The Glidd of Glood Blog

Give me a double helping of Fat Tax

A wringing of hands on Newsnight a couple of days ago, as projections are released that show that Britain will be bankrupt by 2040. That’s pretty grim news, but it’s not like being diagnosed with terminal cancer, although all the commentators seemed to think it was. You have to get a grip. Plenty of the workforce of 2040 haven’t even been born yet, so imagining that they won’t be able to do something about the economy looks to me like defeatist rubbish.

It is sad, if not pathetic, that Britain’s leaders have no vision for the future apart from cutting costs. There was much talk of how everyone’s lives are going to be less comfortable in the future. Nigel Lawson (as if we’d be interested in hearing what the ex-flabby chancellor had to say) spoke airily of increasing the retirement age to 70, now that we are all going to live so much longer. Someone ought to tell Nigel that only politicians and journalists are still employable at 70. Try to get a job these days if you are coming up to 50 and you’ll find your CV is quickly filed vertically in the bin. So that really amounts to the government paying more unemployment benefit and less pension. I wonder where the cost saving is in that.

You could, of course, think to yourself that if the country set out to have the best education in the world, fostered entrepreneurship and created the infrastructure that the working population requires, got behind the green economy and stopped exporting all jobs to China and other far away places, the future might look very different. But bean counters always prefer the cost-cutting option because it requires no imagination or creativity. It comes as no surprise that the imagination of professional politicians, who have never done anything much apart from swim in paper, seems stretched if asked to do anything more than create a fatuous soundbite.

There was much lamenting the fact that Britain wouldn’t be able to afford the National Health Service and you can see where this one is heading. Parroting the worn-out mantra that privatisation is the saviour of all aspects of government service, politicians are slowly thinking of dismantling the thing, bit by bit, doctor by doctor. In a decade or two’s time we will be told that it just isn’t possible to maintain it and it will be replaced by some private health insurance scheme.

Governments only have one source of revenue and that’s tax, so if they are strapped for cash, there is only one place to look for it. Recent talk has centred around a possible mansion tax on the buildings of the wealthy, but frankly, that ain’t gonna change the ball game.

I have a much better idea.

If Britain is becoming increasingly obese, and the BBC says that 61% of adults and 31% of children are overweight, then the health costs engendered by fat are rising. Indeed the Beeb quotes “experts” (ah, the famous experts) who think that in 10 to 15 years, 75% of the population will suffer health problems from being overweight.

We could just roll over (ho! ho!) and let it happen, or the government could do something about it. So far, their action has amounted to telling us to eat a balanced diet and getting Jamie Oliver to try and change a few school menus. Result: diddly squat. If the problem is increasing, then their “action” must be having no effect. After all, anyone who has seriously tried to do something about their weight sees results in a few weeks, so you have to think that the nation isn’t collectively doing anything at all about its.

Let me then add my voice to the other two people who are arguing for a fat tax. The idea is laughably simple: put a tax on processed, non-healthy foods. Use the proceeds to fund the NHS. You can’t lose. If it has no effect on behaviour (unlikely) then all the people stuffing their faces with pies, cakes, biscuits, chocolate bars, crisps and Fanta will finance the treatment of the future problems that their over-eating will cause. If they change their behaviour and become thin through avoiding all the heart-clogging goodies, the government may have less of a contribution to the Health Service but will have a lot fewer patients to treat. How can this not be a good plan?

There are those who see this sort of thing as the thin end of the wedge (of pizza). Why should the government meddle in your daily life and influence what you eat? This is a facile piece of non-reasoning. The government already makes it compulsory for you to wear seatbelts and crash helmets for your own good because otherwise you’d be so stupid as not to do so. Alcohol and cigarettes, neither of which do your health any real favours, are taxed. Drugs like weed, speed, ecstasy and cocaine are banned because of the harm they are deemed to cause you.

But drug taking is small beer compared to cakes, it now appears, when it comes to the nation’s health.

You might get the impression that I don’t like cakes, biscuits and crisps. You’d be wrong, though I hardly ever buy any. There are entire supermarket aisles that I just don’t ever visit. I don’t buy them because I know that if I did, I’d get fat, and I’d sooner be a thinnish and marginally frustrated non-cake-eater than a bloated biscuit nibbler.

Whilst I was about it, I’d tax ready meals too, since then the unsatisfying and salt-laden concoctions would become even more exorbitant with the result that the nation might even start cooking again. “Oh I don’t have the time,” people wail. Not strictly true that, is it? People have the time to Twitter incessantly and be on Facebook for hours, but not to chop up an onion. Whereas, if you did chop up a couple of onions and do a wee bit of cooking, you could invite a few Facebook friends around to eat it with you and have a real conversation without saying “lol” once. Hell, you could even laugh and joke without having to type ;)

Maybe the government could go one further and actually subsidise locally grown fresh produce, though it has to be said that parsnips, carrots and cabbages (and onions) don’t actually break the bank.  It can’t be a problem of cash anyway. The reason people are fat is that they can afford to be fat. Calories are now cheap. Never have people spent so small a proportion of their income on food and they are still ballooning up.

