Friday 26th October, 2012

Frustrating week for me because as you will no doubt be aware the CIMB Classic began yesterday in Kuala Lumpur and the likes of Tiger Woods and my fellow Scot, Martin Laird, must be fancying their chances of scooping the US$1.3 million first prize in my absence. I asked one of you to provide me with the excuse to get out there but you let me down. Thanks a lot. Talking of golf Bob was 15 yesterday and part of his day was spent over nine holes at Royal Worlington supposedly playing golf with a friend. He didn't have much to say about his game. The fact is he would have been pre-occupied exploring the adjoining woods which harbour all sorts of interesting wildlife. I know I go on about his pursuit of furry creatures. In fact fishing is his greatest passion. I can't help him there. I totally hate the smell of fish on my hands. Now, you might have the impression of Bob as an outdoor guy, which I suppose he is, but there is a reality TV show he never misses. Not for him Hollyoaks or TOWIE. It's called Wicked Tuna. Every evening this half term we have had a running commentary over dinner on the latest developments from the fishing town of Gloucester, Massachussets. A blue finned tuna sold for $13,000 in yesterday's episode and there was an interesting scrap between the locals and some outsiders who had strayed into their waters. Oh it's exciting stuff. So I'm back from lunch - client was quite late but with an interesting excuse...."my IT guys in their wisdom decided to put the clocks on our floor back a day early"..and we had a good time reminiscing. That's another thing I've noticed as I write this weekly drivel. Besides blowing my own trumpet more than I used to I also include much more nostalgia. Sign of the times. Anyway an interesting thing happened this week. There was this guy I knew at school who was a good friend, but I hadn't seen him since we'd left. Every few years or so some random event reminds me to type his name into Google to see what he was up to. Nada. No disrespect to him. I used to be a similar non-entity. Something about Glenalmond obviously. If you searched for David Sandison you got a photographer, an accountant or a fisherman in Shetland. But then I ran the Jungfrau Marathon and suddenly I was somebody. Anyway, I spotted his name whilst re-reading my 1981 diary in bed on Wednesday evening and was prompted to have another search for him yesterday. To my surprise, my friend who, as my brother reminded me, lent my parents a pen-knife on my first day at school with which they carved notches into a coat hanger on which to hold my kilt, has re-surfaced. There he was, pictured in the Daily Mail, wearing his OG tie. It's a sad story though I'm afraid. It appears he recently drove his £70,000 Maserati through a stone wall into the harbour in Shieldaig, Ross-shire. And that's the least of it. He has just been fined £1,000 in Perth Sheriff Court for a separate incident. Tut tut.

Friday 12th October, 2012

Soroptomist ..... As you probably know I like new words and this was one I found inscribed on the plaque of a bench in Princes Street Gardens on Tuesday morning. I should add I was walking through the gardens on my way to a 'portant meeting. I was not one of the six tramps I passed horizontalising in various sheltered spots, soaking up the sun rise. I had spent the night in the Balmoral, dig me. So anyway, no conferring and Google strictly ruled out, but can anyone tell me what a soroptomist is? First one to reply with the correct answer gets a prezzie. I wasn't looking particularly for new words. Normally when I walk through Princes Street Gardens I recall a time quite a few years ago when I was marketing with a Sanford Bernstein analyst and we made a detour into the park. The analyst had heard music ( if you can call fiddling that ) and we went to investigate its source. It turned out there was a Scottish Country Dance exhibition going on and I still don't think the analyst believed me when I waved at an elderly lady in the front row of the stage who happened to be my grandmother! No, on this occasion my eyes were peeled for a fox which I'd been told about the evening before over dinner. My friend told me he had seen it one morning on his way to work and it had apparently been stalking an old lady out for a walk with her Jack Russell which I thought was quite remarkable. I am particularly interested in Edinburgh's fox population as I have promised a client, who has a problem with a fox which has made their back garden its home, that I will send Bob up for work experience at some point. Back on the subject of words we had lunch on Tuesday in Cafe St Honore a very traditional French restaurant in North Thistle Street, not to be confused with Rue St Honore, the road sign on the front of the restaurant. Traditionally French it may be when at the end of lunch I drew on my extensive command of the language and asked for a cafe au lait the waitress's face was a surprising blank. Sparing her embarassment I re-ordered. "A cup of coffee please". "No problem" she said. "Would you like milk with that?" It reminded me of the time in Ireland when I was looking for double cream. I looked high and low but there were only cartons of single cream on the supermarket shelves. So I asked a young lad wheeling out a fresh stock of dairy products whether they had any double cream. "No sir," he said pointing to the rows of single cream, "I'm sorry, but it only comes in this size". Last snippet on my theme. Unlike our other children Lottie, our 11 year old genius, needs no help with here homework. She just sits down and gets on with it. Last night was English and the subject was opposites. She was reeling them off with consumate ease till she got to the word IMPROVE. She paused for a second and then came out with "Dettoriorate". Sorry. It's a Newmarket joke really. Frankie's daughter is her best friend in Pony Club.

