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:

Friday 8th June, 2012

I think you know that I am not one to brag about my family's various talents, although I probably have allowed myself a little bit of crowing about Hen's artistry. It is not just photography, her claim to fame there being a one page spread of her photos of a 21st birthday party which appeared in Tatler a few months ago. OK....she didn't manage to complete her Foundation course at Leeds last year, but with an A* in Art A level and a few months of that course behind her she can sketch and draw pretty competently and now she tells me that she has landed a job which involves another artistic discipline. She is spending the next couple of weeks painting show jumps for the Olympics Equestrian events. Marvellous. Takes after her father that girl. In my year off I travelled round the world working on a Stolt-Neilsen chemical tanker. The intention was I would see lots of countries - or at least their ports - whereas in fact what happened was I spent three months, head down, chipping rust off and slapping paint on. I got a glowing reference which I will furnish you with in due course, but to this day I shudder at the thought of my departure from MV Stolt Osprey. I had been given the job of painting the superstructure and had been congratulated on the super job I had done as the front of the living quarters glistened with a fine coat of fresh cream. Happily I completed what was, truth be told, a rather slip shod job on the day before departure, having been quite incapable of preparing the surface as I was meant to. Alas, a heavy storm and strong winds the night before we arrived in Marseilles began to lay me bare even as I said my goodbyes and thank you for having me. Happily only I noticed the tell tale signs of peeling that signalled the whole face of the boat was going to require a second coat at the very least. And somehow I have a feeling that horses and riders at the London Olympics will not want to have too close a look at the fences and poles, at least come the second week. Back to me..... I was quite jammy eh?! Talking of which, and this is a rum one, I was at a loss for something to tell you today - as you might have gathered - so I was going to report that I have at last concluded that I am indeed a lucky boy. Twice now, in the space of just over a week, I have been given the opportunity to buy a gold ring that some Eastern European has found on the pavement just in front of me not far from our office on Knightsbridge. How fortuitous is that? The second time this happened was only an hour or so ago and I had literally just decided to tell you about this as I made my way back to my desk when I was approached by an Indian gentleman as I paused to look at the cars in the Ferrari garage next door to us who said to me " My god, you are a lucky man. You have a lucky face. Shall I tell you why your face is lucky? " Well I didn't stop to find out. It could only end in anti-climax, but I do feel better about myself, I must say. And whats more, I still have a job, I think......so that's good.

Friday 15th June, 2012

A friend of mine wrote on her Facebook page the other evening that "You know you're past middle age when your memories mean more than your dreams". Oh dear me. How depressing is that? I was about to let rip and give her a kick up the backside, but just in time I recognised the irony given how I had spent the morning that day. If you fly into Edinburgh Airport from the south west and are sitting on the right side of the plane looking out of the window, just moments before you land, you might have noticed a castle next to the Glasgow motorway, but otherwise surrounded by huge trees, a river, the Grand Union Canal and a lot of non descript shacks which, for your information, happens to be a chicken farm. The "castle" is in fact a mid 19th century baronial style building, occupied for the last 80 years or so by Clifton Hall School, my alma mater. The tower on the right, at the top of which was my dorm when I first arrived, is still apparently occupied by the ghost of the Green Lady. I caught sight of the place flying in on Easyjet at the crack of sparrows on Wednesday morning and as I had a couple of hours to kill before a hectic series of meetings I decided to go and have a look round. I had not been back since I left the school in July 1976! THIRTY SIX YEARS AGO. The mental scars of having been sent away to boarding school aged 6 and a bit obviously run deep. By the way perhaps don't mention to the powers that be what I get up to on my trips to Scotland, but in my defence I was shown round the school by a very chatty 15 year old girl who was interested Formula One so I her talked her through the proposed IPO. I had such a lovely time wandering around reliving these halcyon days of the early 1970's until the headmaster announced that they had recently stumbled across some archived records within which he might well be able to find my old Common Entrance results. Retrieve them he did together with those of my younger brother. I have a reasonably well developed ability to laugh at myself, but I was not amused in the slightest to find that Jamie's results were infinitely superior to mine and indeed that I had only just managed to scrape into Glenalmond. Here is a sample of my results and the somewhat extraordinary comments. 54% in English I - " Comprehension showed no obvious talent " 52% in Maths II - "Q6 was not done and his main weakness was in Q2 " ( that implies to me I would have been better off omitting to answer Q2 aswell ). 55% in History - "One question well answered, otherwise knowledge often inaccurate." 39% in Latin - " Very weak and should't have attempted part B " ( common theme there! ) 33% in Maths III - " Insufficient knowledge " 50% in French Oral - the comment on this one really annoyed me - " Rather like Morrison, though a bit better in Q.4 " What do they think they are doing comparing me to him? Morrison played rugby for Scotland. Started at Barings the same day as me. He couldn't speak French to save his life and when he tried his accent was horrendous. I am told I sound like Prince Charles when I speak French but I'm quite proud of that. Oh well. There is one positive aspect from roaming around in the past. It makes my own children's efforts seem quite encouraging.

