Stranger land

Big Brother v. mugger brother

2012-02-29T22:12:00.000Z

At my grandma's the other day, where once again she received cold calls from faceless salesmen. The first claimed to be from her phone and internet provider, TalkTalk. Acting as her call screener, I had my doubts about this man's credentials: why was he bothering a 93-year-old, whose telephone and internet use are extremely uninteresting, with go-faster products ? Not nice ... even if he was an actual TalkTalk employee.

But the psycho who called shortly after, asking for a Mr. L - never mind that the master of the house was long since deceased and anyway went by the appellation of Dr. - this low-life was something new and shocking.

I am more than acquainted with the Indian call centres whose desperate foot soldiers try to bore and bamboozle the socks off you, using a monotonous stream of incongruous sounds and weird Indian-English cadences. The challenge as a weary recipient lies in making these characters break rank and respond in a way that doesn't simulate a primitive computer.

This usually proves a challenge too far ... but times may finally be changing. For the character who called my grandmother that fine day - an emissary of the imaginatively titled "UK Claims Department" - this scumbag quickly veered into a very unscripted persona.

I had made it immediately clear that I knew exactly what kind of a scam he was playing but still I invited him to give me his pathetic pitch. To my surprise this elicited a veritable tidal wave of ranting and raving, swearing like a trouper and threatening to this-me and that-me. "You want some more ?!" he kept asking. And when I told him I was from the BBC and was recording the conversation it only seemed to make him up the ante, with evermore voluminous invective.

Obviously it was disturbing to be on the receiving end of such a call while knowing who the intended recipient had been. But it made me curious to know how many other deadbeat employees in these Indian call centres had also finally lost the plot and suffered this kind of a meltdown ? Essentially no different to Fagin's pick-pockets, they have sat there, year in, year out, following their absurd script in which they pretend to be called John and Jane and located in an office somewhere in leafy England, usually "just down the road".

For these slumdog millionaires, this was supposed to be the first rung of the ladder in the new Indian Dream. Today a wretched, thieving call centre, but tomorrow ... the world !

Or not. And now we see evidence of the phenomenal spread of one aspect of globalisation: mental illness, brought on by the rush of great expectations and the inevitable car-crash of crushing disappointment. Today's Indian galley slaves sell their souls and their pride but then, instead of turning on their employers, they stupidly try to regain their lost self-esteem by snarling and snapping at the "customers" who refuse to be mugged.

Update: I notified Charles Dunstone about this blog post. The founder of Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk, Dunstone was always remarkably responsive to my personal emails while I was a TalkTalk customer (something I have already noted on this blog). There's a disconnect in having such a responsive chief exec running a company that too often has been slammed for poor customer service. But there we are, just another of life's mysteries. Anyway, this is what Charles emailed to me, as usual within hours, if not minutes, of my inquiry.

"They [the cold callers] keep changing the numbers they call on. We can restrict your grandmother's line to only accept calls where the CLI [Caller Location Information] is displayed, but we are shooting in the dark trying to anticipate what numbers they might call on otherwise."

Dark carnival

2012-02-08T21:37:00.001Z

"In Salvador and the rest of Brazil's northeast, the economic progress has brought an unwelcome consequence - skyrocketing crime. Fueled by a growing drug trade, an inflow of poor migrants and still lingering inequality between the region's haves and have-nots, northeastern cities regularly rank among the most violent in Brazil."The management of public security there is a failure," Jose Vicente da Silva, a retired police colonel and former national security secretary, said in a televised interview on Tuesday."

The value of nothing

2012-01-28T17:20:00.001Z

We have a new neighbour: the White Cube gallery on Bermondsey Street. It's a sort of out of town superstore version of the other White Cubes dotted around London. Except that it's not out of town; it's in Zone 1, SE1, Bermondsey Street, aka the "new Notting Hill". Etc.

In Sao Paulo I laughed through the tears at the amateurishness of their art museums. Here, I am in equal measure impressed and depressed by the new addition to our inner city "village".

Today, on my third visit, I got talking to one of the black-clad characters who float around the place, as if to offer help and guidance but really to keep our cashless hands, and cameras, off the artwork / copyright.

He was my kind of person: honest, jaded, and chatty. "There are 40 of us," he confided, "and although we consider ourselves well-paid, our employers only need to sell one Tracey Emin piece to fund all our salaries for an entire year !" I told him it was confusing trying to work out whether this converted warehouse was meant to be a museum like Tate Modern or a shop aimed at very wealthy buyers.

Everything on show is for sale - not that they'd be so indiscreet as to put a price anywhere in view. The current main exhibit is a number of works by Anselm Kiefer, a German artist who though not Jewish himself references the Holocaust and Jewish mysticism.

At the austere reception I asked for a price list and was told I could see a sales person or phone them later. There are no price lists, of course.

As my friendly and diminutive interlocutor confirmed, we Joseph and Joanna Public are an integral part of the show: the gallery lets us in for free because our approbation - and numbers, currently averaging 600 visitors a day - are key to inflating and indeed maintaining the lofty status of the artist-cum-brand for sale.

The gallery owner is one Jay Jopling, former boyfriend of Lily Allen and co-founder of Brit Art, alongside Damien Hirst and Charles Saatchi. They succeeded in speeding up the process by which an object becomes a piece of art and then a very valuable piece of art.

Like other modern processes, such as the "artificial" techniques introduced by the Californian wine industry, a key ingredient of Jopling and co.'s alchemy is publicity. Let the masses feel included so that their psychological investment in the "art' increases its worth to the privileged few. The people who actually buy the stuff are, like everyone else, just sheep looking for a shepherd.

During the twentieth century art was finally transmogrified from a quasi-religious pursuit into a fully-fledged alternative currency. And as fiat currencies lost their luster - a bottomless pit of devalued bank notes in recent times - art became an even more legitimate store of wealth, an asset class. Cue Oscar Wilde's famous witticism about a cynic knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

So here we have the art gallery as megastore, merchandise masquerading as museum, with many thousands of square feet in which to display multi-million pound pieces. There are even more hidden square feet - used for storage and as "private viewing rooms" for the high-rollers. Very kabbalistic that the secret gallery is in fact the real gallery.

But I can't end this post looking quite so disdainful of the marketing industry that is modern art. After all, we locals now have another place to go, somewhere to ogle the works of "famous" artists, and all for free. Bermondsey Street is now an achingly trendy place, having been reinvented and revitalised by the process of "gentrification" that began roughly when I moved here in 1997.

These days, as well as gallery visitors, it's buzzing with yuppies, trendies, yummy mummies and even tourists. Once the nearby Shard is completed, this demographic shift will no doubt intensify. The quirky shops and boutiques are jam-packed with life's more expensive non-essential items. Still, it's alive rather than dead, as it used to be - or at least as it seemed to the uninitiated. This formerly industrial inner-city area, dominated by warehouses, offices and council flats, was a very different place 15 years ago.

Now, like the materials for sale in the White Cube, it has been re-created. Artifice or authenticity ? A fake or the real thing ? Base metal or gold ? And if it is all one grand illusion - a big fat price tag slapped on a "meaningless" concept - how much is it objectively worth ? Cue the cliche answer: whatever someone is prepared to pay for it.

True enough. But you can't quite shake the feeling that neither the glittering white gallery nor those of us in its environs are standing on solid ground.

Update: currencies collide.

Big Brother v. little sis

2012-01-11T21:28:00.000Z

Two decades ago, as a rookie journalist working for a UK marketing magazine, I drew the short straw and found myself with the slightly indecent-sounding job title of "below-the-line editor". Above the line is where you wanted to be. It meant you were privvy to the glamorous, overpaid world of advertising. Below was all the detritus: low-status stuff like direct marketing ("Don't call it junk mail !"), sales promotion and PR.

Desperate to inject some passion into my tedious task, I tried to focus on the "database revolution". Time and again I was assured by the "DM" fraternity that computers were turning marketing on its head: soon - very soon - the first would be last and the last would be ... having the last laugh.

There were all sorts of gurus - mainly American apart from the strangely named, home-grown Drayton Bird - to prove that customer "personalisation", "relationship marketing", "one-to-one marketing" (Trademarked !) and so on would be the saviour of direct marketers everywhere - and the downfall of dinosaur Mad Men with their "scattergun" technique.