Friday 28th September, 2012

I received this email on my way out to Frankfurt earlier this week. I don't know what it is about me and Frankfurt, but everytime I go there I get messed up by flight delays and cancellations. It was the same this time albeit, gratifyingly, at the hands of Lufthansa rather than BA. Anyway, this came from a former colleague, "Lucky Tim" we call him, as I twiddled my thumbs ruefully in H'row T1.....it's a long story but worth a read. Happy Monday, I hope you had a lovely weekend? I have a interesting story that I think you will like being a fellow sailor. ( DS adds.....I must admit to have been rather flattered by that ! ) So Im not sure if I have mentioned this to you before but I am a massive fan of the yacht called the Maltese Falcon (google if you have no idea what I am talking about). Since friday the Monaco yacht show has taken centre stage here and the MF has been on anchor just outside the main marina. The yacht show was fantastic and I managed to schmmooooze myself onto a few lovely boats but the boat I really wanted to get on of course was MF.. So to cut a long story short when back at my flat and staring at the MF from my terrace I decided to google it and see whether I could find a contact. I found a typical enquiries@ address and sent off a polite intro/begging/Im a fund manager rah rah rah email and within 2 minutes I received a call back from the PA of a lady called Elena Ambrosiandou (ring any bells?). Elena is the founder of Ikos and had that very public divorce you may have read about. Anyway so I gracefully accepted the invitation from Elena's PA to come onboard that afternoon and have a tour by one of the crew and I was instructed to meet the MF tender at the Monaco Yacht Club jetty. At 1.45pm I arrive nice and early at the jetty to be met by 5 staff who were not at all shocked by little old me, mentioned that they were expecting a friend of Elena's and that they were ready to take me to the MF.. A quick motor out to the MF and Im starting to act like a child in a candy store but still trying to look like this is a normal experience for me in front of the MF crew.. Once onboard I am met by the captain and given a tour ( I have attached a few pics). The MF is truely remarkable! After the tour the PA of Elena arrived and told me that Elena would be onboard shortly and would like to invite me to stay for lunch along with a few other guests. I accepted without too much thought and perched by the bar, intrigued as to who the other guests would be... So along with Elena, the other guests were a Saudi Sheikh called Sheikh Hammed, Dr Mohammed Al Barwani (He had just arrived from Scotland where he was a guest of Charles and Camila because one of his Oman O&G companies had just bought an interest there) A couple of hotties from Motor Magazine (who were writing a piece on Elena) and finally and most interestingly a chap called Alvaro De Marichalar who is now famous as the man that crossed the Atlantic on a Jet Ski travelling from Rome to New York. So after a 3 hour lunch and chilling on the MF like it was my local I hopped on the tender and was delivered back into port with Elena's number in my pocket and promise of lunch and guidance whenever its needed in my new ventures with Tipsy Capital (DS again....I made up this name btw). All in all a crazy day in Monaco! Hope you like the pics Tim How cool and ridiculous is that? I don't know about you, what I really wanted to see was the email Tim had sent. I suppose I was thinking if only I could draft something as convincing as he obviously had done all my problems would be over. Here is what got him on board the Maltese Falcon. Good morning, Please forgive this rather random email but I am huge admirer.. previously from afar... of the Maltese Falcon. Not least this is because of my Maltese heritage but also because of my love of the design and capabilities of the vessel. I'm presently based in Monaco and have been staring from my balcony at every spare moment as she swings on her anchor in the harbour. I was wondering if there is any possibility of going onboard for a quick tour? I am a fund manager so I am often looking for client entertainment ideas and also I am a very keen sailor. I'm not expecting a positive response from this email however I thought, as I watch the gorgeous boat out there, I should at least try kind regards So there you go. It was as easy as that. I'll be brushing up my email skills over the weekend and trying something similar on you next week after which I have no doubt a couple of US$200 million orders will follow. Failing that I'm off to try my luck as a fund manager in Monaco. P.S. Just finished The Sugar Barons by Matthew Parker. Fascinating read, yet horrendous.

