One way at looking at the Friday before Christmas 2008 is to say food, films and fast approaching seventy.
You are not just getting old, old man, you are old, old man. A favourite expression of Del Boy Trotter for his young brother Rodney in Only Fools and Horses, was what a plonker! This means inept and or stupid rather than the Australian version which I understand is someone who rides a motorcycle with a plastic petrol tank. Well I felt a right plonker this morning as on arrival at the Britannia Inn Cleadon for a pre Christmas meal, I realised that I had left a bag of fish in the back of the car overnight. Fortunately there was nothing frozen. it was fish and just as well my journey with the heater on lasted only a matter of minutes. The forgotten haul included two pairs of kipper, prawns in shell and the four packs of salmon fish cakes, plus a pack of smoked salmon. I believe this discovery was cause of this self description for when I came to leave I could not find the car keys, went to the vehicle in case i had left them in the door, not unknown, and returned puzzled to ask the staff at the Inn and Bingo, Eureka, Relief of Relief. The keys had been handed in at the bar having been taken out of the car door by the person who had parked next to the vehicle.
The incident brought back the memory when I was on my way out of Sunderland to London when I had the feeling that I had left the front door open and returned to find when I had, Or the day when as I was again setting off to London and managed to lock myself out of the house by closing the inner back door into the kitchen with the latch having put the front door on the chain and decided that the solution was to kick in the rear door as seen on countless movies and it works folks, it works, but then there is the cost of the repair so wise to try an avoid such a situation. Having a mother with severe memory loss and a first cousin with the same illness and my own memory problems from childhood this kind of forgetfulness could have created alarm, but because one has similarity symptoms does not mean one has a particular disorder, although I am a believer in enlightened self diagnosis.
The Britannia is a Victorian era Inn 1894 when Cleadon was an agricultural village between South Shields and Sunderland. In 1974, when I arrived in the area the then owners had created a children‘s delight of little houses, within the main dining area, each containing one Victorian dining room with books and paintings and a preferred choice for a special family birthday treat got young and old. Sometime in the 1980‘s i the Britannia became part of the national chain of Beefeater Inns, part of Whitbread with Brewers Fair, T G Fridays, Pizza Hut and the Premier Inns. The company ripped out the old house rooms and lost their main market. They did retain some lunchtime customers with their special deal for over sixties although the big attraction was the two main meals for £5 with a good choice and which included fish and chips. Two could dine with a starter drink and end with a coffee for £10.
Then after the new Millennium there was a major change in the ownership of this kind of pub/restaurant/accommodation service in the UK with most, if not all, the stand alone Beefeater pubs sold, mostly to Mitchells and Butlers who owned the Toby Carvery and Harvesters with some of these establishments attached to the Innkeepers accommodation. I had a meal in the Carvery attached to the Croydon Innkeepers where I stayed over the past weekend and then a Carvery Sunday lunch at the post House Steyning in West Sussex last Sunday.
The Britannia was closed for several months 2005 or was it 2006 while the main dining area was gutted once more with the car park entrance to the dinning room removed so everyone has to now enter at the front through to the bar areas and then into the dining areas recreating the atmosphere of an all year middle class dining drawing room at Christmas brightly lit, lots of real paintings and the Carvery.
Now on offer before 7 pm for £5 is the standard choice of three roasts, I had Turkey and Ham, Yorkshire pudding, with three or four of the eight seven vegetables, plus gravies and sauces. For an additional £1 there is a choice of starters or ice cream or coffee, gaining £1 on the Croydon price. I arrived just before midday and by 12.30 there were only two or three tables free, with two large parties and a range of family groups, two and threes. By 1.30 the restaurant was emptying although there were still several tables occupied when I went in search of my car keys around 2pm, including one former work colleague from two decades ago.
The trouble about this kind of meal at lunch time is that it fuels the appetite so I enjoyed a smoked mackerel for tea and two toasted bacon sandwiches for supper, plus puff pastry mince pies (2) and no exercise. Shame on you old man. You keep saying you are going to reverse such life shortening behaviour.
I caught up with the third Christmas in the title film of the 24 hour channel with earlier in the week a Christmas Card and the Christmas Visitor. All three films are being shown consecutively.
Today’s offering was another dose of Christmas syrup, the Road to Christmas, in which a photographer has the kind of journey similar to Jodi Foster in Nim’s Island during which she meets up with another widowed dad and teenage daughter, She is on her way to get married at Christmas in Aspern Colorado only to arrive early and find her fiancée in bed with another man, guess I am gay he admits, adding but I really had wanted us to work. This was fortunate as she had really taken to the widower and his daughter, and his mum.
