Eldon-Online

Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent ...

For the followers of Shakespearean quotations, the title is a well-known line from Richard III Act 1, Scene 1 - deliberately incomplete (and out of season!).

 Judging by some recent comments that have drifted back to me, there are some out there who seem to think I Blog because I can't "let go" and still have a hankering to be in the limelight. For them, I have information. I Blog because I enjoy it, because there are apparently some folk who find it reasonably informative and at times entertaining, and because I have the freedom to say what I like. If I am in the news at all these days it is because I have been asked to be there - I have not sought it. And I am happy with that thank you. So, with that little bit of discontent off my chest - to the subject(s) on my mind at present.

The quotation as used in the title is often recited in its above incomplete form to indicate negative thoughts or emotions, but to appreciate the actual meaning of the words used by Shakespeare you have to read the whole stanza:

 Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York;

And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

 In other words far from being miserable Richard, the future King, is actually happily welcoming a change in his fortunes following the installation of his brother Edward IV on the throne; they were both sons of the Duke of York. A gloomy period has, for him, been turned into summer.

So, am I saying that the gloomy predictions I was making earlier have now gone away, turned the corner perhaps, and that all is well with the world? Well ..... actually, no!

It is true that many parts of the world are reporting encouraging economic figures. Japan, France, Germany, Hong Kong all saying they have come out of, or staved off recession and let's be fair, that of itself is an achievement. And after the real winter of discontent we faced globally it is a much more glorious summer than many might have expected - if you still have a job, that is!!

The economists though, remain cautious or undecided and there seem to be few willing to predict that we are back to normal (whatever that is) - with most hedging their bets on the "well, the worst seems to be over, and some results are encouraging, but we've got a couple of years to go yet" scenario. And I am firmly with the "switherers". Honestly, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be able to put my hand on my heart and say "Yes, I think we have come through this okay, under the circumstances, and there will be no more surprises" - but I cannot. I remain concerned, and will continue to be so until I see the job market improving, credit card debt being reduced, shareholder expectations being tempered, banks getting out from under the large gorilla of bad debts sitting on their backs and a return to a properly functioning market economy unhindered by politicians.

And while many of us live our lives and judge the world through the financial presses, just take a look at the world in which we are living.

The Middle East troubles continue. The war in Afghanistan (in which there are likely to be few winners) where the loss of life amongst the coalition forces (British Forces in particular) recently seems to have escalated, the difficulty with holding elections in that country, newer and bigger bombs in Baghdad, fraudulent elections in Iran ... the list goes on. It includes the potential release of the Lockerbie bomber perhaps today, even, on humane grounds because he wants to spend the last few weeks of his life with his loved ones. Not something that went through his mind when he was involved (even if he was not the actual bomber) in blowing up the Pan Am plane that was taking people back to see their own loved ones in America.

[I actually worry that the decision by the authorities in Scotland to release the man has something to do with taking exception to the protests being raised by US Secretary of State Clinton, and others - on a "don't tell us what to do" basis. I hope I am wrong].

Politically in Europe we have a sick British Government where, it seems, the Prime Minister is not allowed to govern while he is on holiday in Britain but it's okay for one of his colleagues to run the country from Corfu on his Blackberry. And as for the Italians - just what are they going to do with their philandering Prime Minister? Okay, private lives are just that - private, but Mr. Berlusconi's private life is very public and must bring into question just how much gravitas he brings to Government.

In America they are struggling with health care reform, having decided that they want something "uniquely American" to quote President Obama who meanwhile decides to ridicule the British NHS - not a perfect system by any means, but not the disaster it has been painted.

So, while we enjoy our "glorious summer", remember that winter is not too far around the corner (yes, I know, I am talking about the Northern Hemisphere - but that's where the main trouble spots seem to be). And perhaps, just perhaps, we might be back to seeing headlines that echo the opening line of Richard III - without the follow on.

 

Travels in China...Part Five (by Paul Eldon)

The Edge of Empire 

We decided to do something a little different to travel between Turpan and our next port of call, Dunhuang (Gansu Province).  Whereas before we had flown between our destinations or, in the case of Urumqi – Turpan driven, this time I had elected to take the train.  So many people will (rightly) tell you that travelling by train is one of the best ways to see a country.  Regrettably our departure was late in the evening, after the sun had set and the landscape had retreated under its duvet, meaning we saw nothing of the countryside and only the inside of a communist carriage.  You may think what you will of me but this was actually the first time I had taken a train in China and, I’m sorry to say, it was rather disappointing.  Earlier this year I spent a couple of weeks in India travelling between my various ports of call on India’s vast railway network.  The shabby carriages that imprisoned me for the better part of  two days (all up) were a highlight of the trip.  But on my Chinese choo-choo it was all just a little too, well, clean.  The President of The Surly Association of Train Attendants showed us to our cabins and, after a couple of warm beers and some "two minute" noodles we drifted off to sleep in our cells.