Friday 14th September, 2012

Despite the satisfying, albeit delayed, outcome at Flushing Meadows I had been fully anticipating writing you a message that reflected general gloom and despondency chez Sandison and yet it turns out that this is a story of surprise, joy and love. I was expecting to have to report on yet another 60 lids down the drain spent in a futile attempt to get one of children across the finishing line in their driving test. On top of which a Vodafone bill had just arrived revealing that my youngest daughter had managed to run up a bill of £33 in 14 seperate 118118 calls made last Saturday afternoon when she was meant to be watching the Burghley Horse Trials. Maddening. But would you believe it, early yesterday morning, three and a half years after her first driving lesson, Hen passed. Yes, Hen. Not Jimmy, three years her junior, who had been quietly confident - even though she has failed her test three times in the last couple of months - that she would be qualified before Hen. Jimmy has felt she has had the edge ever since, all those years ago in Thailand, she was out of nappies months before Hen could be bothered to look after her own business. Sibling rivalry. Terrible thing, though I should say Jimmy was delighted at Hen's success. "This opens up a whole new world of opportunity for us Hen" she said ominously. Anyway I digress. I was talking about money. Of course test fees kind of pale into insignificance when you consider what we have spent on driving lessons for Hen over the years which also helped lessen the blow of having to insure her. I was pleasantly surprised in fact. I don't want to tempt fate but the RAC may wish they had demanded a bit more than the £750 they did to cover our aged VW Polo. So, it was a very happy home last night and we celebrated wildly. Hen revealed, that whilst she had not repeated previous errors which had included breaking a red light and requiring her examiner to perform an emergency stop, she had been convinced she had failed and burst into tears of surprise and joy when her examiner gave her the happy news. Wiping the tears away as she added her signature and dated the Pass certificate she noted it was the 13th September. "Unlucky for some, but not for me!" she told him gleefully. It was at this point I suspect the poor man began to wonder what exactly he had unleashed on the roads of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. He would be even more concerned if he saw her latest Facebook post after she had spent the afternoon getting used to the sensation of driving on her own. "Jus been patrollin Gazeley-Ashley way, watch out bitchez imma ridin ma weeeeels." So what of the love angle this week? Maybe it was the champagne we were toasting her success with over supper yesterday but Hen started to get quite emotional again as she discussed the contribution her driving instructor Colin had made. As you would expect she has been through quite a few instructors over the years. Colin has only relatively recently come onto the scene. He is 67 years old, married, although apparently he and his wife have seperate bedrooms, and Hen later in the evening told us how much she loved him. Apparently he was friendly, wonderful and gorgeous and witty too. He has some great one-liners many of which she recited to us though I can only recall two of them. "Better to arrive 10 minutes late in this world, than early in the next" and "Early observation = early information; Late Observation = pain in the ar*e." Anyway, at this point, after a tiring day, she shuffled out the kitchen telling us she was off to write Colin a letter.

