So much to write about so little time. My birthday. Forty eight years young and gifts included a pair of high wedges which makes me look about six foot. I'm not sure if this is a good look or not but at least I 'm taller than Tom now who without them is taller than me (but only by an inch..or two). And Tom passed his common entrance with flying colours but I'm starting to sound like one of those painful round robin Christmas letters so I will stop there.
Last week, I went to Mauritius. It was pouring it down in the UK and I got the commission and so I went and Tom went sky diving from 10,000 feet, seeing the island from a whole new perspective. Knowing my son is jumping from a plane is far more nerve wrecking than doing it myself, which I have. He absolutely loved it. I recommend it to anyone who wants to sky dive. Skydive Austral are brilliant. And we swam in the Indian Ocean and went out on a catamaran with lots of very enthusiastic Chinese who shouted every time they saw a dolphin, which was a lot. The island is beautiful, incredibly lush but only 3 1/2 % indigenous vegetation so some of the areas we four wheel drived round looked like a wild version of Richmond park complete with deer.
One of the journalists who went on the trip played golf and lost 24 balls. He's a sports editor but that ball sport is not his game but he was fascinating to listen to with his inside stories, none of which are publishable because 'they can't be proven'.
And lastly attended an event launching the online newspaper The Steeple Times, written by Matthew Steeples, who has ruffled a lot of feathers already because he writes the truth. God forbid anyone should do that, but I assured him he should continue. After all when the Prime Minister talks of transparency, it's official to be online about the off the record stuff. Held at Blakes Hotel which has wonderfully decadent bedrooms I am sure for wonderfully decadent clientele, it was very dark in the black, mirror and chrome basement, reminded me of a bachelor's pad, the sort of thing Spencer from Made In Chelsea would aspire to.
I talked to a journalist who worked for CBS who told me incredible stories he should put into a book but said he never will. He was at the Berlin Wall when it went down (OK so were a lot of others but I was still impressed), and there when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead and at a host of other events. He told me those stories, I told him the time I found one of the first families to escape Kuwait when it was annexed.
It was also there I met a commodities trader called Haymer, although I doubt thats how it's spelt. We talked of banks and conspiracy theories. He thinks JFK were killed by the mafia. I think Diana was killed but don't know who did it. He feels the banks should have been allowed to crash in 2008, although that's easy to say now. Especially if you work in the financial sector as you've made your money and got ours and can be all knowing because you've hidden it in some off shore fund no one can touch or find. He also mentioned that it will only get worse and the banks should be allowed to crash now rather than later. (I think he's put a bet on that one.). And that the RBS technical hiccup (their computer says nooooo....) is because they are bankrupt and they are hiding something. I don't have a clue what they're hiding.
"Greece will be out of the euro." he predicts, "All the wealthy Greeks have taken their money out of Greece, will wait till the country crashes and will go in again and buy up everything. The same thing will start to happen in the UK. Those who can will take their money out and the working class and the middle classes who have a loyalty to their bank and a mortgage to pay will be the poor bastards who suffer." I got the feeling I was the only 'poor bastard' in that room.
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