines.  My Business & Finance small-caps column was due in the morning - my recent bearish views on the market during last week's dead cat bounce seems abundantly vincidated this week; I still think that the credit bubble is dangerous, that a US recession is possible, but not certain this year and that geopolitical risk over the confrontation with Iran needs to be reflected in oil prices.  As a stock pick, I recommended YouGov, the British internet polling firm which has been on AIM since mid-2005.  Nobody in the market has the marketing savvy or the internet expertise of these guys, the same team behind the online conservative TV station 18 Doughty Street.

I also had to deliver a training presentation, which was a bit stressful to prepare.  Although I slightly mistimed it, I think that I delivered it quite well.  We may be opening these to more clients, and even journalists, in the future too.

I missed my Magill deadline too - not a good thing to do, but the story can wait. 

Roll on the weekend!

Birthday books

Since it's my birthday soon, I've bought myself some books as a personal indulgence amidst all the filthy weather. 

Linda Grant, a British novelist and Guardian writer, several of whose books, including the Orange Prize-winning When I Lived in Modern Times, are set in Israel tells of her extended stay there in 2002/3 in The People on The Street: A Writer's View of Israel.  Grant writes that as a "category error, a British Jew, when everyone knows that the British are tactful, decorous, well0mannered, prudent, prone to meaningful silences and Jews are - well, the opposite. She's in Israel, "...not out of Zionism or interst in the Middle East conflict, but because the moment I put my foot down there, everything was half familiar.  I had half the story already inside my head and was avid and eager to learn the rest". 

Amazon also made a good choice as to what I would be interested in reading next.  Continuing on my quest to figure out what's been going on in Iraq, I also bought Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, the highly-praised account of the invasion and its aftermath by Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks.

On the move

I've just started accessing blogs while I'm away from my desktop using my PDA, using Bloglines Mobile.  This allows me to read a hell of a lot more than I otherwise would and avoids the impulse-buying of books, magazines and newspapers that I'm partial too. 

A lot of dirty book stores in London will keep their stock in their basements, keeping a ground-floor shopfront of unobjectionalbe material, usually dusty and neglected remaindered books, on the ground floor.  Often on my way home from the West End in London, I'll drop into one of these, which is usually open later than any other bookstore.  I hope that I don't get noticed doing this, as a reputation as a sad porn-addict is the last thing that I need. 

Now, if I could only get bloglines on the Tube....

Bumps in the road

My apologies if posting is a little light over the next week or so.  I'm going through something of a busy period at work, I have to do some travelling and I'm also writing a profile cum interview of the man who is, by many accounts, the world's most influential columnist.  So, sorry to dissappoint all of you in my audience, that means you John, if posting isn't what it should be. 

Reach out and touch someone

HSBC's motto, "The world's local bank" is turning out to be more appropriate than I might have wished.  For the last two weeks, I've been trying to open a simple business account for a limited company that I run at a city-centre branch of the bank.  The bank doesn't give phone numbers for its staff or branches.  The result is that every time that either they or I have a query, we have to go through the HSBC call centre, rather than contacting the business manager directly, meaning that I'll get a call back the next day, if I'm lucky.  To get any response, I have to take a ten minute tube journey and walk in to seek out the individual concerned in person.  The world is flat? Not with HSBC. 

A night at the pitchers...

I feel like crap, although I'm still hoping to get out by tomorrow night to see this documentary at the French cultural centre on German writer Ernst Jünger, who was one of the military administrators of Paris during the occupation. It makes a break from the oestrogen overdose  I've been accumulating today from going through my backlog of unwatched DVDs - The Thomas Crown Affair, Dirty Dancing, Ghost and Jerry Maguire. 

Update

I have to concede that Dirty Dancing is actually very enjoyable.  I doubt that many people would have picked up on a lot of the themes, of class and of the segregation of Jews from wider society, as epitomised in the resort.  It's happy ending, the blending of old and new generations in a reasonably harmonious synthesis is probably either unrepresentative or only short-lived.  Baby may well have been out of college by the time "the sixties" really kicked off, with Jane Fonda's trip to Hanoi, the Weathermen terrorists, the Manson family, the PLO, the Black Panthers and the rest took centre stage. 

Sunday Miscellany

I tried to buy an air conditioning unit yesterday - apparently London is all sold out.  For the first time, I'm finding it physically painful to move around in the open air between 10am and 4pm and the tube is sheer hell. 

I took a trip out of town yesterday to Mortlake - which sounds like a geographical feature from a Harry Potter novel - to see the Jesuit church of Saint Mary Magdelene.  Sir Richard Burton and his wife Isabel are at rest in the graveyard, in a cement replica of a bedouin tent.  There's even a little window up a ladder that you can climb so as to peer inside the tomb, with the coffins, some devotional pictures and various Catholic objects on display. 

Meanwhile, the night of the politically-dead continues in London, with Jack Straw among a number of Labour figures dissenting from his support of the US position

Mr Straw, demoted to Commons Leader by Mr Blair, sent out by far the strongest condemnation of Israel. In a statement to Muslim leaders in his Blackburn constituency this weekend, he said: "Disproportionate action only escalates an already dangerous situation.

All very depressing.  Well, at least Superman is back...

Back from the dead

After declaring that I was tired and that the end of the Black Line had arrived, I have been concentrating on getting published on paper instead, with some interesting and gratifying results. 

However, I still want an archive and I need a homepage.  Also, although the discipline of deadlines and word counts and adapting your style to different publications is very useful, I still think that good blogs, with sources available through a weblink is the most completely transparent and inherently honest form of writing.