Friday 31st August, 2012

Anyway, back to Sweden. Yes, what a great country. We rented a house on one of the islands in the Swedish archipelago together with a boat to get us there. It was not the modest vessel I had hoped for, but a Chris Craft 25ft motoboat with an 8.1 Volvo Penta inboard engine together with brand new set of propellors which meant the boat was capable of a stunning 60mph. Alas it did not come with GPS and I can tell you the Swedish archipelago is one complicated and rocky place. I wasn't actually skippering the boat. The friends we were with had heard about my exploits in the British Virgin Islands no doubt and had pre-qualified their 16 year old son who passed his small boats licence days before. Fair play to him. We rocketed along on our 40 mile journey to Blido, darting artfully around islands and between yachts, flying across the substantial wake thrown up by various enormous ferries that ply their way between Stockholm and St Petersburg or whereever. My mistake was to take the steering wheel on the last ten minutes of the journey, in my defence a particularly precarious section that involved some dangerous rocks. I'll get to the point. I successfully negotiated all of these until we were just about to tie up to the jetty off our house. At that point there was an horrendous scraping noise and we had run aground. The pristine propellor flukes were not looking quite so shiny and smooth anymore. 'Nuff said. Blinking hate boats. To be fair it wasn't really my boat handling that was at fault. I was quite pleased at how I smoothly extricated the boat off the rock and edged gently up to the pier. The problem was the lack of sat nav and map reading, I admit, is not my forte. Believe it or not days later I had another little navigational incident. This time though it was on the Old Course at St Andrews. Now, as you might expect, I know my way around the Old rather well. I won the our family golf competition, The Big Stick, again this year, the eighth time out of the 15 occasions on which we have held the event. As I scribble this I am still considering whether or not to send you the write up which, as the winner, I am obliged to come up with. We'll see. The Old Course starter official manny handed us each a score card together with a sheet containing the day's pin positions and I was rather pleased with myself when, faced with a tricky approach to the third, I remembered to pull the sheet out of my bag and consult it. Armed with the knowledge that the pin was 22yds from the front and 7yds from the left I took an extra club, decided to add a bit of a draw and my 9 iron finished two feet from the hole. I resisted the urge to suggest that my father, brother and nephew would do well to pay such attention to detail, because I felt that would have been a little bit pompous. Just as well. When I next resorted to my pin sheet on what I thought was the 5th, I couldn't reconcile from the sheet whether or not I was on the hole I thought I was so I just hit the damn ball and hoped for the best. On closer inspection as I wandered up to the green I discovered that, from the start of the round, I had been using a map with the pin placements for the New Course on 19th August 2011. What a numptie. Oh what the heck, it's a dull old day...I'll send you my write up. But if you havn't heard of William Macgonagall, Scotlands second greatest poet then you may well think I have finally lost the plot. My write up owes a debt of gratitude to his seminal work, A Descriptive Poem on the Silvery Tay. Just for reference, faither means Dad, J is my brother and Charlie is my 17 year old nephew. The yellow jacket is a hideous corduroy creation once owned by the brother of the editor of Private Eye, which the loser of our golf contest is obliged to wear over lunch in the R&A.