In this new world order, marketers would shun billboards and TV commercials in favour of computer-generated, customised communications: tailored to the individual likes and preferences of each and every consumer. Computers in the early '90s were blinding us with science and for below-the-liners there was nothing more white-light blinding than the potential to "drill-down" into the data.

I won't bore you any further with this hugely dreary subject, suffice to say that it all came to nought. Well, almost nought. And certainly nothing even vaguely approaching the megalomaniacal dreams of the times. Did we consumers start being treated like the BFF of companies flogging financial services, TVs or toilet paper ? Did they start whispering sweet nothings into our eager ears, making oh-so-personalised offers that we just couldn't refuse ?

Even with the advent of dot-com mania a few years later, personalised marketing still remained in the realms of fantasy. The irony of these dodgy dot-coms blowing all their seed capital on good old-fashioned above the line advertising was not lost on this jaded observer.

Actual real-world examples of companies "personalising" their marketing seemed to amount to about ... er, one company: Amazon. And what sophisticated strategies did the book giant employ ? "Welcome (back) Robert" and "Other people who purchased this title also bought ..." That was the customised genius of Amazon.

Around the time that the dot-com bubble was bursting in 2000, I went on a press trip to Israel, sponsored by two local companies hoping to cash in on the personalised gold rush. What was really interesting was not so much our hosts' offerings (both companies pretty much died in the years following) as the reaction of the assembled journalists, gathered from various European countries.

Overwhelmingly, they were suspicious of the motives behind the services being offered. It was "Big Brother" they cried, spying on innocent individuals ! Having by now seen how useless companies were at exploiting all this "personal" data, I thought the complete opposite of my continental cousins. For me it was more a case of: "Bring it on ! Please, somebody finally do something to make me feel like a name rather than a number."

I got talking to a couple of the journos - from Germany and France I think - and remember their telling me how any country that had been the victim of authoritarian, dictatorial rule would feel very nervous at the idea of citizens giving up some of their hard-won privacy. I realised then it was a deep-rooted mindset which no amount of counter-argument was about to change.

Today, twelve years later, I still see few signs either of this personalised marketing utopia or of the evil Big Brother state constantly prying into every aspect of our lives.

What I do see are companies that have outsourced almost everything and thus are even more incompetent - the right hand hasn't a clue what the left is doing; they claim to record every phone conversation "for training purposes" but obviously never, ever listen to those recordings so they might start to rectify their endless cock-ups.

In fact, the only Big Brother I see is in the form of lots of "little brothers", which is to say, we-the-people. All of us private citizens of the world. It is we who are watching each other; it is we who give a damn what the rest of us are up to.

And I have the perfect, most up-to-the-minute example to prove this. About an hour ago my very own little sister popped up on Google Talk to say "Enjoying Abba are we ?" What the ??!! I thought, how did she know that P had just been blaring out the likes of Mamma Mia and The Name of the Game on our iPhone ? Well, although it felt weirdly telepathic, the truth was far more prosaic.

Apparently, in one of many unmemorable online moments, I had put the Spotify app on my Facebook page and agreed to let it tell the world what I was listening to. Of course, it wasn't actually me who was accessing my Spotify account at this time, but let that pass.

The bigger point is that Spotify is unlikely to do anything useful with this information - it will go into a forgotten black hole like all the other dead data. Yet within moments of seeing that "personal" info, my sister across the sea had actually done something with it. Not something greatly consequential, perhaps, but at least something rather than nothing.

This "little brother" (or "little sister") society we now live in is why Facebook has become such a titan: it worked out that spying itself should be outsourced - to us - and that the only "customer relationship" worth promoting is between the customers themselves. After all, hasn't this blog post really been just one big subliminal ad for Apple, Amazon, Abba, Spotify, Google and Facebook ?

Arise and go

2012-01-09T22:12:00.000Z

Lech l'cha. Arise and go. Move yourself.

We first leave womb when we are exiled from the home, but just in time since we would have died in Eden. Seek pastures new. Over yonder, under horizon, left at rainbow. Earth flying at 66,000 miles an hour, there's no being, only becoming. I am what I will be.

Liberated, we spend our exilic lives going into new exiles, doors closing, opening, lost and found, travelling away from, towards, sojourning, at home, among foreigners, family, friends, foes (often blended). We stay in our pond and feel bigger as it shrinks around our expanding girth. We make a break for the open sea and disappear, anonymous and animated.

The whole wide world is a narrow bridge connecting us to our future selves. Fear is part of the journey.

The urge for home, the itch for adventure. Stillness and movement. To every think there is a time. We pass through shocking new terrain, from blob into newborn into baby into child. Each stage and age a necessity, no scenic circumventions allowed. Adolescence, quarterlife, midlife, new life. Curiouser and curiouser.

Lost life. What doesn't kill us, but did kill those near to us, makes us stranger and once again we must go into exile or wither in the old country.

Kiss and kin is not what it used to be. Blood and soil is now rootless cosmopolitan, we're all immigrants to Netland. Here, there and everywhere, but always "here". Post-patriots, global villagers, how do we expatriate our online identities? How do we freeze-frame our far-flung home if no longer in a fading sepia photo, stored safe as a gem ?

The past is a foreign country and so is our home and all that once we held. Dear friends were not so firmly planted in that cracked earth, were always strange to us and we to them. Complacent, we would condemn "American" friendship as mere business acquaintance, utilitarian, skin deep. But not we Real people, blood brothers and sisters.

You become a father, so you travel. To meet your son in the land of his birth. "Welcome, stranger", you say to each other. You travel to meet his mother in the land of hers. You travel because your home town is not where it used to be. You travel because there never was an alternative. Take me home to the future.

Wherever I lay my baby's head.

What is this "virtual" fear that stalks our first steps in the Land of Net ? It's the same fear that chased Gutenberg's "virtual" papyrus, through which he opened the doors of perception. Is a "virtual" friend a lesser friend ? Wrong question. It's human nature to make a virtual out of necessity. Count on thoughts, allow them to print on your soul, never mind how they arrive.

We're all strangers, to our ever changing selves as much as to others. We'll take whatever shoulders we can cry on or ears we can whisper into. I'll show you my friendship if you show me yours.

Travel with me a while, stranger; together we'll be stronger.

March 9, 2011, Bom Retiro, Sao Paulo.

Kosher snake oil

2012-01-08T13:26:00.000Z

Once upon a time, many centuries ago, one Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman Girondi left his home town of Girona and travelled to the big city of Barcelona, where he engaged in a now-famous public debate. A former fellow Jew who'd converted to Christianity and become the King's right-hand spiritual advisor wanted to "prove" that Judaism was the theologically inferior religion.

Spain was limbering up for the Inquisition, the audience was hostile, expecting to see a spectacular humiliation of the hated ethnic minority; everything was against the Rabbi, who is better known to future generations as Nachmanides. Yet a miracle happened and he won the debate.

Not enough of a miracle to prevent him from having to flee Spain soon after, in fear for his life, and ending his days in the Holy Land (on second thoughts, maybe a blessing in disguise ?). But a miracle nevertheless, of the David and Goliath type that makes Jews proud of their ability to triumph against the odds, to overcome adversity by the simple force of argument - and perhaps also a sprinkling of magic fairy dust from above.

Jump forward about seven and a half centuries. Instead of Spanish Christendom you have 21st-century Atheism and in place of Nachmanides, you have ... Rabbi "Shmuley" Boteach.

He started on the fame game in my home town of Oxford, where he arrived in the 1980s as an envoy from Lubavitch. For those who don't know, Lubavitch (also known as Chabad) is a Brooklyn-based global operation of orthodox Jews from the Chassidic school. The charismatic leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (whose posthumous career as a potential Messiah is going strong) decided that post-Holocaust Jews needed to be killed with kindness (chesed) in equal measure to the deadly hatred that had engulfed so many of them in Europe. Thus, "outreach" was born, sending Lubavitch emissaries far and wide across the globe, in the hope of revitalising emaciated Jewish souls wherever they might be.

So far, so romantic. But the proudly independent Jewish community of Oxford was not exactly dying on its feet and crying out for help from Lubavitch. However, being pretty open and welcoming, the community and its one decent-sized synagogue showed itself happy enough to work alongside the new arrival. It could see the potential advantage for Jewish students at Oxford University in having more opportunities for Jewish involvement.

But this spirit of co-operation was not reciprocated by Boteach. Claiming the community wasn't "kosher" enough for his liking, he struck out alone. Things got particularly nasty when one of the Oxford Jewish Community elders was allegedly intimidated by a Lubavitcher, who "tried to run me over".

It wasn't long before Boteach's outsized ego could no longer be contained by the organisation that had got him to the UK and so he jettisoned it in favour of his new, one-man band called L'Chaim (which means "to life" in Hebrew and is what you say when having a drink, as in "cheers"!).

Some years later, while attempting to be Jewishly re-born in Jerusalem, I became friendly with a young guy who had been a student at Oxford and a volunteer at the L'Chaim Society. He had already fallen deeply out of love with his former boss and urged me to make journalistic use of his dossier "proving" Boteach's dodgy dealings and less than holy behaviour.

I never got round to doing so but one particular thing he said has stayed with me. My friend told me how every student at Oxford university - non-Jewish as well as Jewish - was given "free" membership of the society whether they asked for it or not - and of course most certainly did not.

Boteach did this, allegedly, because he was playing a numbers game: he wanted to be able to claim that his was the biggest society - or second biggest - at Oxford University, a claim which he keeps making to this day. The fact is that he and his society never had any official connection with the university, yet he continues to boast that he served as "Rabbi at Oxford University". Or is it Rabbi of Oxford University ? Whichever conjunction, the clear intention is to mislead you into thinking he had some official university-endorsed status.

Moreover, the great "kosher" rabbi was responsible for at least one religiously mixed marriage thanks to all the Jewish and non-Jewish mingling at L'Chaim. It should have been patently obvious right from the start that someone like Boteach has only one real religion: fame.

He, of course, would claim that he was only using publicity for a higher purpose, in accordance with Lubavitch leader Schneerson's edict: let orthodox Judaism harness the secular world for the greater glory of God. Isn't it better to "reach out" to the widest possible audience than to remain insular, isolated and, as the Holocaust proved so devastatingly, dangerously vulnerable ?

To paraphrase Little Britain: "yeah but no". Judaism believes that all forces in the world can be used for good or bad: ego makes people, especially males, strive for more, gets them up in the morning. But it is also, like fire, potentially destructive. Moses, the "greatest rabbi" was said to have dangerously high levels of ego and vanity but these were successfully sublimated into the greater good.

Boteach has never got anywhere near to sublimating his ego. The very idea is laughable. he's first and foremost a salesman.

It wasn't long before his questionable "society" was spreading it's wings to London and - of course - Cambridge. Boteach even managed to get a cringing "fly-on-the-wall" documentary all about (you guessed it) himself broadcast on Channel 4. One watched it and saw someone desperate to be a big time celebrity. A Madonna. Rabbi Madonna. But minus her mediocre talent and with an even more grating, screechy voice. All this was long before the chassidic look became a pop star's fashion statement, thanks to Matisyahu.

Questions were growing, however, over L'Chaim's financial and tax dealings. This beneficent "charity" seemed to be keeping the rabbi and his large family in very rude health, with beautiful houses in both Oxford and London and allegations of one too many luxury holidays taken. If you look at this website there's some interesting research into the subject.

Then one fine day, with more of a whimper than a bang, the great transatlantic transplant suddenly vanished from British shores, returning in glory (he claimed) to his native US, where a new chapter of even greater fame beckoned. There were radio and TV talk shows, books like Kosher Sex and those ubiquitous newspaper articles, all conferring respectability and gravitas. He could now spin things to make it appear that his time as a UK expat was simply a warm-up act for the main event, back in the US of A.

Constantly chasing greater highs from the oxygen of publicity, he soon leapt into bed with Michael Jackson. "America's Rabbi" was suddenly best buddies with the damaged and diminished "king of pop", to whom he came bearing deep concern as a "spiritual advisor". The purest, most selfless of motives, as ever.

The website link above shows that there are in fact serious questions to be answered regarding Boteach's financial dealings with a "charity" he set up as part of the Michael Jackson gravy train.

In more recent years, he leapt aboard the atheism bandwagon, debating the new Big Fish, Christopher Hitchens. Writing in the wake of Hitchens' death, Boteach did his usual routine of pretending he'd been close friends with the celeb in question. And he generously informed the reader of Hitchens' discovery "that he was Jewish only when his mother revealed it to him in his twenties".

Only Boteach could make such a sloppy and elementary error. He couldn't even be bothered to Google it and "remind" himself that in fact his great friend Hitchens had been 38 when he discovered his Jewishness, long after his mother's death.

There is no doubt much more to say about this self-styled superstar rabbi - I haven't even mentioned his semi-literate and unproof-read books: if God is in the details, he's certainly nowhere to be found in the sloppy, slapdash and often recycled words penned by Boteach.

To end where I began: when it comes to Jewish wise men - hachamim, sages - and you look at the story of a Nachmanides side by side with that of a "Shmuley", all you can conclude is: "How are the mighty fallen !" Judaism deserved to win the day before. Now, hijacked by people like Boteach, you'd think God was on the side of the atheists.

PS: Someone just asked me what prompted me to write this post now ? I'm not entirely sure but it may have been Boteach's article in the Jerusalem Post in which he did his usual thing of, simultaneously, puffing himself up, patronizing British Jews and writing something as laughably exaggerated as this: "At Limmud [a major Jewish conference over the Christmas period] I was peppered by journalists asking whether I was a candidate for British chief rabbi and the strange speculation reached a fever pitch when The Jerusalem Post published a long feature on the conference’s third day exploring that possibility."

PPS: Someone else, himself a rabbi and an expat Brit now living in the US, says Boteach is not taken very seriously over there. He adds that Jews should be entitled to their own snake oil salesmen, joining the merry throng of non-Jewish snake oil salesmen. Yes, I suppose they should. It just makes it that bit harder to be a "light unto the nations".

PPPS: Have just watched Boteach talking about his new book, Kosher Jesus, in this video - skip past the sycophantic intro by someone else. I suppose I should tone down my criticisms slightly. The guy has some interesting things to say; he might often be ridiculous and irritating; he was clearly damaged emotionally by a messy parental divorce and has a bunch of "issues" to resolve; his self-promotion has often been out of control, he is a fame-junkie whose wisdom and judgement, therefore, will always be questionable ... but maybe this blog post was itself a bit over the top, a rather explosive attempt to redress the balance after years of watching him "get away with it" ? A character like this needs to be held more accountable but I can't pretend he's public enemy number one.

Laughter and forgetting

2012-01-04T22:10:00.000Z

I know I must be a parent because there's a nagging guilt that followed my "what a squeam" post and has made me worry I was too negative. So let me salve my conscience by hereby stating: I may have laughed more in recent times than ever before in my 44 years. Thanks to the sproglet.

I wrote somewhere on this blog how amazing it seems that babies smile so soon after entering the world, and so long before they have the ability to communicate in other ways. Anthropologists and psychologists may say this is simply a defense mechanism: mother nature's way of ingratiating the vulnerable little blob with its parents.

Maybe.

But maybe also it's just a touch more poetic. Smiling before speaking and, even more so, laughing before speaking is something indefinably perfect, requiring no further explanation.

You're on all fours, pretending to be a dog(gie), while being led around the kitchen floor by the ear - and then your 15-month-old guide and leader suddenly starts laughing, and so of course do you. What more needs to be said ? All life's riddles, worries, complexities, demons, angels, good, bad, past, future - all become meaningless, drowned out by the only thing that matters: the laughing moment.

Poverty of imagination

2012-01-04T14:05:00.003Z

Another in the endless parade of Brazilian tackiness. The "rich" lifestyle in Brazil leaves me cold - or cringing.

Bilingual English

2011-12-30T16:40:00.001Z

In the world of modern, competitive parenting, not giving your half-Brazilian child his bilingual birthright is seen as a mortal sin. But however Sam's international language skills do develop, I'm already finding it hard not to give him at least two different versions of English.