 As many who are reading this will know, one of the joys of travel are the well-considered timetables of transportation authorities worldwide.  We arrived in Dunhuang at 5:30am after, what the Group all agreed, was not the most restful of sleeps.  Actually, that’s not entirely accurate.  We arrived in a town called Liu Yuan – some 130km from Dunhuang where we were met by our Han Chinese guide Henry.  (Dunhuang was supposed to have its own railway station but, despite assurances from guide books, at the time of our visit it hadn’t opened yet.)  I can honestly say that the drive was possibly the worst travel experience of my life to date.  And I think those more accustomed to the pointy parts of planes probably found the journey excruciating.  The road – if you can call it that – G215 is a new addition to China’s extensive road network and was built atop the sand of the Gobi desert.  We were thrown around that bus like toys hurled from the cot of a tempestuous toddler.  For two hours.  And before that Henry gabbed at us for 30 minutes solid, possibly without pausing for a single breath.  I can’t fault his command of English but by all the ancestral spirits of China, move over Richard Quest and Lyse Doucet, he may actually have the most annoying voice in the world.  Through no real fault of his own you can probably imagine that once we finally arrived in Dunhuang he was as popular as a bakery at a clinic for diabetics.

 The two main draws of Dunhuang are the impressively dramatic sand dunes on the outskirts of the city and the staggeringly beautiful Mogao Grottoes.  We began our day at the former (after a disastrous and farcical breakfast which didn’t help our already bruised moods) where a few of us rode the short distance to Yueya Quan (Crescent Moon Lake) on camels and the rest were ferried by electric buggy.  The soaring dunes around us teemed with other tour groups sand tobogganing, paragliding and lolloping along in their own camel trains.  Dad and I had a go at sliding down a dune on a wooden sled with one of us faring better than the other.  I’ll leave it to you to decide who it was - but it wasn’t me.  Crescent Moon Lake is decidedly unremarkable, and the buildings we saw around the water were reconstructions after the originals were destroyed during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution.  Henry was able to prattle on endlessly for 20 minutes when really all that you need to know of interest is that Yueya Quan is first mentioned in documents dating back 2,000 years.  The Mogao Grottoes (also known as the Mogao Caves) are without question a must-see in China.  Originally over 1,000 caves contained murals and Buddhist artwork and imagery, supposedly dating back to AD 366.  There are approximately 600 caves left although many are now closed to visitors.  The history of the caves is a fascinating one and would take up far too much space to go into detail here, but I do recommend doing a little independent research.  For an additional fee on top of the entry ticket you can be taken around a few of the caves by a guide and this is well worth the money.  Our friendly guide was tremendously well informed and spoke flawless English.  I was also struck by the way in which tours were conducted.  For anyone who has been to China one of the things that strikes you about the culture is the noise.  It’s a very loud country and sometimes even the most banal of conversations are undertaken as though the speakers are stood in the middle of a typhoon.  But even the larger Chinese tour groups moved through the caves in awed silence.  The usual hustle and bustle of daily life in the People’s Republic also melted away and jostling crowds gave way to ordered queuing.  It’s arguable that the horrendous journey from Liu Yuan to Dunhuang was made worth it by the few hours we spent looking at the evolution of Chinese art from the Jin to the Ming Dynasties.

 The following day we drove the 6 hours to Jiayuguan – the location of the last fort on the Great Wall and the edge of the world in ancient China.  Before that there was time to sample Dunhuang’s local donkey delicacy which I found quite pleasing to mine palate.  It wasn’t to everyone’s taste – especially not at breakfast – but I was pleased to add it to my list of weird and wonderful creatures that I have consumed joining silkworm and scorpion among others.  Mercifully, although long, the road was silkily smooth and we arrived in good time for us to take in the gargantuan fort.  It wasn’t hard to imagine how, back in the day, a soldier posted to guard the frontier must have felt he had slighted the emperor.  Although now joined by modern factories a bleak and desolate landscape was the vista enjoyed by the thousands of defenders of the Son of Heaven.  It had been our intention to travel by train the remaining leg of our expedition, but after the discomfort of our previous experience we changed our plans and decided to fly into Xi’an.  Returning deep into developed China, and to one of the more popular destinations on travellers’ itineraries, we bade farewell to Patti (who, by this time was in desperate need of ablution) and Henry and I resumed the mantle of flag-waving tour guide.