People also like to indulge the fantasy that their size isn’t their fault. It’s glands, it’s a compensation for being miserable, it’s the pernicious advertising. It would be interesting to see how these excuses would stack up in a world where Coke cost £4 a litre (like beer).

There have been mutterings about a “Fat Tax” but if you call it that, it won’t ever happen. Fat people have a tough time as it is, they say (all 20 million of them) without taxing them into the bargain. So call it the Health Service Levy. But for God’s sake stop wringing your blubbery mitts and actually do something.

I leave you with Ricky Gervais saying what needs to be said.

  

Patient in drug bill shock

When I started this sporadic blog, people said I should do so because I was always ranting about things and they thought, I suppose, that this would be a better place for me to do it so that they wouldn’t have to listen to my criticisms. I don’t think there have been that many rants here, but then I always thought the accusations of my supposed ranting somewhat exaggerated.

That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any at all though, so here is one.

Last week, I had a very run of the mill operation on my left knee. Just a cartilage clean-up, a bit of keyhole surgery that the surgeon has performed well over a thousand times in his career. As far as I can tell, it seems to have gone swimmingly.

Before leaving hospital, I was given a prescription for a cocktail of drugs that I am to take for a week or so to ensure that everything heals up properly. These are:

• a painkiller, that I’m not taking because there is no real pain to speak of
• an analgesic that is supposed to reduce swelling
• a drug to combat the nefarious effects on my stomach of the analgesic
• an anticoagulant that ensures that I won’t develop a thrombosis in my leg as a result of the operation

I imagined that this little lot would amount to about CHF 50, say £30. Imagine my delight when I was presented with a bill for CHF 340 - that’s £240.

The breakdown of the bill is interesting:

• 2 boxes of Dafalgan painkillers, which I haven’t even opened, are a miserable CHF 3 a box: CHF 6
• 10 tablets of a generic Ponstan replacement, made by Sandoz all the same, are also CHF 6
• A tub of 50 Omezol gastric-secretion inhibitors are CHF 27 – most of which will get returned to the pharmacy
• 30 tablets of Xarelto anticoagulants (of which I actually only need to take 15) are a whopping CHF 300. That’s £208! £7 a tiny tablet.

I am wondering whether I couldn’t have just taken aspirin to replace the Xarelto. Having no knowledge of, or interest in, drugs, I imagine the answer is no, but I’ll ask my surgeon next week nonetheless.

I shall be intrigued to know just what is in the Xarelto wonder-drug, which as far as I can see, is only supposed to make my blood thinner, rather than cure cancer or AIDS. Right at the moment, until I am the wiser, this is looking like a typical pharma stitch-up. 200 quid is still a sizeable amount of cash and you can buy any amount of interesting things with it. Ending up with a small white cardboard box, half the contents of which are of no use to me, is just faintly irritating.

Naturally, I’m not really going to end up paying for much of this; my insurance company is. But this is beside the point. I have to cough up CHF 360 a month, every month, for my compulsory health insurance premiums. The insurance company is a private company that of course seeks to make a profit, and in the current economic zeitgeist, an increasing profit, every year. So you can be certain that whatever it is shelling out to the pharma companies in exchange for overpriced drugs is being passed on to us, the insured. At the end of the day, the multibillion £ or franc profits of the pharma companies are being generated by us, the ageing population.

I appreciate the old adage that pharma requires huge amounts of time and investment in blind alleys that produce nothing, in return for every single successful drug that produces a profit. And I’m not against companies making money. Maybe I am being unfair to Bayer, the makers of Xarelto. After all, last year they only turned over €36.5bn and produced a miserable €2.5bn of profit, 6.8%. Hardly enough to set the stock market alight.

But still, 200 quid for a couple of pills? Thank God I only need to have thin blood for two weeks.

 

 

Easter Bunny comes early to Switzerland

Got to the checkout of my local Coop today and the Easter rabbits were already out in force. Switzerland prefers Easter rabbits to Easter eggs; don’t ask me why. It is all the more mysterious that the rabbits are made by Lindt, the Swiss chocolate maker, half the time yet Switzerland doesn’t actually have any wild rabbits. It’s a Swiss mystery. The rabbits could hop over from France, but they don’t. Maybe they aren’t Easter rabbits at all, but Easter hares. You can occasionally see hares in Switzerland.

