Final Days

And so this morning I took my last 6.35am walk from Charing Cross Station, across the north side of Leicester Square, up Jubilee Way, into Leicester Square, up Wardour Street, across Oxford Street, into Wells Street and left into Mortimer St. As I perambled along I wondered if knowing that you have a terminal illness was a bit like this. I would never see the completion of the demolition of the Swiss Centre; nor would I see what replaced it. I would never see the opening of Princi or Inamo in Wardour Street. The fate of the once Intrepid Fox would remain forever a mystery. After three years of waiting, the cut-through by St Martins-in-the-Fields would never be re-opened for me.

Well, of course, it isn't a bit like dying, unless there's a life after death and you can look down on developments from above. Because in my case, there will be occasional returns to these sites, and I will see what has happened. However, it's strange how infrequent these can turn out to be. There are parts of London that you see every day for years, and then you never see them again for a decade. That's what will happen to me now. I will become familiar with cut-throughs and developments between London Bridge and Old Street. The changes in Petticoat Lane, where I worked for some time in the early 1980s, will once again become apparent. Full circle, full circle.

++++++++++

A year or so ago I wrote about a radio programme that I had heard in which Jon Ronson interviewed a woman who had been fooled by a sociopath and bore his child. I observed that, although the sociopath went to jail, from an evolutionary point of view, it showed that sociopathy worked.

Well, bugger me sideways and call me a turtle, but the New Scientist today has this story:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826614.100?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=top1_head_Bad%20guys%20really%20do%20get%20the%20most%20girls

NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the "dark triad" persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

David Schmitt of Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, presented preliminary results at the same meeting from a survey of more than 35,000 people in 57 countries. He found a similar link between the dark triad and reproductive success in men. "It is universal across cultures for high dark triad scorers to be more active in short-term mating," Schmitt says. "They are more likely to try and poach other people's partners for a brief affair."

So, it's official.

+++++++

This morning on Wake Up To Money, we had David Bennett, Chief Executive of the Association of Private Client Investment Managers and Stockbrokers, (and I hope that Google Search DOES send them here) who was talking about inflation. You can probably listen to the podcast to get the exact quote, but the gist of it was that old chestnut of inflation "benefiting no-one".

I sometimes wonder whether it's plain stupidity or a conspiracy of silence, but anyone who thinks that high levels of inflation benefit no-one really ought to go back to O-level economics, or whatever it is they teach now. There are millions of people in their seventies living today (including my mother) who benefited enormously from the inflation levels of the 1970s and the smaller spurt in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Inflation is a neat means of redistributing wealth, when directly taking it from one group and giving it to another would cause a social revolution. I'm not saying that inflation is inherently good. I just wish people in the world of finance would either admit or at least understand that it is not inherently bad for everyone. Providing that levels of production remain what they would have been otherwise, inflation is merely a roughshod means of wealth redistribution. All analysts likely to appear on Wake Up To Money in the next few months, please take note. It isn't that complicated.

______________