Friday 10th August, 2012

It has been such an astounding week or so for Team GB you have probably had enough of impossible stories, but there has also been some sporting action to report away from the Olympics. I am often asked whether I make up the stories about Bob. I don't. I really don't. Anyway, it would take quite an imagination to come up with his exploits last weekend. If it wasn't for the pile of feathers by the sink I spotted when I came down for breakfast suggesting he might have been up and about I suppose I would have been a little irritated that Bob didn't show till some time after 10am. It transpired that he had got up at 3.30am, wandered to the bottom of our paddock and sat, .410 shotgun in hand, for four hours, hoping that a rabbit would emerge from a burrow. When, by 7.30am, it became apparent that the rabbit community was wise to his prescence, and a pigeon wandered lazily overhead, he popped that, plucked it, put it in the fridge and a slightly disgruntled Bob pottered back to bed. It was a shame he explained to me. He had been very keen to get a rabbit as he had found a nice recipe for Lapin a la Moutarde. The local wildlife had one up on him the next day too. He had been asked to take the dogs for a quick walk. We were going out for the day and they would have to spend a few hours locked in the dog house so they just needed a little run about. He came back forty minutes later. Twiggie, his lurcher, was a muddy mess. Humphrey, our miniature smooth haired daschund had a cut on his side and squealed when you so much as touched him. And Bob's wellies - my Le Chameau's to be precise - had been been sliced open. As I said, we had just sent him for a quiet Sunday morning walk and he had turned it into a bloodbath. He calmly explained to me they had had an encounter ( I'll spare you all the details ) with a male muntjac ( photo attached so you know what to look out for next time you go for a wander in the countryside). Some muntjac this. Feeling slightly threatened admittedly, it had turned on Bob and Humphrey and bitten them both! Humphrey has had a lucky escape safe to say, but my wellies are a write off. I had to take the dog to the vet so that'll be a £100 bill at least plus £160 for a new pair of Chameau's. Blinking boy. Drives you mad. We are off on holiday to Sweden tomorrow morning, my wife's first ever visit to her fathers homeland. We have tried to go there before as I may have told you but ended up that time in Denmark as I had booked flights to Copenhagen believing it to be Sweden's capital city. So away next week and in my absence please contact my colleague Matt Brown (0207 201 3540) who will be happy to help if you need anything from us......

Friday 26th July, 2012

As you know, I am quite fixated about tallying the number of countries I have been to. I think I have told you before that if you see me scribbling away furiously during a particularly boring analyst meeting I am most likely writing out a list of countries I have visited. Actually these days I might be jotting down something else. After a bit of practice I can now recall and write out the names of all 50 states in the USA in 2mins 10 seconds flat. Test me sometime. Nationalism is a bit of a bug bear of mine actually. Hate it. Really brings the worst out in people. Nevertheless on the eve of the Olympics it is hard to avoid the subject of countries and sport. I suppose I started on the theme yesterday. Now, of course, I happen to be Scottish, but speaking as a Brit I must say we didn't give Scotland much to do in the Olympics. Women's soccer I think was about it. And they only go and mess it up. I helpfully sent my Scottish clients sent a picture of the correct North Korean flag which prompted this response from a friend in Edinburgh. This is the flag they almost put up Anyway, to put the hapless Hampden officials into perspective, it wasn't as crass an error as the one made during the medal ceremony at a Kuwaiti shooting event earlier this year won by a Kazakh, Maria Dmitrienko. Click on the following link. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17494812 I have mentioned before how many people you spot wandering around London in whites and carrying tennis racquets when Wimbledon is on. On Monday and Tuesday this week the thing I noted was the number of cyclists - I even seen one on a Boris bike - wearing yellow jerseys. Bradley Wiggins is a legend, don't get me wrong. First words on winning the Tour de France and facing the crowds with microphone in hand? "We're gonna draw the raffle tickets now!". So English. Anyway, as you know I am reasonably sporty myself and have a fairly diligent regime involving running round Hyde Park at lunch time. I was out there again yesterday. Surprise surprise, blinking thousands of would be Olympians had suddenly appeared. Perhaps I am being unduly cynical. There was a great atmosphere and they all seemed to be having a lovely time. I say I go running. It's a bit more than that of course. I mix it up with stragically chosen moments of sprinting, star jumps and squats, depending on who's watching. I digress. I was meant to be writing about my bug-bear.... nationalism. London is a multi-cultural place, but the Olympics have brought it to a different level. The city is heaving with different nationalities wandering around the West End, trying to put off the moment they have to head over to Hackney. Getting to the point, I was wearing my acrylic purple T shirt proclaiming that I had completed the 2011 Jungfrau Marathon, but almost everyone else seemed to be running around hair or eyebrows paints funny colours, carrying flags or with the names of their countries emblazoned across their chests. I don't know. Just seems strange to me. The only interesting thing was the number of runners I spotted from countries begining with C. China, Cameroon, Chile. I even passed someone claiming to come from a place called CANADA, wherever that is. I paid my second ever visit to Germany this week which was very exciting. My British Airways flights was inevitably delayed - well over an hour. Would never have happened if I'd flown Lufthansa. So I had to cancel my client dinner, and landed in Frankfurt at 9.00pm suspecting it was too late even for an impromptu rendevous with a good German friend of mine and to grab a bite to eat. Oh ye of little faith. Never underestimate German efficiency. Whisked in seconds through passport control putting Heathrow to shame, moments later I was in a taxi doing 110 mph down the road into town. The last time I'd been driven that fast by a taxi-driver I was on the way from Macau to Chungshan Hot Springs Golf Course and we nearly died. Within about half an hour of landing in Germany I was sitting in the garden of a charming restaurant eating the most enormous Wienerschnitzel and drinking a large glass of ice cold apple wine. So you see, stock broking has its moments.