It is about -10°C today with a wicked east wind. We are also in mid February and there is plenty of winter to get through yet. We could be in for some more snow soon; in fact you’d have to think that bearing in mind the time of year and the Arctic temperatures, it would be highly unlikely for there not to be some more snow this winter – perhaps even lots of it. I welcome this, as I like a proper cold winter in which you can do wintry things like huddling around log fires (I almost said “roaring” log fires but sidestepped the worst of the cliché at the last moment), skiing and drinking mulled wine.

So what’s with the early Easter bunny arrival? Easter is on April 8^th, in other words two months away. It begs all sorts of questions.

The first of these is, why are we always accelerating into the future instead of just enjoying the present? Why do we have to be fixated on spring, when we are very much in the depths of winter? It just seems redolent of constant unhappiness, a lack of satisfaction with the status quo, no matter what it is. There you are, enjoying your summer holiday and still having barbecues out in the garden when the shops get filled up with ghouls and pumpkins to prepare you for Halloween. You’ve barely digested your pumpkin and are still poking around in the forest looking for mushrooms when you are almost submerged by Christmas decorations and aggressed by perfume adverts. The tree is scarcely down when it’s all Easter rabbits.

This suggests a total lack of imagination on the part of retailers, if they can only orient their wares around pseudo religious festivals. But wait a moment. Retailers only ever do anything to make more money, so if there are lots of Easter rabbit displays two months early, then people must be buying them. You can understand that people might be persuaded to do their Christmas shopping early, not that I’ve ever met anyone who was, but surely people don’t buy their Easter eggs – or bunnies – two months in advance? Chocolate is still reasonably perishable; it’s not going to get any better in two months and it might melt. You suspect then, that the bunnies are for immediate consumption and that by beginning early, the retailers will sell lots of them in the run-up to Easter and then another heap for Easter itself. It’s the only scenario that makes any sense.

So who are the consumers of Easter bunnies, when you have entire isles groaning (another good cliché that) with bars of chocolate? There is no shortage of chocolate in this country, unsurprisingly. I can’t say that I have noticed that the chocolate in an Easter bunny tastes especially different from chocolate you can find in a chocolate bar. So you then have to think that the simple fact of pouring the chocolate into a bunny mould and covering it in gold foil does wonders for sales. It must do. Maybe this is why the Swiss don’t do Easter eggs. Perhaps the egg just doesn’t have the non-seasonal appeal of the rabbit. I find this a little strange. It always seems a bit sadistic to attack your Easter bunny, whereas who cares about an Easter egg? It’s not as if a chick was going to hatch out if it anyway.

Old joke but I still think it's hilarious.

Apple - the elephant in the room

Apple released its latest quarterly earnings report last week, which has proved to be fascinating and quite frightening reading. That’s Apple the computer-maker, right? Well not really. It is now Apple the phone-maker.

Stick the numbers in Excel, and out pops the information that in the last quarter, Apple sold 37 million iPhones generating a healthy $24bn. Yup, that’s $24bn in the last 12 weeks, or a turnover of a couple of billion dollars a week. Just in phones. In fact, iPhones made up 53% of Apple’s turnover in the last quarter, whereas Macs were a paltry 14%. So that is now 86% of Apple’s business which is not actually in what you normally think of as computers. Even the iPad contributed to 20% of the turnover, and that hadn’t even been invented a couple of years ago. To produce $9bn in three months with a product that wasn’t even available a short time ago is little short of staggering.

Add all this stuff together and Apple managed to produce a turnover of a little over $46bn (the “little” still being $333 million, just to maintain some perspective). But even better than this, they produced a net profit of $13bn. Let’s pause to consider that figure for a moment. It means that Apple is now $13bn richer than it was 3 months ago. The fact that it now sells more phones and iPads than computers doesn’t seem to be doing it any harm from any angle: gross margin has actually increased from 38.5% a year ago to 44.7%. So you’d have to think that phones and iPads make bigger margins than computers.

These would just be numbers (I suppose they are just numbers) were it not for a few interesting considerations. The first of these is that despite this gargantuan wealth and success, Apple isn’t planning, to the best of my knowledge, to hand any of it over to its shareholders in the form of a dividend. Apple has never paid one. It sits like an ogre in a cave, gloating over its treasure. What really, is the point of securing another $13bn? I suppose conservatively, Apple will amass a further $40bn over the next 12 months. What do you suppose it is going to do with it? The Apple slogan used to be “Knowledge is power”. I’m inclined to think that the unspoken slogan now is “Obscene wealth is power”. After a while, isn’t it all just a bit meaningless?