 

“China Experience” Rating (Dunhuang): 7/10

It was worth the trip and I would recommend going before the onset of mass tourism.

 

“China Experience” Rating (Jiayuguan): 8/10

I wouldn’t bother going unless you have an interest in history because outside of the fort, it’s booming, industrial China in a all its factory belching goodness.

Brother Can You Spare A Dime?

It seemed appropriate to use a song title that originated from the Great Depression to open a Blog in these strange and contradictory times.

Clearly investment bankers at a number of firms will be smiling all the way to their banks given either the bonuses they have received or -indeed - the "sign-on" fees that are once again prevalent in the market. And I said in a previous blog that I had a view on such payments - which I do. Honestly, I am generally in favour of rewarding good performance, and doing so via bonuses sits reasonably well with me, but I have three issues about which I am not so comfortable.

First I think we need to be clear that these payments should be performance related and not for some "anticipated future performance". That is hardly an incentive. Secondly they should be paid out over a period of time and not in one lump sum in the quarter, half year, or year in which the job was done. Sure, the largest percentage can be paid first, but let's hold some back to ensure that the deals engineered or the products created are actually genuine and not toxic. A bit like the contingency payments you might hold back on a house construction to ensure the building does not fall apart over a period of time. And thirdly I do have concerns about some of the amounts. I mean is the USD100m claimed by Andrew Hall a reasonable sum? You can feed a heck of a lot of people for a fraction of that amount so I hope any recipients will be at least conscious of their fellow human beings and spare more than a dime. But I wonder.

At the other end of the scale we have the ranks of the unemployed. Some habitually so, but now swollen by the newer unwilling entrants whose numbers continue to rise, despite all the talk of recovery. Job prospects look bleak in developed and developing economies for the foreseeable future. Homeless numbers too, continue to rise. In England the other day I heard a vendor selling the Big Issue, a magazine sold by the homeless to enable them to extract a living shout, "Buy your copy of the Big Issue and get nothing in return". He was poking fun at the "buy one get one free" offers and similar ploys to create interest in a product, and equally was having fun doing so - but underneath it all was a man who understood the realities of a life which held very little positive prospects for his future. Imagine how he feels about even well- paid people, ignoring the mega-rich in the previous paragraph, who would not be prepared to put their hand in their pockets for a serious magazine, which is actually worth reading, sold at the princely sum of GBP1.50 (HK$20), of which the seller receives half the proceeds. Every dime counts here.

Now what about those in the middle - who were the real reason I started this particular blog in the first place, or more precisely those involved in start-ups and SME businesses.

Certainly recessions, depressions, unemployment, and bills to pay focus the mind on alternative sources of income. For a few (relative term) people, venturing into their own small business is often the fulfillment of a long held dream. But start-ups are notoriously high-risk ventures, for a string of good reasons – reasons which are sufficiently good for many banks to ignore SME customers altogether. And in times like these, it is even more difficult to obtain funding. Skittish markets, lack of appropriate business skills, low entry costs that enable anyone to join in are all indicators as to why something like 90% of such ventures fail in the first year.

TV programmes that are now shown around the world, like The Dragon's Den have done something positive towards bringing the harsh realities of running a small business into focus. People are thus becoming better prepared to avoid the pitfalls, but they still can't get the money! So, where do they go? That is where "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" came into its own.

I came across a website the other day by accident (I do that a lot) called cmypitch. It led me to looking for other similar sites and yes, they were out there. Having been an "angel" - theatre investor, (one spectacular success one breakeven and one disaster) I have always been conscious that there were alternative sources of finance out there in small chunks, but I had not realised how far it had spread, and into what businesses. And what a good idea I think it is.

Here you go Hong Kong. You are still entrepreneurial, I hope. I think there is an interesting proposition here - raising small amounts of money from a large number of investors, and placing it wisely in start up businesses. I have a few ideas already!

Travels In China ... Part Four (by Paul Eldon)

Out with the Old, In with the New

Now then, where were we?  Ah yes.  We had witnessed the ritual of buying and selling livestock as wizened old men with flowing beards, operating as middlemen, knowingly oversaw the transaction.  We watched, enthralled, as donkeys and horses were put through their paces by their potential new masters.  We deftly avoided tripping over severed goats’ heads and, in stunned silence (well, not quite silence – middle aged people do “ooh” and “aah” a lot), drank in the experience of centuries of tradition.  And that was before lunch.