Friday 13th July, 2012

Bob got back from Rugby last Friday for the summer holidays and much as I was looking forward to seeing him again the joy did not last long. An hour at most. It had been a long and stressy week as I think I told you. After supper I slumped in front of the TV. Moments later Bob arrived looking uncharacteristically frazzled to tell me that our next door neighbour, with whom I had had no contact whatsoever in the five years we have lived at our house, wanted to see me, adding that he had shot a pigeon with an air-rifle which had then fluttered over the substantial dividing wall into the neighbours garden. Talk about irate. The guy was apoplectic and ordered me into his house for a serious dressing down. Apparently he had been sitting in his conservatory enjoying the peace and tranquility of our Suffolk village when a bird landed on his lawn followed immediately by a boy wearing camouflage trousers, vaulting the wall and proceeding to dive on the hapless pigeon. I could see from the large pile of feathers strewn over the guys garden that he was probably telling the truth. I apologised profusely of course. His point that if his wife had been home alone she would have been terrified by this intrusion was well made. But funnily enough the thing he seemed most preoccupied by was the fact, he told me, that Bob had been barefooted. I think he considered this was a signal of some much more malicious motive beyond putting a poor bird out of its misery. I assured him - as you already know - that this was completely normal behaviour. Recall that he once ran two miles to the local railway station, caught a train to Cambridge and onto an appointment with his orthodontist with no shoes on. Fair play to the neighbour, though slightly to my surprise, he calmed down, even seeming to view me with some sympathy I felt. PS Otherwise engaged, Bob had missed supper so whilst I patched things up with the neighbour he rattled off a bite to eat for himself. The pigeon having been left behind in the furore next door, he settled instead on "poaching" an egg in the sauce of a can of baked beans which he emptied into a saucepan. Haute cuisine. PPS Went to a friends 40th birthday party last night. How cool am I to have friends that young?