The second interesting consideration is that gross margin. At 44%, it compares somewhat favourably with the 7%-8% retail margin that Apple accords those selling its products. That’s right; when you show up and hand over $500 for an iPad after half an hour’s discussion with a knowledgeable sales person, the shop will keep about $35. It’s barely worth them talking to you. And the worst of it is, that you will go back and hassle them again, because there will be some area of your Mac, or your iPhone, or your iPad that you don’t understand and you will need a bit of professional guidance. They will try and tell you what you want to know and won’t charge you for the information in the interests of good customer relations. The shop can’t afford to hire morons, because low-IQ people would not make good employees, given the complications of the technology, so it finds itself paying competent people substandard wages for the greater glory of Apple. The shop can’t afford to pay their staff any more, Apple having given them a very small piece of their pie.

Retailers would be better off selling plates, or jeans or something less complicated where you could get cheaper less intelligent staff and still make a living margin. But Apple doesn’t really care what happens to its old retailers. For a start, the phones are sold by any electronic goods box-moving company, or by one of the phone operators. The iPads can be sold by supermarkets. Even the Macs can be sold by supermarkets. And hey, if some consumers really need some technological guidance, then Apple just opens an AppleStore and sends whatever retailers it had in the area to the wall. 

Then you also have to wonder how much Apple is paying the people who actually make their machines – mainly in China (of course). After all, if your gross margin as a manufacturer is 44%, you must be putting some serious pressure on your suppliers. And if you are selling 30 million units in 3 months, then you’d have to think that you’d have plenty of pressure to wield. If Apple doesn’t want any of its resellers to make a decent return, why would you think it would feel differently about its suppliers?

 Why even talk about Apple at all? Probably because it has always cultivated a cosy, cuddly, anti-establishment image. Remember that iconic ad that launched the Mac? Well the truth is that Apple now is Big Brother. It’s a corporate behemoth and it acts like a corporate behemoth. It uses its weight to impose itself in whatever business transaction it undertakes. It’s an amazing marketing success story – you can’t help admiring it – and the shares still seem hugely undervalued. But friendly, Apple is not. Maybe this is why the smiling Mac face logos have all disappeared from their systems and the systems are now all called after big cats: panthers, leopards, tigers, lions : killers all.

 

 

Moore's law could apply to alternative energy

In computing, Moore’s law states that the cost of computer hardware decreases every year at an exponential rate, with consequent rises in computing power. In 1990, when I was in the Macintosh business, we sold pallets of 20Mb external hard disks, a size which doesn’t even qualify as a joke now and is perfectly useless. These days, it is quite normal to have an external hard disk of 1 terabyte at home – that’s about 50’000 times bigger, and it will probably cost you much the same as the weedy disk of 1990.

This in itself is not news. We all take for granted now the manipulation of huge files, videos and the like over the web which would have been the stuff of science fiction 20 years ago, not to mention the way microprocessors have entered into every facet of our lives. But equally, this is not magic. The only way that this progress continues is due to the amount of human brainpower which is invested in ensuring that it does. If investment in R&D came to a halt, so would progress, and even if it fell considerably, then Moore’s curve would start to tail off.

 

It is interesting to speculate on what the alternative energy industry would look like if there were a similar amount of global investment in R&D. As the world looks at Japan with its fingers crossed and prayer mats and hassocks out, there is a nuclear chill spreading over the globe. You cannot really plan for a Black Swan event. Nuclear energy generation is a risky thing. You can plan for a disaster, but you can’t plan for every disaster and it is the nature of the world that sooner or later, an unplanned for disaster will occur 

It was pointed out to us in 1989 in our MBA class by a power-generation expert that the world had two choices. One was to continue to use fossil fuels to create electricity with the inevitable consequence of global warming and global disaster. The other was to rely on nuclear energy with the problem of radioactive waste and possible disaster. The rock and the hard place. Given that stark choice, you would probably take the nuclear lottery ticket, which is what many countries have done. But what of wind, wave and solar?

I know little or nothing about these industries. I have never seen a decent report that shows how much energy you need to invest in a solar plant or a wind turbine to manufacture it and when, if ever, you get it back with interest. Do they curl up and die before they become energy positive? There are definite advances in the technology which is making them better and better. But what sort of advances in the technology would we already have had the world’s governments believed in them from the off?

It is highly doubtful that anyone saw the direct route to the smartphone in 1990. It could be imagined, but the technology to make it just hadn’t been invented. Is there anything stopping us imagining solar panels that are thousands of times more efficient in 20 years time than anything we can produce today? Surely though, this is just a question of mental effort and commitment.

Maybe the one positive thing to come out of the Japanese disaster is that the people in positions of power will start to ask themselves these questions and act on the answers that seem to naturally propose themselves.

 

How to win on the lottery and be miserable

I won CHF 15 on the Euromillions lottery on Friday. It would be lying to say that this made my day, but I was nonetheless quite pleased. After all, this means that I can now participate in the next five draws for free, as I only ever bet the minimum amount, CHF 3. Like any well-adjusted lottery participant, I hold out no chance whatsoever of winning, so it is consequently little disappointment when I don’t. But “you have to be in it to win it”, hence my paltry participation. I don’t do it every week either; it’s a random occurrence. If I were relying on Euromillions to make me happy, I’d be pretty much destined to be miserable.

But yesterday, I consulted the web to see whether I had won anything at all with my one correct number and two stars and I found this and couldn’t suppress a brief moment of ironic hilarity:

 

Nobody managed to take the €75 million jackpot, but consider the fortunes of those who came close. It must have been galling to be one of the 12 people who managed to get all the numbers right but only managed one of the two stars. Instead of the €75 million, they each scraped in €400’000. Not bad, you might say, and I wouldn’t sneeze at it, but it’s not really a life-changing amount. You might pay off the mortgage, or buy a fairly crappy flat outright, but it won’t see you to a life of endless cruise ships and multiple properties around the world. So I can imagine the attitude of those 12 people to be closer to gall than real joy.

 

But consider the feelings of the 40 poor blighters who found 4 of the 5 numbers and both the stars. They guessed 6 out of the 7 bouncing balls correctly and what did they win? A mere €5’400 – the amount of a luxury holiday. It wouldn’t even make much of a dent in a student loan. Yet this was a better effort than 2.84 million other winning tickets before you even start to think of the probable 10 million tickets that didn’t win anything. What are your chances of doing that again?

 

You have to imagine that the overriding feeling experienced by those 40 people is today one of bitter disappointment and regret. Do you suppose that they have even owned up to it in the office for the amusement of all? Not so much €5’400 richer than €75 million poorer and a sneaking feeling that they will never win the lottery. Ever.

 

Whereas, of course, I have already bought my ticket for this week’s draw – over €100 million now. Can’t wait. Naturally, if I win, I won’t tell you. The last thing I need is an in-box full of begging emails.

 

It can be an idle amusement to think what you would do with a lottery win, but here it is more amusing to think what the authorities would do with the tax on it. In Switzerland, 30% of it would disappear in tax immediately. Of this, about 40% goes to my commune, or village with its massive total of 200 inhabitants. So let’s see now, that makes a lottery windfall for the village of about CHF 16 million. That’s got to be worth a statue of me, or at least a dedicated fountain. After all, we already have a log cabin for private parties and have invested in the new local sewage works. What else could we possibly need?

 

Many routes to the top of the status tree

I have been reading a book about body language – The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan & Barbara Pease. It’s probably about time, as the book informs me that some 70% of what we communicate is through body language and not verbal language. Thus it appears that I have spent the last 50 years to a large extent wasting my breath. I suspected as much. 

One of the things that the book frequently stresses is how certain gestures are related to status and that similarly, if you want to reduce your status, all you have to do is consistently make the wrong ones. The theme is so prevalent, that it started me thinking about status, what it is and the role it plays.

Desmond Morris’ The Human Zoo and The Naked Ape spend quite a lot of time examining the same questions and inform us that man is essentially just a more developed ape and consequently a hierarchical social animal. This means that power games and the establishment of status are ineluctable concerns and that you ignore them to your greater discomfort. Higher status generally means a more comfortable and fulfilling life and it is of paramount importance in the mating game. More status will get you more interesting jobs with higher pay at work, more comfortable living conditions, more space, more love, more invitations and more friends. Some people seem to understand this intrinsically and make their lives a quest for increasing status. I suspect, however, that they fail to understand the full gamut of the different manifestations of status. I make no claims to have discovered this, but I think I can identify some of the more prevalent forms:

 

Status of achievement

Society accords status to those who seem to have achieved something in life. It little matters what this is. You could have been head prefect at school, represented your country at swimming, developed a computer programme, written a book, founded a company, saved an endangered species or created a fashion collection. Simply put, it is anything that you can put on a CV that is manifestly your achievement and pretty much only your achievement. The more achievements you have, the better and the higher your status. This is a form of status that is very much in vogue in the western democracies, as meritocratic societies are supposed to form a nursery for achievement. The corollary to this is that failure to demonstrate achievement will damage your status; people will wonder what you have been doing with your time or suspect you of just being incapable.