 For lunch our affable guide Patti took us for a meal with a local family.  That is to say the local family made it and we ate it.  It was a privilege and an experience to be invited into their home.  The family were so generous and friendly and, if you’ve been to a Middle Eastern restaurant, then you might also be able to picture the dining experience.  The décor was gaudy, the floor uncomfortable (what chairs?) and the food plentiful and delicious.

In the afternoon we visited the site of the original market, which was unfortunately, nowhere near as interesting as the morning experience.  If you travelled to Beijing pre-2003 you might remember that the Silk Market used to be a noisy, crowded place crammed into a few narrow alleyways.  For some reason the poor quality and cheapness of the items for sale are heightened now that the stalls have been relocated into a shiny, glass mall.  Although lacking coffee shops and escalators the Kashgar Central Market did remind me of the “modernisation" efforts of municipal governments across China; smart aisles and individual stalls replacing what, I’m sure back in the day used to be the most tremendous hullabaloo.  I did, however, end up making a few purchases – toothpaste (rule #1: if there’s no readable language on the packaging, don’t buy it), some cloth slippers (rule #2: it’s inevitable that the one thing you’ve been searching for in Beijing for the past 6 years should turn up – in your size – at a marketplace some 4,600km away) and an astrakhan hat (rule #3: never, ever listen to yourself when you say you’ll wear/use ethnic clothing away from your holiday destination).

 The modern city of Kashgar is built around the central old city, a collection of crumbling clay houses and a maze of old world customs.  The local government has declared that the old city is at risk from earthquake damage and so the rule is, we were told, that repairs are forbidden.  Once a building collapses the occupants are forced to relocate to new housing complexes conveniently located on the outskirts of town.  This is not new, nor exclusive to ethnic minority housing.  It is happening all across China.  I myself was witness to it in Beijing with the demolition of the old hutongs but, as someone who enjoys history and the preservation of cultures, it is still difficult to understand and disappointing to watch.  Perhaps because of Kashgar’s immemorial standing as an old Silk Road trading post it was even more devastating.  As we passed through the city we saw blacksmiths toiling in front of their roasting ovens; carpenters whittling away at their wares; we smelled and saw varicoloured spices on display; and through it all the smiling, welcoming faces of local merchants and tradesmen, children and families bartering, chatting and going about their lives as their parents, grandparents and (probably) great-great grandparents did.  We cleared the old city and re-entered the 21^st Century, standing in the central plaza in front of the Id Kah Mosque.  It was here that I began to think about the difficult issue of autonomy.  (I will post a separate entry on my own blog in due course about this and related issues.)

 “Time: the indefinite progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.”  Seems oxymoronic really to say that time moves on in a place like Kashgar but, alas, it does and it did and we prepared to move on to Turpan, a desert city about 3 hours drive outside of Urumqi.  Before we left I asked that we drive through People’s Square so that I could photograph the Great Helmsman.  Why?  Because it’s the biggest statue of Mao Zedong in China.  If they won’t come willingly...

Abdul (you’ll remember him as the agent I dealt with previously) had decided that his younger brother Patti (the jovial young Uyghur lad) should join us.  As I understood it Mohamed, the guide who would meet us in Urumqi, was either new to the organisation or needed watching over and so, in the absence of objection from the Group, along he came.  And it’s a jolly good thing he did too!  Firstly, we arrived at our hotel in Turpan only to find it was closed.  The replacement was foul and had no in-room air conditioning, so I got a little stroppy.  We ended up at a far more appropriate establishment.  The second reason why Patti needed to keep an eye on him is because, well, Mohamed isn’t a very good Muslim.  The two of us drank far too much beer than was good for us in a desert environment.  Turpan is the hottest place in all of the Republic.  I believe it also lays claim to being the coldest as well which is a clever trick. That’s about as interesting as it gets.  Well, that and the story of Xuanzang and the Journey to the West which meant a visit to the ancient, ruined city of Jiaohe – a genuinely fascinating place with gates, temples, public buildings, graveyards and simple houses still evident.  It seems that it’s also home to a particularly lethargic snake.  We arrived as the sun was setting over the burning mountains and there was a genuine feeling of how impressive this city must have once been.  But really, that’s about it.

 “China Experience” Rating (Kashgar): 3/10

If it wasn’t for the colossal statue of Mao it would have been awarded 1/10 by merit of the character signage.

“Life Experience” Rating (Kashgar): 10/10

If you can make the trip it's well worth it. Definitely a top 3 of my travel experiences to date.

 “China Experience” Rating (Turpan): 5/10

It certainly still felt like a Uyghur city but Mohamed, Patti and I were joined by the Han Chinese owner of the bar. And he didn’t speak Uyghur. Or English.