Friday 6th July, 2012

I have had my second curtailed week in a row so I feel the need to explain myself. Whilst it may not have surprised you, my repeated absences probably havn't shown me in the best light to our new colleagues who have joined us from RBS. Being serious for a moment though, everyone here has been fantastically supportive and helpful. My mother was taken ill as she was travelling down south with my father to visit my brother in Wiltshire. They were staying in a hotel just north of Birmingham when she developed chest pains early on Tuesday morning. Perhaps you havn't met my mother, but she is quite a piece of work. In considerable pain, she was being looked after by an understandably slightly frazzled, young hotel receptionist while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. "Don't worry, don't worry" my mother tells me the girl said to her. "Take slow deep breaths. Like this..... Breath in.......breath out......breath in......Now bring your legs up a bit dear" At which point my mother apparently couldn't resist retorting, through gritted teeth "I'm having a heart attack you know, not giving birth!" Very fortuitously one of England's newest hospitals was close to hand and having been taken there in an ambulance, within minutes she was being attended to and, fingers crossed, all is now well thank goodness. She'll be leaving this morning and heading home to Elie, Fife. Wolverhampton. Now there's a place I had not been to before and at the risk of alienating myself with the large number of my clients who will now no doubt reveal that's where they come from, it's not a place I need to visit again. You know when you go somewhere for the first time and it's rainy and grey? You kind of feel you should give it the benefit of the doubt and only judge it when the sun comes out. No need to bother with that when it comes to Wolverhampton. What a dump. Mind you, our opinion of the place was not helped by the Ely House Hotel which I booked my father and I into on Tuesday night. I liked the name obviously and it had looked pretty smart on the website, but as Hen likes to say....Never judge a book by its cover. To be fair to me, I suspect there were probably worse hotels about and it did have a reasonable selection of malt whisky. Anyway, if you were in hospital in Wolverhampton, feeling a touch under the weather, I suspect this would perk you up......written on the back of the home made get well card that my mother received, a message from our 11 year old daughter. Dear Grannie, I hope you are not to badly ill, poor you!! And not even in your own comforting surroundings. I don't feel perfect to, although I'm sure your ailment is a bit worse than a cold. Please get better soon and come to see us. Lots of love, Lottie xxx OK...she can't spell but quite sweet! Changing the subject Hen is in France for yet another holiday at the parents-in-law pad in Gascony. This time, rather than lounging about the pool in what inevitably proves to be a futile attempt to get a suntan, the highlight she tells me is the prospect of a visit to Disneyland Paris on the return trip. Hen absolutely hates scary, "fun" rides. Wild horses could not drag her to Big Thunder Mountain. But she has agreed to go to Disneyland, can't wait actually, on the promise that she is allowed to dress up as a real live sparkly, pink Princess in order to cavort on equal terms with Mickey and Minnie Mouse. It's a worry. The girl is going to be 20 in a few weeks time.

Friday 29th June, 2012

You may not have noticed it, but I have been a little under the weather this week. I have had a rather nasty cold. More to the point though the effect of this is that it has been almost a week since I last had a glass of wine. This is virtually unprecedented for me. I read somewhere that a Greek philosopher, Plato or Socrates - perhaps you can help me out here - advocated regular and substantial wine consumption for men upon reaching the age of 40 to ward off the grumpiness of middle age. He wasn't wrong. If I am a little stressy at the moment though it is most likely for another reason, truth be told. The fact is I now have not one, but two children learning to drive. I have told you before about Hen's previous efforts. She took her test about a year and a half ago, after I had spent roughly £1,000 on driving lessons for her. Much to my relief and, I might add, the general safety of the roads in Suffolk, she failed. As she blithely explained she would almost have passed given she committed 13 minor errors, only two more than the permitted number. The problem, she magnanimously conceded, was the red light she had run and the fact that the instructor had had to apply the emergency brakes to avoid their crashing into the back of a white van. So much time has elapsed since her last attempt that she is now required to re-sit her theory test so we are all ok for a while yet. However second daughter Jimmy is an altogether different proposition. She has passed her theory test, spent hours driving a clapped out Jeep around a field perfecting her gear shifting, a basic skill which eludes Hen, and has had a series of lessons in Rugby and around Bury St Edmunds. Her test is scheduled for 18th July at 2.30pm. I am a worried man. She might just pass. Which brings me to an email I received from my brother yesterday, who was concerned by the quote he had received to insure his son, who has passed his US driving test, to drive in the UK this summer: From: "Jamie Sandison" Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:10:52 +0100 To: