I frequently get asked if I invent the episodes I relate, which I promise you I do not, but occasionally people reading this rubbish do get the wrong end of the stick. After relating the other day the story about Bob’s mock Geography common entrance paper in which he had written that the capital of Russia was Roulette, a concerned client asked me why we sent our children to such a patently hopeless academic institution. Oh dear me no.....nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the school featured in yesterdays Daily Telegraph. I quote:
Edward Tomanek, aged 7, began playing the piano aged 3 and then asked his parents, Lyudmilla, 34 , and Stuart, 46, who do not play themselves, to buy a violin. He studies on a scholarship at Kings College School in Cambridge. Practising for hours a day, he passed Grade 8 violin with a distinction aged 6, before achieving Grade 8 on the piano this year. His mother said “If he’s not playing then he’ll be composing, or get out his chemistry set. And he loves dipping into languages – old English, Latin, Greek.”
Although, according to my youngest daughter Lottie, he swears a lot, which is a slight let-down, I was bathed in a sense of reflected glory as I proudly strolled through the front gates of the school yesterday evening on my way to watch the Year 5 play in which Lottie was Peasant No.3 in Act II of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The description of her part should have alerted me, but there was disappointingly no sign of her for the first hour. However, when the interval mercifully arrived and I queued in the freezing cold outside the Art block waiting for a restorative glass of white wine and a sausage, the evening seemed to be brightening up judging by the sound of laughter as the people in front of me made their way along the corridor. The source of the amusement became horribly clear when one of Bob’s young friends standing in the queue behind me, tears practically rolling down his face, gestured me to look at the display of art on the wall. “Lottie did that one”, he managed to splutter.
“Happiness is a horse and a rich Daddy”.....You what? There was I thinking that with Hen having pretty much left the coop things were going to become a little more straightforward. Sadly not. If Lottie is misguided so was I. Talking of Hen, news from that other centre of academic excellence, Leeds, is that the course she is on is not exactly stretching her. She reported at the weekend that she was being kept busy, and late into the evening, tending to the pigs and crops on her virtual farm.
I am away next week. A hardship posting escorting a couple of clients round a series of company visits in Jakarta and Bangkok. I am embarrassed to say it will be my first trip to Indonesia since 1994 and I will also be returning to Bangkok for the first time since leaving Thailand where I lived from 1996 to 1998. And I have the cheek to call myself an Asian stock broker. Ridiculous. My comment earlier this week about never having used the MTR when I lived in HK went down quite badly with some of you, but I led a similarly spoilt existence in Thailand and one of the things I am most looking forward to is catching up with my old driver Sunna! Sad eh. Anyway, you know how I like to roll our my old trip reports. Here’s one from a visit I made to Indonesia in 1992. (Note that it took me a month between making the visit and putting pen to paper. No wonder I drove my then boss, David Brennan, mad.) It was a different world obviously. Indonesian deposit rates were 20%. Lending rates 25%. Non-performing loans at the state banks running at 20%+. And the country’s population has increased by 60 million since that visit! Interestingly enough though three of the companies I met then we will be seeing again on this trip. Nothing like keeping up to date with one’s portfolio holdings.
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