 

Status of capability

We look up to those with aptitudes and skills, especially if those skills are things which are commonly desired. Someone who lives a humdrum life with a short CV but is a talented musician, or a gifted surfer, or knows how to renovate his entire house, will still have status, and this may be considerable within the tribe in which he can demonstrate his or her skill. Indeed, it is advantageous for such a person to spend most of their time with the tribe in which the skill is esteemed. But in society in general, we look up to those who know how to do things, whether it be those who can master the intricacies of the iPhone, or those who speak five languages fluently.

 

A Patek Phiippe. You can be statusful without owning one, but if you do, you'll probably have at least a little.

 Status of ownership

This is often a derided form of status and many are those who consider it utterly superficial, but ownership is still a powerful vector of standing in the community. If you live in a small bungalow on a main road, you are unlikely to enjoy the status of the owner of a detached mansion in Kensington, no matter how marvellous a person you really are, and no matter what your reasons are for choosing this abode. You are unlikely to find a top model to take to dinner if she knows that you generally drive a 20 year old Ford Fiesta. You will have much more chance if she knows that you will pick her up in a Maserati, no matter how much damage you are doing to the environment. Without going to these lengths, expensive jewels, clothes and watches all signal that you are at the top of the banana tree. It helps if these trappings of success are congruent with your achievements, rather than being bought with maxed-out credit cards, but for initial impressions at any rate people will believe the bling and revise their opinion later if necessary. This is a lot more favourable than being seen shabbily dressed in a brown polyester suit sporting an ancient £5 Casio and getting out of some old banger. You might get away with it as a Nobel prize-winning physicist, but even so, you aren’t doing yourself any favours. Naturally, people who have no achievements and no aptitudes but who are prepared to wear a fake Rolex or eat spaghetti and tinned tomatoes for months to buy themselves a pair of Jimmy Choos tend to detract from the status of ownership. In fact, marketing has promulgated the myth that the simple ownership of statusful items is in itself enough to ensure high status, but owing to the general acceptance of this untruth, luxury items have become common accoutrements of the less statusful in society, although extreme luxury is still the preserve of those at the pinnacle. You can’t really fake a luxury yacht, or a 400 acre stately home – or at least, not easily.

In business where power and its demonstration is everything (and you thought it was just about having a useful job?), people pay a lot of attention to your suit, your shoes and your watch or handbag. Woe betide you if you have the wrong ones.

 

Status of birth

There is little you can do about this. You were either born a lord or you weren’t, but if you were, then a lot of your status is assured in many countries no matter how little you achieve in life, or how poor your dress sense. If that seems unfair, that’s because it is, but then whoever said that life was fair? Of course, if you weren’t born into nobility, you can still increase your status be inviting the aristocracy round for dinner and counting them as your friends. In fact, just being friends with statusful people will increase your own status, up to a point. If David Bowie comes to your parties or you regularly go to the theatre with George Clooney, then some of their status will definitely rub off on you but you still might not get VIP invitations to film premières.

Places like Britain, France or Germany may be meritocracies, but status of birth is still a solid silver spoon to have in your mouth throughout life – class never really went away.

 

Status of beauty

It’s a good starting point, but that is pretty much all it is, unless you are young and female, in which case you might not need anything else. Being good-looking definitely gives you a head start in the status stakes. If you are female, you need to put this to good use and marry into status, if you can’t (or can’t be bothered) to achieve this for yourself. Sadly, if you are male, you have to go one of the other routes as being a good-looking cleaner still only makes you a cleaner. On the other hand, this is good news if you are short, fat and balding, unless of course, you are a short, fat and balding cleaner.

 

I was listening to Michael Caine being interviewed on the BBC World Service a couple of weeks ago and he related that when Frank Sinatra was going to parties, if his chauffeur had to drive more than 15 minutes, he would instruct him to turn around and go home. This was because, if the address was more than 15 minutes away from Sinatra’s Hollywood home, then it was clearly in such an unfashionable part of town that to be seen there might damage his status amongst the Hollywood elite. This does seem to be taking things to extremes and I have never been a fan of Sinatra anyway, but this is the perfect illustration of the relativity of status. It is after all, a purely relative concept.

 

I was once in the Philippines on holiday and arranged to have a car for a day to take me to see the famous Chocolate Hills (before any readers get excited, they are a volcanic formation, rather than being something created by Willy Wonka). This came with a guide and driver. It was a completely nondescript Toyota saloon which I would never consider owning, but people along the streets waved at us as we passed as if we were royalty. In that part of the Philippines, where entire families and their attendant menageries are transported on Honda CG125 motorbikes, just having a car at your disposal clearly marked you out as a local star.

 

I ought to reread Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety. No doubt he has said everything mentioned above much more eloquently – I really can’t remember. In summary I would say that status is important, in its wider forms and that happily, a lot of it can be achieved purely by living a meaningful and successful life. But sadly, it still helps if you are a banker rather than a nurse. Sorry about that.

 

Give a handbag this Christmas

If you’re a guy you should give your significant other a handbag for Christmas.

All too many Christmas presents contain a certain amount of self-interest. If you give someone you live with a cookbook, aren’t you at least expecting to be eating some of the recipes? If you give them perfume, then you would normally at least like the scent as you will be smelling it a lot. Sexy underwear is far more a present for the guy than the girl in many cases and is a complete minefield. As are just about any clothes for your wife or girlfriend. Most girls love high heels, but you’re bound to buy the wrong ones here too, and if they are too high or sexy, this might also be construed as a present to yourself.

A handbag, on the other hand, is a truly altruistic present, as guys derive no benefit from them at all. Your significant other might as well tote her stuff around in a Tesco bag, for all you’d notice. It is, however, all too easy to overlook the massive power exerted by the handbag on the fairer sex. You can almost think of them in terms of very expensive permanent flowers. You shouldn’t worry that she already has ten of the things. It is not possible for a girl to have too many handbags (as far as they are concerned). A new handbag says, “I love you”.

Nonetheless, you have to face up to the fact right now that you will buy the wrong handbag. This is not overly surprising, seeing as you can’t tell the difference between that and a supermarket carrier. There are just too many parameters to get wrong. Brand, colour, materials, and odd trinkets and accessories, or the lack of them, of course. Your chances of getting them all right are nil.

You could of course, let your WAG choose her own handbag, but this is still not an optimal course of action as it rather ruins the element of surprise. It also puts the onus of establishing the price on her, and this is very ungallant. Far better is to do the following:

First, find the right shop. Highly important. The shop has to be convenient to get to, as you will be going back to it with her, straight after Christmas. It also has to have a wide range of amazing handbags, so that when she returns the one you gave her, she has enough nice ones to choose from. It also has to stock the right brands. You probably won’t know what these are, so it is best to ask some other women in advance. You might take their advice for a short list of colours and designs, but this won’t stop you buying the wrong bag. Look at it this way, if you bought the right one, it would imply that you know as much or more about handbags as your WAG, and how healthy would that be? It would either imply that you aren’t a real man, or she is not a real woman. Failure to choose the right bag should thus be considered positively.

Secondly, you must make sure that the shop will be perfectly happy to change it after Christmas. You should make it plain that you will be back. Keep all receipts preciously.

Thirdly, spend enough money. The handbag, being of vital semiotic importance to a girl, will necessarily be expensive. Anything Made in China is therefore ruled out. This will save her embarrassment when she takes it back to the shop and finds that all the ones she really likes cost twice as much as the one she is returning.

You should now have purchased a woefully expensive bag by a reputable brand in a recognised and handy shop. Don’t get attached to it. Just because you chose it, doesn’t mean that it’s right. It isn’t. It’s completely wrong. But it is at least credible, and on the big day, it will say how much she means to you and how much thought you put into her present. It will also hold out the allure of future shopping to her, when she will have all the fun of going to swap it for the handbag she really wants.

You could, naturally, just get a voucher for a handbag from a suitable emporium, but that is not as fun as unwrapping a shiny new handbag, even if it is the wrong one. Handing out envelopes at Christmas just isn’t very romantic (and the value tends to be written on them).

To get into the right mindset, imagine that your sweetie is going to give you some carbon or other baubles for your motorbike. You think the idea of a carbon clutch cover, or some absurdly expensive anodised levers is absolutely wonderful. She can’t see the point at all – to her they are invisible. Were she to try to get you any, the bits wouldn’t fit your bike, or the levers would be anodised pink, or something. And that’s just wrong. But you’d appreciate the intent and then change them for the bits you really wanted.

Incidentally, if, after unwrapping her bag on Christmas day, your girlfriend or wife looks a little put out and says “You shouldn’t have. I feel uncomfortable accepting this,” it means she doesn’t love you any more, if indeed she ever did. No girl ever looks a gift handbag in the handles from someone she truly loves. Start planning divorce or an end to your relationship immediately.

 

The Body Shop rainforest is looking increasingly damp

Subsequent to my Body Shop post below, I think I need to add a bit of an update.

 

You CAN order on-line – at least in the UK, so they got that bit sorted out. They probably did years ago and I didn’t notice it, but then maybe I wasn’t on the UK site. It doesn’t make much difference as far as I am concerned though, as the missing shampoos don’t feature. I haven’t done the research, but I’m not sure you can get anything on-line that you can’t get in one of their shops (thus missing one of the great advantages of on-line shopping: endless choice).

 

I also popped into a Body Shop a few weeks ago and they sold me another shampoo. I told them I wasn’t over-impressed with Rainforest Shine – “for normal to dry hair”. Ah, said the sales assistant, I suspect you need Rainforest Balance – “for oily hair”. Fair enough then. I clearly don’t need Rainforest Moisture shampoo – “for dry or damaged hair” and I don’t need Rainforest Radiance shampoo – “for coloured hair”. And there isn’t anything else in the rainforest to wash my hair with.

 

After a fair few washes, I can report that Rainforest Balance is not doing the trick. It makes my hair feel as if it has spent a couple of days being sand-blasted by the sirocco – dry and frizzy. You know what is missing here? Rainforest Something-or-other for “bog-standard normal hair” or even “for frequent washing”. Looking at the range, there is no shampoo for normal hair which is neither dry nor particularly oily. You’d have thought that “normal hair” would be a large market segment, but it seems that no one has normal hair. We are all dry or oily.

 

The UK site has an excellent feature where you can leave a review of the shampoos (and no doubt everything else – except, it appears, the old shampoo range). So what do the people who can be bothered to leave reviews think of the new range? It doesn’t look good. Most people seem very polarised, with a lot of 1 star and 5 star reviews, but the aggregated results are as follows: Shine 67% favourable, Balance 65%, Moisture 50% and Radiance 50%. I see that amongst the top rated products on the site, Satsuma Shower Gel (might have to try this) scores 99%, with only one person out of 80 not liking it. Seems to me like a bit of a raspberry (have they ever done raspberry shampoo?) for the Rainforest. How could you possibly be happy with 50% satisfaction? And of course, most of those leaving negative comments are disappointed because they were perfectly happy with what they had before. I hope that the person responsible for the Rainforest range is tearing their hair out, because they should be. Assuming that is, that they actually read the reviews. It would be ungenerous of me to think that they didn’t.

 

So I am not crying in the wilderness, then, or if I am, I seem to be accompanied by a large amount of Body Shop shampoo customers, potentially future ex-Body Shop Shampoo customers.

 

Immigration - integration - not as simple as it looks

 
I was reading an article a few days ago about the total failure of the integration of the immigrant communities in Germany. More especially the Turks, who seem to fail miserably at education, are largely unemployed, and less than 10% of them take a German wife. The rest of them (in as much as they marry) go back to Turkey to get married to a Turk, who then joins them in Germany where they too, fail to integrate and bring up children who speak no German. All this creates social tensions and of course leads to political extremism which seems to have a fair wind at the moment in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For God’s sake, you think, why don’t they just integrate, or, if they don’t want to be there, go home? It looks pretty simple to me.

 

A friend of mine has just gone to Kuwait to teach for a couple of years. She had no desire to go to Kuwait, but there are no language teaching jobs in Scotland, such is the British interest in learning foreign languages, and there is a mortgage to be paid. So she now finds herself in a Muslim country with little to do. As far as I can make out, she has no intention of adopting the veil, of observing Ramadan, in as much as she can avoid it, of giving up bacon – although it probably isn’t available, or going teetotal – though once again she probably will have no choice. I don’t think she has any intention of shacking up with a future Muslim fiancé – though who knows what the future may bring. In short, she is an economic migrant with absolutely no intention of integrating. She will almost certainly spend her time in an ex-pat community – a sort of Western ghetto – trying to carry on as much of a Western existence as she is able. And who can blame her? I am sure I’d do the same thing.

 

So let’s play another scenario. Let’s imagine that over the next couple of years, she does integrate, converts to Islam and takes to wearing a burka and adopting Islamic customs. She finds that living on a pile of sand with shopping as the major distraction is just enchanting. Can you imagine how this would go down amongst her friends and family back in Glasgow? Did you say lead balloon?

 

I found this extremely interesting. Talk about double standards. Why is it more reasonable to expect Turks and Muslims in western countries to conform to western customs than it is for westerners in Arab countries to Islamise? Well, I know we have a better culture here, obviously. Less mumbo jumbo, more liberty of expression, thought and custom, better treatment of women blah blah. Clearly. I’m bound to think that, as it is my culture and I am comfortable with it. But supposing I was a Kuwaiti. Would I not be thinking, bloody foreigners in their Western ghettos with their drink and their pork and their low-cut tops?

 

I don’t wish to get into the relative merits of the cultures, or arrive at a definitive truth. I just thought it was interesting to realise that integration cuts both ways, and that the inhabitants of any country probably feel uncomfortable with a minority which rejects their customs and way of life. And for most people, if you go to work in a country, assuming you haven’t entered it clinging to the undercarriage of a lorry, having paid off some dodgy Mafia guy, it was because they needed you and had work for you to do. All to easy to forget the migrants working in damp fields cutting lettuces or something for a pittance as you tuck into yet another salad. It’s not that simple, this immigration thing.