I had not seen the Italian made with English dialogue version war film The House of Intrigue 1959 with Curt Jurgens and Dawn Adams based on ten true successful German anti spy programme Englandspiel also known as Operation North Pole. In 1942 German Counter Intelligence in Holland under Major Hermann Giskes of the Abwehr which was run by Admiral Canaris captured a wireless operator and persuade him to continuing sending messages. The operator tried everything he could to alert the Special Operations Executive in London and in film he avoids the deliberate mistake in every sentence protocol established to ensure continuing authenticity. One reports gives 54 of 59 captured agents executed in the concentration camp of Mauthausen in 1944, while the second says 47 of 54 were killed and that out of 190 drops of people and equipment, 3000 Sten guns 5000 revolvers 2000 grenades, 500000 rounds of ammunition, 75 radio transmitters and 500000 Dutch guilders were captured. In the film it was the arrest and execution of Canaris in 1944 and the appointment of his replacement Stoltenberg which led to the executions and there is evidence that Canaris was anti Nazi and anti Hitler, involved the various assassination plots, and helping individuals to escape well as knowingly passing on allied disinformation. The suggestion is that the allies were aware their communications had been compromised but continued to send agents to their subsequent deaths helping to make the German hierarchy unsure where the main invasion was to take place..
Getting back to the reality of the present I continued to be affected by Robert’s Peston’s book Who Runs Britain. In the first chapter he hammers home the argument that first under Margaret Thatcher and then under Brown Blair, the income of the poorest 20% of the population only improved by less than 1% a year but that of the top 20% commenced to rocket and with a large proportion paying little or no tax. This cannot be right?
In the second chapter he explains how Blair Brown rather than Thatcher created the economic mess in Britain as part of an US led approach. The developed commence with the creation of private equity firms whose aim is to but out whole companies using cheap borrowed money. The most recent was the acquisition of Boots for £11.1 Billion with borrowings of 10 Billion and the most famous failure was the borrowing of a similar amount in the attempt by the boss of BHS to buy Marks and Spencer’s. The aim of such buy outs is to told for a period of years, creating good annual profits with the help of Brown Blair and then sell the works for a major capital gain in a win win position. He explains that for you and me we were encouraged to go info the buying of property to rent which had risen in value three fold over the previous decade so that modest family villas in he North East had moved from £60000 to £180000. Anyone who borrowed 80000 to 85000 to buy one property worth £70000 in 1999 when banks started to offer 100% 125% mortgages to buy homes to rent out and then sold in 2005 or 2006 for £150000 would have made significant capital gains even after paying capital gains tax and even if the rental income over the period of purchase was less than the loan interest repayments.
The Peston charge against Brown Blair is that they created the situation where individuals became billionaires buy borrowing the money to buy major companies where their value was rising and the cost of borrowing falling. Moreover Peston charges Brown Blair with assisting by giving major tax breaks, incentives to Equity firm owners and managers which were not given to the individual house to rent buying investor and even when it became necessary to change this position Peston argues the reform was designed to minimise the upset. As previously explained with the general Hedge fund development the actual money used to buy the companies was borrowed from investing banks and for general investors such as local authority pension funds, trade union funds, charitable bodies and local government investment brokers and where as a condition of investing it was agreed in advance the equity firm would take 20 % of all profits so if a buy and sale made 2 billion the firm would make 400million with most of this going to the owner directors of the firm, say £350 with £50 million in bonus payments to the senior managers and other employees. As with individual buying to rent everyone was making profits,
It was not until 2007 that question commenced to be asked about the actual security of all this loaning of money without the former strings such as a proven collateral. Moreover questions were also asked about the way the load were being ”insured” in much the same way as bookmakers set off bets with other bookmakers by so called credit default swaps loan swaps. When I went to pay off one load with another I found that my original load had been taken over by another firm not knowing that banks were selling off their billion dollar loans to hedge funds, pension funds and other investment banks. In the summer of 2007 Peston reveals that the banks could find not taker for $300 to $400 billion of loans which included the Boots buy out and the merger of Saga and the AA. Those caught out included the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and Morgan Chase and where the losses are expected to run into the billions having loaned too cheaply. Until these loans are repaid and losses sorted no one is lending more money at any interest rate because everything is going clown in value rather than the previous up and up, individual properties said to have dropped by a third, blue chip company shares, and small business after small business. Those who bought in the later in what we now know was a cycle are the first to face bankruptcy including the loss of their homes if these were given as collateral for loans. And the bubble burst and those who created it were protected and the rest of us learnt that we were ones two were required to pay. And a Merry Christmas to you too.