Friday 25th May, 2012

Hen was home last night and she and I settled to an exciting evening in front of the telly after a barbeque and two bottles of Pino Grigio Rosato. What a fascinating programme we watched about Billingsgate Fish Market. I think I've told you before about my attitude to fish and fishing. It is definitely at odds with Bob's. Apart from the smell, the tangles and the danger to body posed by hooks, gaffs, knifes and teeth, not to mention the risk of ciguatera, it is also the fact that I am incredibly unlucky and rarely catch any of the little blighters. My luck changed once though. It was many years ago, pre dating any influence from Bob, we were staying in Ireland in a house on the shore of some sea inlet on the West Coast and I decided to have a go at catching supper. Would you believe it within 20 minutes I had pulled out four or five substantial and I must say, quite attractive looking fish. Manfully, I gutted and filleted them, wrapped them in tin-foil and put them on the barbeque. I can't tell you how utterly disgusting it was. Tasted like eating mud. In an effort to identify the fish, the next day I went to a shop in Sneem and described them to the shop keeper. "Oh they'll have been the pollock" the man said. "Are they edible" I asked? "Oh yes" came the enthusiastic reply. "They used to be very popular here in Ireland.....during the Potato Famine." Well funnily enough one of the fish merchants on the TV last night told us that thanks to celebrity chefs likeGordon Ramsay and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall pollock has become incredibly popular and he can hardly give cod away these days despite its abundant supply. At that point I almost switched the telly off in disgust, but a moment later I could have hugged him. "That's a pollock," he says, holding one up. "Lovely piece of fish, lovely bright colours, that sort of thing. Tastes like sh*t. Then you get cod [holds up a cod]. That's a fish that's been swimming in the North Atlantic, feeding on the right products, since the day it was born. If that's a human being, that goes to the gym every day, yeah? It eats all the right foods. It probably drives a Porsche, right? This – back to the pollock dangling limply in his hand – is sitting at home on the settee, in a tracksuit, watching Jeremy Kyle, eating a burger." Well I thought it was hilarious, but I suppose it boils down to one's history with pollock and your sense of humour which can be like ships passing in the night....witness a couple of Blackberry exchanges I had with my daughter Jimmy this week: David Sandison, Jimmy Sandison NEW Messages: --------- David Sandison: My auntie died this morning Jimmy Sandison NEW: Oh daddy I'm so sorry are you ok? Jimmy Sandison NEW: Who's sister was she David Sandison: I didn't know her well. She never talked to me, or to anyone really David Sandison: R.I.P. Auntie Social David Sandison: Ha ha ha!!! Jimmy Sandison NEW: Oh golly ok David Sandison: It was a joke!! Sorry. Couldn't resist it!!! David Sandison: Do you get it?? Jimmy Sandison NEW: What no one died? Jimmy Sandison NEW: U sick freak David Sandison: Did u know that Beyonce is Roy Castle's love child? She chose not to take his name as she didn't want to be known as Beyonce Castle. Boom boom! Jimmy Sandison NEW: Isn't he a music producer? Or something Jimmy Sandison NEW: Very interesting David Sandison: Do u get the joke? Bouncy castle. Jimmy Sandison NEW: Why have u taste in jokes gone so down hill Jimmy Sandison NEW: I've gone deaf in one ear Jimmy Sandison NEW: Completely David Sandison: What? Didn't quite hear you David Sandison: Poor you. When did this happen? Jimmy Sandison NEW: Last night I think it was cos I was spinning around loads so my balance in my ears have gone weird David Sandison: Try spinning back the other way?? Jimmy Sandison NEW: That's what I thought but I'm not gunna risk it cos I can't remember which way I spun in the first place

Friday 4th May, 2012

Here's a strange one. A couple of days after being asked by his old University if they could give my father's telephone number out to someone who wanted to make contact with him, my mother answered the phone to a lady calling herself Moira asking to speak to Ian ( my father ). My parents have been happily married for 50 years, but my mother's hackles were raised. She knew immediately that this was the very Moira, my father's first serious girlfriend, and who had dumped him apparently on the grounds that he was unlikely to convert to Catholicism. You probably havn't met my mother, but she is not to be taken lightly, especially when her hackles are on end. Nonetheless my father took the phone and despite not being the sort to linger on calls ( "have you seen this blinking phone bill" he used to shout at us ) 45 minutes later was still nattering away, reminiscing happily to this lady who, 56 years after they had last talked to each other, had suddenly decided the time was right for a reconciliation. Moira is not the only one susceptible to a bad dose of nostalgia. Just last weekend I was standing in the kitchen listening transfixed to a programme on the radio called Reunion about the handover of Hong Kong back in 1997. It was quite entertaining stuff. Emily Lau hasn't softened a jot. But when they played a recording of the ceremony itself I suddenly found, much to the amusement of Hen who was looking on, that I had tears running down my cheeks! How sad is that. In my defence it was a very emotional event and even Lord Patten admitted that he had to suck polo-mints in an attempt to hold back the tears! And that brings me to Dirk the penguin. This is a story I spotted this week about a pair of tourists in Australia, Rhys Owen Jones, 21, and Keri Mules, 20, from Wales, funnily enough, who admitted the theft of Dirk from Sea World on Queensland's Gold Coast, when they appeared before Brisbane magistrates. The pair broke into Sea World, swam with dolphins and let off a fire extinguisher in a shark enclosure before setting off back to their hotel with Dirk, a fairy penguin, under their arms. Wacky. Happily Dirk was rescued and returned to Sea World unharmed and reunited with his little partner, Peaches. But what has this got to do with my focus on nostalgia? Sadly I never managed to visit Sea World as it does sound like a fun place, but all those years ago when I was a fund manager and ran the Baring Australia Fund - consistently number 1 in the South China Morning Post fund rankings btw - I owned a substantial stake in the marine park which was then listed as a property trust. I never expected too much from my stock picks so you can imagine I was delighted one morning to wander into my office to find the company had reported and the stock was up some 9%. I rang an Ozzie broker - I think it was Simon Poidevin - to find out what in the results had prompted this move. "Mate", came the reply, quick as you like, " havn't you heard? Flipper the dolphin had twins!" Enjoy the Bank Holiday. We have my mother, who needs time to think about things away from Dad, to stay for the weekend. I jest. In fact it is all very exciting. She is bringing down 20 asparagus crowns, a belated birthday present, which hopefully I will be able to plant if the rain ever stops.