You are not just getting old, old man, you are old, old man. A favourite expression of Del Boy Trotter for his young brother Rodney in Only Fools and Horses, was what a plonker! This means inept and or stupid rather than the Australian version which I understand is someone who rides a motorcycle with a plastic petrol tank. Well I felt a right plonker this morning as on arrival at the Britannia Inn Cleadon for a pre Christmas meal, I realised that I had left a bag of fish in the back of the car overnight. Fortunately there was nothing frozen. it was fish and just as well my journey with the heater on lasted only a matter of minutes. The forgotten haul included two pairs of kipper, prawns in shell and the four packs of salmon fish cakes, plus a pack of smoked salmon. I believe this discovery was cause of this self description for when I came to leave I could not find the car keys, went to the vehicle in case i had left them in the door, not unknown, and returned puzzled to ask the staff at the Inn and Bingo, Eureka, Relief of Relief. The keys had been handed in at the bar having been taken out of the car door by the person who had parked next to the vehicle.
The incident brought back the memory when I was on my way out of Sunderland to London when I had the feeling that I had left the front door open and returned to find when I had, Or the day when as I was again setting off to London and managed to lock myself out of the house by closing the inner back door into the kitchen with the latch having put the front door on the chain and decided that the solution was to kick in the rear door as seen on countless movies and it works folks, it works, but then there is the cost of the repair so wise to try an avoid such a situation. Having a mother with severe memory loss and a first cousin with the same illness and my own memory problems from childhood this kind of forgetfulness could have created alarm, but because one has similarity symptoms does not mean one has a particular disorder, although I am a believer in enlightened self diagnosis.
The Britannia is a Victorian era Inn 1894 when Cleadon was an agricultural village between South Shields and Sunderland. In 1974, when I arrived in the area the then owners had created a children‘s delight of little houses, within the main dining area, each containing one Victorian dining room with books and paintings and a preferred choice for a special family birthday treat got young and old. Sometime in the 1980‘s i the Britannia became part of the national chain of Beefeater Inns, part of Whitbread with Brewers Fair, T G Fridays, Pizza Hut and the Premier Inns. The company ripped out the old house rooms and lost their main market. They did retain some lunchtime customers with their special deal for over sixties although the big attraction was the two main meals for £5 with a good choice and which included fish and chips. Two could dine with a starter drink and end with a coffee for £10.
Then after the new Millennium there was a major change in the ownership of this kind of pub/restaurant/accommodation service in the UK with most, if not all, the stand alone Beefeater pubs sold, mostly to Mitchells and Butlers who owned the Toby Carvery and Harvesters with some of these establishments attached to the Innkeepers accommodation. I had a meal in the Carvery attached to the Croydon Innkeepers where I stayed over the past weekend and then a Carvery Sunday lunch at the post House Steyning in West Sussex last Sunday.
The Britannia was closed for several months 2005 or was it 2006 while the main dining area was gutted once more with the car park entrance to the dinning room removed so everyone has to now enter at the front through to the bar areas and then into the dining areas recreating the atmosphere of an all year middle class dining drawing room at Christmas brightly lit, lots of real paintings and the Carvery.
Now on offer before 7 pm for £5 is the standard choice of three roasts, I had Turkey and Ham, Yorkshire pudding, with three or four of the eight seven vegetables, plus gravies and sauces. For an additional £1 there is a choice of starters or ice cream or coffee, gaining £1 on the Croydon price. I arrived just before midday and by 12.30 there were only two or three tables free, with two large parties and a range of family groups, two and threes. By 1.30 the restaurant was emptying although there were still several tables occupied when I went in search of my car keys around 2pm, including one former work colleague from two decades ago.
The trouble about this kind of meal at lunch time is that it fuels the appetite so I enjoyed a smoked mackerel for tea and two toasted bacon sandwiches for supper, plus puff pastry mince pies (2) and no exercise. Shame on you old man. You keep saying you are going to reverse such life shortening behaviour.
I caught up with the third Christmas in the title film of the 24 hour channel with earlier in the week a Christmas Card and the Christmas Visitor. All three films are being shown consecutively.
Today’s offering was another dose of Christmas syrup, the Road to Christmas, in which a photographer has the kind of journey similar to Jodi Foster in Nim’s Island during which she meets up with another widowed dad and teenage daughter, She is on her way to get married at Christmas in Aspern Colorado only to arrive early and find her fiancée in bed with another man, guess I am gay he admits, adding but I really had wanted us to work. This was fortunate as she had really taken to the widower and his daughter, and his mum.
I had not seen the Italian made with English dialogue version war film The House of Intrigue 1959 with Curt Jurgens and Dawn Adams based on ten true successful German anti spy programme Englandspiel also known as Operation North Pole. In 1942 German Counter Intelligence in Holland under Major Hermann Giskes of the Abwehr which was run by Admiral Canaris captured a wireless operator and persuade him to continuing sending messages. The operator tried everything he could to alert the Special Operations Executive in London and in film he avoids the deliberate mistake in every sentence protocol established to ensure continuing authenticity. One reports gives 54 of 59 captured agents executed in the concentration camp of Mauthausen in 1944, while the second says 47 of 54 were killed and that out of 190 drops of people and equipment, 3000 Sten guns 5000 revolvers 2000 grenades, 500000 rounds of ammunition, 75 radio transmitters and 500000 Dutch guilders were captured. In the film it was the arrest and execution of Canaris in 1944 and the appointment of his replacement Stoltenberg which led to the executions and there is evidence that Canaris was anti Nazi and anti Hitler, involved the various assassination plots, and helping individuals to escape well as knowingly passing on allied disinformation. The suggestion is that the allies were aware their communications had been compromised but continued to send agents to their subsequent deaths helping to make the German hierarchy unsure where the main invasion was to take place..
Getting back to the reality of the present I continued to be affected by Robert’s Peston’s book Who Runs Britain. In the first chapter he hammers home the argument that first under Margaret Thatcher and then under Brown Blair, the income of the poorest 20% of the population only improved by less than 1% a year but that of the top 20% commenced to rocket and with a large proportion paying little or no tax. This cannot be right?
In the second chapter he explains how Blair Brown rather than Thatcher created the economic mess in Britain as part of an US led approach. The developed commence with the creation of private equity firms whose aim is to but out whole companies using cheap borrowed money. The most recent was the acquisition of Boots for £11.1 Billion with borrowings of 10 Billion and the most famous failure was the borrowing of a similar amount in the attempt by the boss of BHS to buy Marks and Spencer’s. The aim of such buy outs is to told for a period of years, creating good annual profits with the help of Brown Blair and then sell the works for a major capital gain in a win win position. He explains that for you and me we were encouraged to go info the buying of property to rent which had risen in value three fold over the previous decade so that modest family villas in he North East had moved from £60000 to £180000. Anyone who borrowed 80000 to 85000 to buy one property worth £70000 in 1999 when banks started to offer 100% 125% mortgages to buy homes to rent out and then sold in 2005 or 2006 for £150000 would have made significant capital gains even after paying capital gains tax and even if the rental income over the period of purchase was less than the loan interest repayments.
The Peston charge against Brown Blair is that they created the situation where individuals became billionaires buy borrowing the money to buy major companies where their value was rising and the cost of borrowing falling. Moreover Peston charges Brown Blair with assisting by giving major tax breaks, incentives to Equity firm owners and managers which were not given to the individual house to rent buying investor and even when it became necessary to change this position Peston argues the reform was designed to minimise the upset. As previously explained with the general Hedge fund development the actual money used to buy the companies was borrowed from investing banks and for general investors such as local authority pension funds, trade union funds, charitable bodies and local government investment brokers and where as a condition of investing it was agreed in advance the equity firm would take 20 % of all profits so if a buy and sale made 2 billion the firm would make 400million with most of this going to the owner directors of the firm, say £350 with £50 million in bonus payments to the senior managers and other employees. As with individual buying to rent everyone was making profits,
It was not until 2007 that question commenced to be asked about the actual security of all this loaning of money without the former strings such as a proven collateral. Moreover questions were also asked about the way the load were being ”insured” in much the same way as bookmakers set off bets with other bookmakers by so called credit default swaps loan swaps. When I went to pay off one load with another I found that my original load had been taken over by another firm not knowing that banks were selling off their billion dollar loans to hedge funds, pension funds and other investment banks. In the summer of 2007 Peston reveals that the banks could find not taker for $300 to $400 billion of loans which included the Boots buy out and the merger of Saga and the AA. Those caught out included the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and Morgan Chase and where the losses are expected to run into the billions having loaned too cheaply. Until these loans are repaid and losses sorted no one is lending more money at any interest rate because everything is going clown in value rather than the previous up and up, individual properties said to have dropped by a third, blue chip company shares, and small business after small business. Those who bought in the later in what we now know was a cycle are the first to face bankruptcy including the loss of their homes if these were given as collateral for loans. And the bubble burst and those who created it were protected and the rest of us learnt that we were ones two were required to pay. And a Merry Christmas to you too.
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