English-English (as opposed to American-English etc.) has of course always been very class-conscious. Do you (sorry, does one) say couch, sofa or settee ? Dinner, tea or supper ? Toilet, loo or bathroom ?

But it's more tricky than just class when trying to teach a baby to speak. For instance, do I stick more to generics or specifics ? Is it a photo, a painting or simply a picture ? Do we live in a house, a flat or a home ?

I'm supposed to be pretty good with words, at least compared to the average, but I'm finding this a tough gig. It's made more confusing by the peculiarities of baby books. "Where's Spot ? It's time for dinner !" Well, Spot may be required for dinner attendance but I'm sure I'm more of a supper man myself. Yet after my Spotty re-education I now find myself telling Sam about "dinner", not just on the page but in the real world too. Presumably consistency is king at this age ?

Then there's abbreviations. I try to keep it short, so it's a phone rather than telephone. But I keep slipping up and going for the full verbal monty, simply because sometimes I instinctively say telephone.

And don't get me started on aural descriptors. Modern trains are silent, but then you find yourself sitting on one with your son and making "shu-shu-shu-shu" and "chuu-chuuuuu" noises. Babies need accompanying sounds, not modern, efficient, electrified silence. And anyway, all the baby books tell you that this is the sound a train makes. Consistency again.

This is the kind of post where I'll probably think of a million troublesome words and phrases after I've posted. So I'll keep it short for now, publish and be damned, and invite comments from any readers, whether they are as bemused as me I me I the author or ready to offer the magic wand of been-there-done-that parental wisdom.

Update 1: I didn't even mention all the American-English that comes with many / most of the electronic toys these days. Two versions of childhood separated by a common language, from A to Zee (Zed).

Update 2: Dog or doggie ? Little dog(gie), baby dog or puppy ? Then there's the bizarre choice of wording on some (English-English) baby books: a picture of a biscuit accompanied by the word "treat"; a picture of a kiwi and the word "kiwi" - but is that really more appropriate at this age than the more generic word "fruit" ? The very next page does indeed go for the generic by showing what looks like Emmental but writing "cheese". Then we see something called a "beaker" rather than "drink" or "cup". And "cutlery" next to a picture of a spoon and fork. Cutlery ?!

What a squeam

2011-12-26T23:14:00.003Z

Sometimes, nesting with a toddler is like living with a drunk: stumbling and crashing all over the place; an excess of extreme emotions; lightning fast mood changes from sunny to psychotic. And back again. Thus it was today - a day on which Sam chose to grace us with his most charming, smiley and all-round adorable self for the entire morning, starting from the very moment he opened his eyes. Presumably he'd had a great night. But with a suddenness that was head-spinning, as he (presumably) decided his lunch was overdue, he pitched headlong into a quite demented and deafening squeaky-scream. Or was it a series of squeaks and screams ? Or perhaps a screamy squeak ? Or a squeam ? How do you define all these baby noises ?

He'd been limbering up for this in recent days while staying chez the grandparents, where I noticed this strange and disconcerting new noise beginning to emerge. But that was just the preamble; what we got today was like something out of the Omen, and the worst part was that nothing seemed to sate or salve his ear-splitting anger - certainly not the food he was hurriedly being given. Was it yet another manifestation of the winter lurgy that has been plaguing us all ? As ever, we don't know anything for sure but must instead presume and suppose and speculate.

All we do know is that, with food consumed and post-prandial nap taken while on his daily constitutional, the now almost 15-month-old bambino mercifully slipped back into his more benign self as the day wound down, finally ending as he'd begun: cute and cuddly.

Is this the dawning of yet another new phase ? The "terrible twos" come early ? (Even though they're supposed to be a myth or misnomer, or even a mythnomer.) No doubt many will tell me it's perfectly normal and signals his growing desire to communicate. Whatever it is or isn't, I'm no longer holding my breath for an explanation, having finally twigged that in this surreal land called parenthood, abnormal is the new normal.

Still, living with a "drunk" often makes you want to reach for the bottle yourself. Either that or watch some more Family Guy, featuring crazed megalomaniac baby Stewie.

More damn stats

2011-12-26T22:35:00.004Z

Brazil economy overtakes UK. And on the other hand, this.

Hitchens part deux

2011-12-19T00:39:00.040Z

Not sure if my previous post said what I wanted it to. I also made the usual mistake of publishing long before I had finished editing (and no doubt will do so again on this post). Anyone who reads this blog soon after posts appear is reading something often quite different from a reader of the same post a while later. Hitchens was praised for his ability to write publication-perfect prose at 100 miles an hour, often after drinking "enough to kill or stun the average mule."

So what did I want to say ? Well, as confirmed by some of the less-glowing tributes (and therefore more in the spirit of the man himself), I often found myself put off by his old-school pomposity and mannered style, at least when debating on camera. He was supposed to write well because he took the advice (from Simon Hoggart) to "write as you speak". But sometimes his speech seemed just too affected, like someone permanently acting and unable to switch off. All a bit last-century. Especially the constant use of "brothers, sisters, comrades" and suchlike when addressing audiences. Not to mention the ubiquitous, gratuitous French phrases.

Then there was the cliqueness and crescendo of self-congratulatory back-slapping among the group of well-known writers that constituted his inner circle. As one profiler (Lynn Barber) noted while he was still alive, Hitchens was an amazingly social creature for someone who professed to follow the road less travelled.

I ended the previous post by saying that Hitchens was likeable, in marked contrast to many supposedly more godly men against whom he pitched himself in atheistic debate. I'll give an example of that: I tried reading a book called "Nonsense of a High Order" by one Rabbi Moshe Averick, subtitled "The confused and illusory world of the atheist". He takes aim at all the usual atheist targets, including Hitchens. I found much of interest in this book; it provoked thought which is surely the mark of a good book. Yet the author seemed, well, obnoxious: insufferably smug and childish for someone purportedly discussing the meaning of life (as also seen in his interaction with readers in the comments section of a website.) Sadly, I'm all too familiar with that personality type from my time inside Jewish "outreach".

Hitchens may well have been obnoxious himself at times, as well as sloppy in some of his thinking. But he also had ... something. As he said himself, his greatest fear and hatred was to be boring / bored. Communicating without being boring and with a degree of charm is too important to leave to chance. It really should be taught in schools.

Despite my reservations about Hitchens-the-man, over the years I have found myself lapping up his columns and, latterly, his books. I read his autobiography, Hitch-22, on my iphone while in Brazil; and I listened to the audiobook of "God is not great" also while over there. It was a great comfort and stimulation to have a big fat dose of Hitchens while stuck in a Latin land of tedious superstition. And on that occasion his Richard Burton-esque reading voice went down very well. As so often, I found myself laughing out loud numerous times.

I must have been pretty desperate for intellectually stimulating company since, as I said, I emailed him a fan letter. I suppose it was more of a get-well-soon letter. But my Hitchens-watching had long put me in the "twitcher" camp. Some years ago I had actually stalked the guy while he was walking in Manhattan and then again in London's Soho. By stalked I mean followed for a few hundred yards, during which time I was wondering if I had anything worth saying to him, unprompted, and whether he would anyway be receptive at that particular moment. I decided not, on both counts.

The fact that he was still writing so incredibly close to the final curtain, and writing about all the usual subjects rather than his own dire predicament, also leaves me with a pretty big sense of loss: his articles are part of the ebb and flow of my life, as they are for so many other people. I still expect them to be churned out, week after week, month after month, year after year. I suppose that makes me an addict.

But hang on a minute. I've had this same sense of "what am I going to do ?!" and even "what is the world going to do ?!" after others have left the stage. And that brings me back to the opening sentence of my previous post, about the illusion that we are connected to people who are, in fact, complete strangers to us. I didn't "know" Hitchens, or Steve Jobs or Amy Winehouse (I hesitate to mention her name alongside these two) just as they didn't know me. We were not acquainted. I was acquainted with things that they put out there for general consumption.

Let me reveal something else: with both Hitchens and Jobs, whose terminal illnesses had been widely broadcast, I found myself thinking, once or twice, "come on, then, weren't you supposed to have died by now ?" I was waiting for the moment of drama. That was also part of the "show". Of course, when they did actually die my dirty little question disappeared in a puff of amnesia, to be replaced by genuine shock and sadness - perhaps even mild panic.

But that's the theatre of public life for you: watching people strut and fret upon the global stage means we, the audience, are captivated as much by the superficial drama as by any deep and meaningful content. Only time will help us untangle our muddled, muddied minds. For now I'll conclude by adding my own "rest in peace" wishes to an especially familiar stranger; an occasional fellow-traveller whom I never met; and to someone "out there" who's no longer ... there.

The time-worn RIP phrase just seems to be the right thing to say immediately after the trauma of dying. The individual words may be meaningless if you subtract the emotional intent behind them but can you ever really do that ? Hitchens may have preached an anti-theistic extinction of all consciousness once the brain dies but the emotional heartbeat of his life - reflected back at him by all who felt its force - can at least carry him across the river to the unknown shore.

Whatever has become of you, Hitch, this abandoned reader wants to remind my own reader that you were an anti-theist, not an atheist. Which to my ears bespeaks a Jew-ish kind of non-believer: he who wrestles with God. Or god.

Unreadiness is all

2011-12-16T20:20:00.056Z

Our hyper-connected age means we often feel closer to strangers than to kith and kin. What is it to be involved with someone we have never met in person, or to feel that their existence / non-existence is deeply affecting our life ? Christopher Hitchens railed against the bogus sentimentalism that swept his native country when "The People's Princess" Diana died. And he said so very publicly not long after her pseudo-state funeral. Now we must do his memory the courtesy of avoiding such misplaced sentimentality and hagiography.

For whatever base reasons, when familiar strangers die we feel a jolt. The actor Richard Burton "left the building" in 1984 and though I had not been especially interested in his life, I still felt a degree of shock and concern over his untimely exit. Celebrated for his Shakespearean film roles, I immediately thought of Hamlet's line, "The readiness is all" - readiness for death when life is often nasty, brutish and short. And drink-sodden.

How naive I was, childishly imagining that no-one could die before they had reached some kind of spiritual nirvana. (Mind you, the recent George Harrison documentary showed him feeling much the same way throughout his life). I retained a good deal of that foolishness when the next "stranger" death occurred - that of talk show host Russell Harty in 1988. One minute he was there, babbling to celebrities on TV, and the next he was gone, at the unripe age of 54.

How seemingly random and quixotic of me to give a damn about these particular characters, but that's how it was. As with my lachrymose teenage reaction to the death of a family cat, my emotional response to the high-profile deaths said more about me and my stage of life than it did about the celebs I was apparently mourning.

I've come a long way since then, having years ago lost track of all the unready, unripe deaths. Eventually it dawned on me that none of us is ever "ready", not even those who deny life by obsessing about death. That's just another fetish.

This blog has already recorded two unripe "stranger" deaths - one in the form of 27-year-old Amy Winehouse and another in the passing of 56-year-old Steve Jobs. Now it's time to add my voice to the outpouring for Christopher Hitchens, whose atheistic body has just given up the ghost after 62 years.

Characteristically writing right up to the bitter end, Hitchens had worried that he was unready for the grim reaper. But I would argue he was more ready than most.

Like Burton's, his was a hard-drinking, hard-living life but it was also hard-working and hard-thinking. As his brother Peter wrote in a touching article today, Christopher's life had also been imbued with courage. Not the cliched courage of cancer "battlers" - his iconoclasm didn't allow for such lazy labels - but the courage to, as Steve Jobs might have put it, "think different". Often enough that meant thinking differently from your former self, as well as from others, and killing off your own sacred cows. In Hitchens' case, it also meant living life at full-throttle, travelling relentlessly, taking positions, risks and somehow keeping the bookish, ivory-tower side of himself in check.

I first came across Hitchens in 1988 when working as an intern at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in New York. Their subsidiary Hill & Wang was publishing his first collection of essays, "Prepared for the worst" (which might have been more apt as the title of his final collection). The last essay in the book described his belated awareness that his mother had been Jewish and so, therefore, was he.

His family had lived for a period in Oxford, where I grew up, and now that I was living in NYC, capital of the non-Israeli Jewish world, I felt particularly intrigued by this writer's revelation. Although aware of my Jewish identity from birth, I was perhaps not so different from him in feeling confused and conflicted as to my "real" identity - English, Jewish, expat, other ? Some years later, in my own belated attempt to square the circle, I tried on an all-out Jewish identity, enticed by a new breed of born-again Jewish groups (or "outreach" as they euphemistically called themselves). As a result, Hitchens and his Jew-lite spiel would for a while become unkosher to my intolerant ears. But not yet. And thankfully not since.

When he became widely known for his anti-theist views via the 2007 book "God is not great", I often wondered what deeper stirrings might lie behind Hitchens' intolerance and anger toward much within Jewish practice. He stated that Jews were proto-secularists: they had managed to reduce a plethora of gods down to just one. They were ahead of the pack in pursuing the holy grail of zero gods but still not quite there yet. At least, not in theory. In reality he saw many fellow travellers among his newfound co-religionists. Not to mention his philosophical and political heroes such as Baruch Spinoza and Leon Trotsky, aka Lev Davidovich Bronstein.

Hitchens reserved an extra dose of bile for the "child-abusing" Jewish practice of circumcision. Here's my cod-psychology theory regarding his personal animus: he was not circumcised by an "exotic", "classy" mother who hid her own Jewishness, as many British Jews did in the wake of the Holocaust. He was not raised Jewish, a religion that is notoriously demanding if you want to be traditionally observant. His mother Yvonne was unhappily married to his "boring" English father, a frustrated ex-navy commander. Yvonne finally ran off with a former vicar before committing joint suicide in Greece. Hitchens was 24 at the time and writes extensively about this trauma in his autobiography, Hitch-22.

Indeed he notes that in his very last phone conversation with his mother, during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, she said she was thinking of moving to Israel. The young Hitchens thought this was just another "quasi-spiritual" idea from someone desperate to reinvent herself. His response on hearing this revelation was to describe Israel as just another war zone and, moreover, land illegally occupied by Jewish squatters. This provoked an unexpectedly strong reaction from Yvonne: "My impatience earned me a short lecture about how the Jews had made the desert bloom and were exerting themselves in a heroic manner."

If he had not been so "mocking and dismissive", the older Hitchens concedes, perhaps his mother would have taken that opportunity to share with him her dark secret about his Jewish roots ? Perhaps she would not have felt so helpless and hopeless as to take her own life ? Hitchens discovered that just before her suicide, she had tried to contact him multiple times. And he believes she even tried to abort the suicide bid once it was underway - but tragically too late. All of which amounts to a pretty heavy mother-son dynamic and one that clearly left him with all sorts of unprocessed emotional baggage.

A personality like Hitchens seems to fit the "forewarned is forearmed" motto. With Judaism he was not forewarned and his foreskin remained firmly in place. To discover at 38 that you are halachically Jewish (that is, fully Jewish according to the law of matrilineal descent) is one thing; but to feel confidently Jewish is quite another. And I wonder if being a Jonah-come-lately to Judaism was a challenge too far for this famous polymath, hence the need to play catch-up only in order to confirm his position as a militantly secular Jew.

Is it too harsh to say of Hitchens' Jewish journey, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing ? Did he secretly wish to belong rather than bash but uncharacteristically lacked the courage to try ? Much easier at that point simply to champion the uncircumscribed mind and to see it as indivisible from an uncircumcised member.

To be honest, I'm not unduly worried about solving such psychological riddles, even if I did ask Hitchens directly in a rare fan letter I wrote him last year (unanswered). These days I don't feel that I belong much myself. Who does anymore ? We've all been atomised by post-modernity and globalisation. Those who try to take refuge in fundamentalist extremes are just yearning for a "safe" past that never existed. Just ask Matisyahu.

The craving for certainty through rules, the need to obsess about who's in and who's out, inclusion and exclusion, are childish and tiresome. I may have my doubts about Hitchens' subconscious motives but I'd still far rather have spent time with him than with any number of "believers", Jewish or otherwise, who have tried to dismiss him with the wave of a condescending keyboard. For all his shortcomings, Hitchens possessed a quality which these god-fearers eminently lacked: likeability.

To be continued ...

Sporting chance

2011-12-06T18:23:00.003Z

Last night I played badminton for a second time at the Bethnal Green Technology College, open to the public in the evenings. It's a fairly new gym and pretty decent. As I was leaving, I couldn't help comparing and contrasting it with Clube Hebraica, one of only two badminton venues I found in Sao Paulo.

The latter is billed as being the largest Jewish community centre / club in the world. In reality, it is just another private bubble, an ugly concrete-clad edifice, badly finished and filled with furniture that seems stuck in a 1960s or 70s time-warp.

Yet it costs a fortune to join and in monthly membership dues. It also happened to be an impossibly expensive and gridlocked taxi journey across town, which is why I gave up going there (as a guest rather than member, I hasten to add).

In stunning contrast, BGTC is in one of London's notoriously poorer areas and my fellow badminton players, almost exclusively from the local Bengali Muslim population, were hardly the kind of demographic you would expect to see in one of Sao Paulo's "rich" areas. Yet here they were, enjoying the facilities of a building which seemed to have arrived from the future compared to the "rich" but dreadful Clube Hebraica.

Yes, London has its dodgy side and its occasional rioting, but a new building like this in a "poor" area shows that civil society is as deeply-rooted in the UK as it is a far-off fantasy in Brazil.

PS: Looks like the economic boom is over in Brazil. As I sensed when living there, the overstretched consumer in a consumer-unfriendly society has finally buckled.

Play it again, Sam

2011-12-05T11:50:00.008Z

Well, here it is ... again. Six months (almost to the day) after dad first began trying to secure your exit from Brazil and now at the ripe old age of 14 months, Sam, you've just received your third passport.

Of course, the first British one turned out to be a rather cruel joke on the part of her majesty's government. But arriving early this morning, and by personal courier no less, was your second and, for the next five years at least, your final British passport. This can be added to your Certificate of Registration as a British Citizen to prove decisively, conclusively, officially and exhaustively, that as well as being a Brazilian you are also now a Brit !

So that's you sorted. Just need to get a few parental loose ends tidied up and then we can consign visa and nationality status traumas to the dustbin of history.

In the meantime, it's a little ironic that out of the three of us, right now you're the only one who's able to leave the UK, since both mum and dad's passports are in the unhurried hands of the border control bureaucrats.

Going anywhere nice ?

Occupy London

2011-11-29T00:45:00.016Z

Kids and adults. Fathers and sons. The other day Sam amused himself in his usual way by taking the car keys, chewing them and at some mysterious moment, dropping them. The question is where ? Since they never turned up I can only guess it was down the toilet, perhaps as he reached to flush the chain - another new trick.

As the car to which the keys belonged was about to be clamped - an event I had long anticipated and planned for - I vainly scoured every inch of the flat, hoping to pre-empt the clampers. But it soon became obvious the keys would not be found and my stress level went through the roof. Not only would there now be a big fee (£140) to pay; not only would there be the prohibitively expensive cost of replacing the lost set; but I would also have to travel to another city (Oxford) just to retrieve a spare set.

Stress caused me almost to lose my rag with Sam, pressing him for a level of communication which remains in the realm of fantasy: "Keys ! ... car keys ! ... where ?!" Of course all this elicited was his familiar car sound - blowing through pursed lips.

Kids and adults. Who would want to be the latter ?

So off to Oxford I went, cycling from home in Southwark to Paddington station: a familiar route and mode of transport but this time I found myself trapped in the St. James Park-Royal Mall-Buckingham Palace triangle. The president of Turkey was being treated to a State reception, which meant a parade of Royals, including the Queen, Charles and William (I think it was him) going down the Mall in posh cars and then back again in horse-drawn carriages. Royal soldiers did their usual marching, shouting and military aerobics.

And we, the people, were literally a captive audience, unable to escape our Royal masters for the best part of an hour: long enough to fume yet again about the insanity of monarchy. God help us, when will the majority of Brits wake up to the demented idiocy that is this game of fancy-dress ? Why not just appoint a new bunch of Royals every week, based on who wins the National Lottery ?

My fuming was briefly interrupted by the sound of kids running at full tilt through the park, eager to catch another glimpse of the Queen Bee and the other gilded geese. Seeing this, I imagined how I would have behaved if my son had been with me. The sad reality is that I too would probably have entered into the childish spirit of the occasion.

But he wasn't there and so I was in Grinch-mode. The full apparatus of state was being used to grant extreme privilege to an undeserving few, at huge public expense. The VIPs (very important parasites) were ferried up and down the garden path (the illusion of this being public space was shattered) so they could work up an appetite for yet another banquet (recession, what recession ?) while expendables like me had to thank our lucky stars that we had popped into Greggs to buy an egg mayonnaise sandwich and a sticky bun en route.

We had work to go to, trains to catch and plans to keep - the little, unimportant things which allow governments and royalty to function in the first place, especially with this tottering economy.

But suddenly we realised what it means to be a "subject" of her Majesty rather than a fully-fledged citizen: we, the 99.99% are unimportant, while those 0.01% who live off our taxes and their inherited wealth are desperately, desperately important. I was witnessing the real occupiers of London and, like others massively inconvenienced with no warning or apology, we were not amused.

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

Car keys down the toilet.

Toy soldiers and kings and queens.

Childish things.

Like a Virgin

2011-11-10T17:57:00.008Z

After suffering the nightmare of Telefonica Brazil's broadband - possibly faster than a carrier pigeon but certainly not fast enough to watch video, while at the same time being criminally expensive - I know I should be pathetically grateful for any old broadband back in Blighty. But human nature being what it is, I soon became itchy to test out the competition.

So it was a fond farewell to TalkTalk, whose founder and chief executive, Charles Dunstone had impressed the hell out of me over the years by always replying to my personal emails (often within minutes) and thus more than making up for the too-often flakey - or worse - Indian call centres and technology. But when my tenant was recently inconvenienced one too many times by the on-again-off-again phone and internet connection, I found myself sharing her exasperation at the situation.

I did a bit of online research to bring myself up to date with the broadband market and decided to give Virgin cable another go. I had used it a few years ago and half-remembered something disappointing about it. This became a fully-remembered problem once the new, super-fast 30-meg line was installed and switched on. Yes, the test showed it was flowing at full-tilt through the pipes but in actual use it often seemed painfully slow or even dead. Despite the fantastic-looking modem, with its multi-coloured lights constantly flashing away, navigating the Web once again felt cumbersome. I am guessing there was also something iffy with the wifi - too often you just sat there waiting to hop back onto its irregular signal. Very disappointing.

So now I've gone with O2, despite their customer service and technical slip-ups already. The product itself seems excellent. It uses the boring old phone line, unlike Virgin's cable, but seems to employ a bit of gee-whizz gadgetry that helps draw twice as much data. The net effect is that you get a steady flow of high-speed internet, which is infinitely preferable to an unsteady flow of super-high-speed internet !

One other thing worth mentioning: on ending my trial period with Virgin I asked if they wanted the modem back and they said no. I immediately thought of the crappy modem we had been forced to buy back in Sao Paulo, since Telefonica's really crappy modem didn't include wifi. And when we ended our contract with Telefonica, something they made all but impossible to do, we had to schlep across town and hand-deliver their piece of junk back to a Telefonica office.

Neighbours

2011-11-10T16:33:00.004Z

... everybody needs good neighbours. And here's another truism: when it rains, it pours. When it was "raining" in Sao Paulo, which was often - very often - it was amazing how many other things contributed to the soaking I received.

One day, I discovered I had been charged £250 because I had failed to pay my half-yearly service charge on time. That being the service charge on my "home", the flat in London to which I recently returned after a 13-month absence.

This £250 fine was because someone had seen fit to do a Land Registry check on my flat, that is to see if I was still, after many years of active involvement in the running of this place, the owner. The someone in question was our dear leader, the chairman of the "company" set up by residents to run this collection of 100-plus flats. Since I am also a director of said company, and since I had been in regular contact with the chairman and indeed our managing agent, it seems a little ... overzealous to give me this virtual pat-down. And then present me with the bill.

And all because for the first-time ever I failed to pay on time, or indeed within hours of receiving a bill though the post. For years I had asked the chairman why we couldn't receive our bills as email notifications or why we couldn't pay them by direct debit, as we do almost everything else, and then just forget about them. Oh no, he said, computer says no. We must follow "The Law" and deliver them by snail-mail. But what's to stop us doing both, I asked, to no avail. Our chairman is the kind of low-tech, blinkered bureaucrat who would probably thrive in Brazil.

This much ado about nothing mushroomed into a giant show-down and stand-off between us. It then ballooned even further by drawing in our fellow directors, who saw fit to put their names to an email demanding that A) I apologise and B) I resign. That's what you get when no-one can be bothered to be the chairman themselves and thus will say or do almost anything to keep the current incumbent sweet.

Equally unsurprisingly, I did neither A nor B but chose C: dearest fellow directors, please worry less about the sensitivites of our chairman and more about the real non-payers of our service charge, who are growing in number during these grim economic times.

So the show rumbles on and when I'm not being angry about it I can't help laughing at the age-old cliche of warring neighbours. This kind of war I can handle; the kind that involves armed assailants in my home I'm not so good at.

Unreal and unjust

2011-11-08T07:40:00.004Z

After our violent robbery in June and subsequently being told by local police that I and my son were in danger of kidnapping unless we moved house, all I wanted to do was get back to the UK.

But our UK immigration lawyer told us it would be too risky to bring two "foreigners" in our party of three into the UK. Instead, following his advice, we spent a fortune in money, time and stress applying for a visa allowing my son a "right of settlement" in the UK. It was flatly rejected, along with the first appeal.

Because that visa application failed, we were stopped at Heathrow in August and treated with great suspicion - Sam and P kept in isolation for 10 hours and almost deported immediately. As I said in my previous post, hopefully all this cr@p is behind us but when I read news reports about what went on with UK border control while we were being locked out of my own country, my mouth drops in utter disbelief and the anger comes flooding back. Today's news tells us as follows:

"On Monday, Mrs (Home Secretary Theresa) May admitted she personally authorised border controls to be relaxed during the summer months for Britons and other EU nationals.

But she insisted that UK Border Agency (UKBA) officials had gone further than she had intended, by scaling back key checks on travellers from outside Europe without ministerial approval.

The number of suspected terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants who entered the country as a result of the move will never be known, Mrs May admitted."

Update: "It's frightening how many slip through the net"

Update 2: "Border checks suspended regularly since 2007".

Update 3: "500,000 let into UK with no checks".

Stable door

2011-11-04T23:53:00.002Z

There it goes again, slamming wildly long after the horses have bolted. I never thought I'd take such interest in the UKBA but after our experience I might be forgiven for becoming a bit obsessed with it. The vast incompetence and worse now being unearthed just adds to my bitterness about the overzealous, money-grubbing and punitive way we were treated, although hopefully it's all in the past tense now.

... And this just in.

Update: It just gets better and better. Now we read this, which suggests that while people like us were being harassed, financially exploited and still given the cold shoulder, others much less deserving were being welcomed with open arms this past summer ! "Not fit for purpose" doesn't even begin to describe the farce that was (and still is ?) the UKBA.

Misinformation Age

2011-11-04T10:24:00.007Z

Coming back from the Stone Age that was life in Brazil has made me appreciate life in the UK a thousand times more. As we settle back into the London flat, the ability to order things online and have them delivered to the door - up four flights of stairs, thank you Amazon, Tesco et al - has been wondrous to behold. I am reborn as an online evangelist.

But with higher standards come higher expectations. I've experienced several examples recently of misinformation and confusion from companies and organizations. That is bad enough but what really grates is when you are misinformed with zeal, when the person fervently or dogmatically or didactically insists upon the rightness and trueness of his words and the wrongness of anything that contradicts them. When that happens and s/he is subsequently proved wrong, it is doubly annoying.

Example one: several people at the IPS (Identity and Passport Service) assured me by phone that my son would qualify for a British passport. I applied, including a very full, full-disclosure letter. A week later I received said passport. Celebrations all round. Not long after, following an over-zealous inquiry to the IPS from my local MP, double-checking that the passport had been correctly issued, I was informed that it had not been correctly issued and must now be rescinded. Depression all round. Two phone chats with the head of the IPS resulted in his assuring me that his staff would, in future, be better informed. Great, so glad to be the crash-test dummy in your learning curve ! Considerable hassle later and my son now has a certificate of British citizenship, which is one-up on a passport, so we're smiling again - and bracing for another tedious passport application, albeit without worries this time.

Example two: Trying to switch from TalkTalk to O2 for phone and broadband. More than one person at the latter assured me that TalkTalk must - legally - issue me with a MAC number, and if they did not then I could go to Ofcom forthwith. On this misinformation, I got heavy with TalkTalk. But then someone else at O2 finally agreed that I did not need a MAC number in order to leave. I was also told by O2 that I qualified for a discount on my bill. Subsequently this information was shown to be suspect too. When starting a new customer relationship this doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Example three: Switching foreign currency bank accounts from Nationwide to Lloyds I was assured by the latter that I would not have to receive a constant stream of unwanted paper statements - something which irked me no end with Nationwide. But on opening the Lloyds accounts the paper statements began to arrive. Call up, speak to someone who says "You can switch them off by logging into your account and clicking X button". That turned out to be wrong, plain and simple. Speak to someone else who says, "No, you can't switch paper statements off for these accounts." Make a fuss, am transferred to the guy who opened the accounts for me and who reassured me multiple times that I could go paperless. He checks again and, to my pleasant surprise, comes back and says he has got them to make a personal request to switch off the paper. So hopefully a happy ending to that little saga.

As I said, it's all relative. Being back in the UK is living like a king, so much price, product, service and convenience choice compared to the nightmare of Brazil. But this problem of misinformation is one of the biggest challenges in our information society. There's so much more that frontline staff need to know about these days and yet there is far too much shoddy middle and senior management at companies who are not investing in the right level of training.

Now we are one

2011-10-26T05:59:00.004+01:00

Yet another anniversary: I've been "hanging out" with you for exactly one year today, Sam, having arrived in Sao Paulo to meet you on October 27, 2010. Feels like a hell of a lot longer to me, and probably like a lifetime to you. 5.44 am. I'm staring at the nearly completed Shard, through my bedroom window, our window, a giant lighthouse on the doorstep. There was a lot less of it, and the beacon less bright, when your journey began here in this cosy corner of a foreign field. January 17, 2010, according to some sources.

Playing the price

2011-10-25T01:23:00.000+01:00

A Brazilian woman, mother of one, at a recent playgroup in Oxford: "In Rio we owned our own place and earned more; here we are renting and on lower salaries. But with all the subsidised or free services available to you as a parent, as well as all the other things that make life here so much easier, we feel wealthier living in the UK."

Brazil is calling

2011-10-24T19:40:00.001+01:00

So said the huge, wrap-around billboard ad on the Waterloo IMAX cinema, as we strolled in central London today. I turned to P and said: "Don't answer ! Let it ring."

A Job well done

2011-10-06T14:08:00.001+01:00

Like many, I feel a sense of loss and sadness today that I can't imagine applying to any other fallen "business leader". With his "Just one more thing" presentations, Steve Jobs always represented the future rather than the past - the cutting edge in technology with a human face.

As someone just posted on Twitter, "Steve Jobs was born out of wedlock, put up for adoption at birth, dropped out of college, then changed the world. What's your excuse?"

I previously mentioned the Apple founder on this blog and also referred to his famous address to graduating students. Jobs may have been very tough as a boss - perhaps even cruel at times - but his humanity and vision is what we all remember as an era finally draws to a close.

RIP Steve.

Update: Interesting obit in the Telegraph, not always flattering.

Update 2: Beautiful tribute from his sister Mona.

Hayom harat olam

2011-09-29T20:00:00.000+01:00

... or in English: "Today is the birthday of the world", aka Jewish New Year, aka Rosh Hashana 5772. It's also your first birthday, Sam. The weather here in Oxford was perfect, and so were you. In recent days you've been walking, saying "mama" and charming everyone as usual.

Happy First Birthday, son.

And happy new year for this year and every year to come.

End of the beginning

2011-09-18T17:39:00.001+01:00

Three and a half weeks back in Britain and my son now has a British passport to add to his Brazilian one. None of us expected it to come so quickly or easily, such was the confusion and gloom over his status. Now we will try to make a life here and my ten months in Brazil will, I imagine, become just another travel adventure rather than a potential life sentence.

Unusually for me, I feel no sentimental attachment to the country, apart from my son and partner's blood ties to it.

Politically, Brazil is both too big and too small. Antiquated socialist bureaucracy on the one hand and anarchic law of the jungle on the other. No room for the middle to breathe. Uncorrupted governance, an educated electorate, free enterprise, civil society, enlightened self-interest ... all a long way off, as far as I can see. A creative rather than commodity-driven economy would benefit everyone, but that can only happen by smashing the status quo. And I don't see any sign of radical change in the near future.

This blog has probably served its purpose, so let me thank you, dear reader, real or imagined, for sharing this part of the journey with me. Until we meet again, tchao tchao.

Unpaved memory lane

2011-09-08T14:50:00.001+01:00

An article in the current issue of Folha de Sao Paulo talks about this blog's old bugbear: stone-age sidewalks in Sao Paulo.

As had been immediately obvious to my neophyte eye, the article mentions how pavements are the individual responsibility of the privately-owned buildings whose land they adjoin. The municipality only has responsibility for sidewalks in front of government-owned buildings !

New regulations are apparently being brought in to enforce more pedestrian-friendly walkways. Hmm. I'm still not holding my breath. Of course, the only sane solution is for Sao Paulo to act completely out of character and take responsibility for all its pavements. Perhaps someone should offer them a translation of John Donne's famous words:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe [or Brazil] is the less.

As I keep saying, a society stands or falls by the quality of its pavements. Donne's poem, written close to the founding of modern Brazil, sees this with a clarity which still eludes that country in the twenty-first century.

Keep blogging and carry on

2011-09-08T05:12:00.001+01:00

The devil has all the best tunes; paradise is boring. We've been back in Blighty for a fortnight now and my mood and blogging continue to be inversely correlated: unhappy equals more blogging, and vice versa. As I wrote in my recent post, life here feels so much sweeter after the bitterness of Sao Paulo. I'd like to write a national newspaper article telling downbeat Brits that despite all the doom and gloom, "You've never had it so good!" "Bankrupt Britain" is still light years ahead of "Booming Brazil". As a shopper, I'm overwhelmed by choice, quality and value. Where's all this crazy food inflation everyone keeps talking about ? It must have flown south across the Atlantic.

Residing here on the periphery of Oxford, I'm able to appreciate the seamless blend of cityscape and landscape as never before. The barely visible minutiae of civilization, all quietly contributing to an enhanced life experience. And above all, the safety: the physical openness and lack of self-imposed prisons. But sadly all this is taken for granted by most Brits, including my former self.

It's endlessly fascinating how perception and reality are so often out of step. Exotic Brazil has a fun and sensuous image to most people in this part of the world. My downbeat assessment of life there generally seems to fall on deaf ears. That's in marked contrast to the many times Brits used to warn me that Israel, a frequent destination of mine over the years, was "dangerous". In fact, normal life there is safer than elsewhere, including Britain.

The woman who cleans my parents' house is Brazilian and married to "an Italian", according to my mother. But a quick inquiry confirms, once again, that her husband is just another Brazilian who acquired an Italian passport. As I wrote on my blog recently, the question of why such passports are awarded - what's in it for countries like Italy ? - is one that intrigues me and which I put to her, hoping for enlightenment. But all I got was the familiar refrain that she can earn more in the UK than in Italy.

This was closely followed by another common complaint: that she has had to reduce her status by working as a cleaner here when in Brazil she is a hairdresser. Why didn't she take advantage of her UK ticket-to-ride by perhaps re-qualifying as a hairdresser here, you might ask. Like many Brazilians abroad she doesn't seem to have expanded her horizons in line with the opportunities she has been given.

It has been enough simply to earn money to send back to Brazil - she and her husband have no less than three houses there - and look to return at some point. Of course it must help to know that you can pop back to the UK as and when to top up the bank balance. I'm all in favour of free movement of labour, just that it is applied equally and fairly.

As for this woman preferring "home" over "abroad", well obviously I'm in no position to criticize. We all have the inalienable right to decide where we call home, even if we end up not living there.

Keep calm and carry on

2011-08-29T23:02:00.001+01:00

It seems as if every other Brazilian you meet has joint Italian, Spanish or Portuguese nationality. All they need is a grandparent from one of those countries to qualify. Why do countries, including others such as Poland, offer this generous benefit to people who appear, once they have it, to go and settle in the UK ? I've heard endless stories to this effect, with Britain's famous welfare state rolling out the red carpet to these instant EU "citizens".

Then there are the preachers of hate, militant Islamic and otherwise, who enjoy decades of job-free hospitality in the UK for themselves and their large families, but cannot be ejected from this country because of "human rights".

And of course there is the home-grown population of looters. The looting class extends all the way down from former "left-wing" prime ministers who steered this country into near-ruin but who now enjoys multiple houses and a multimillion pound income, thanks to "consultancy" work. Looters also include police chiefs and council chief executives whose incompetence is rewarded with six figure salaries and seven or eight figure pension pots, all at the expense of future generations. The list of looters goes all the way down to vicious lowlifes helping themselves to free merchandise during the recent "summer sales".

Keep calm and carry on, says the old British aphorism, a reminder of the once-famous stiff upper lip. Britain kept calm while it was committing social and economic suicide. Now that the damage has been done, it is anything but calm. More like witch-hunt hysteria.

We arrived at Heathrow several days ago after a night flight from Sao Paulo. Our plane was ahead of schedule as we touched down before 7am. However, ten hours later we were still at Heathrow. My son and partner had been separated from me almost immediately and kept in virtual isolation for the rest of the time. "You can go through, sir, you're a British citizen," they told me, as if the fate of my family was no concern of mine. So I and my parents sat and paced endlessly, up and down the steel and glass cathedral that is Terminal 5. If it hadn't been for my lawyer and my MP's office, I wouldn't even have been able to speak to P on the phone.

It looked almost certain that she and our son were going to be refused entry and either held like prisoners in immigration limbo or sent on the next flight back to Brazil. The woman dealing with their case seemed hostile and impervious to anything but the blackest interpretation of events. It was therefore pretty miraculous that this grand inquisitor suddenly disappeared from the stage (her shift had ended) and was replaced by someone altogether more human.

The new and improved version offered a more sympathetic and nuanced ear to our respective accounts and seemed impressed by our honesty, even if that didn't make for a slick story. She conveyed her thoughts to the Chief Immigration Officer and suddenly the portals of paradise were flung open. The prisoners were free to leave No Man's Land and enter, at least temporarily, this sceptr'd isle.

Since our traumatic entry I've heard a number of UK Border Agency (UKBA) horror stories. Academics, extremely wealthy individuals, fiancées, people from countries formerly considered close cousins, such as the US or Canada - these unfortunate travellers have been detained, humiliated, handcuffed, imprisoned and finally refused entry and deported. It's a depressing state of affairs - doubly so when you see who has been let in for all these years while Britain was asleep at the wheel.

Keep calm and carry on, indeed.

Update: On hearing of our immigration hassles, a sandal-wearing former hippie here in leafy Oxford was heard to say: "Quite right too ! They should be tough with them !" He was probably just the kind of person who, during the long years of "multiculturalism", exemplified by politically-correct contortions in order not to offend "minorities", would have shouted down anyone expressing precisely the kind of "fascist" comments that now emanate so easily from his bearded orifice.

Pae in the sky

2011-08-27T22:48:00.001+01:00

We climbed into Sam's balloon and sailed off into the night. How is it possible to traverse a great ocean, from south to north as well as east to west, in less than half a day ? Do we really understand what we do when we fly ? Below us is the vast expanse of dark, watery oblivion but we simply sit and count the hours. Ten months ago I travelled in the opposite direction, going "on holiday" for a while. Now I was returning as a pae (father). The past is a foreign country, and so is anywhere that refuses entry to your flesh and blood. As we approached the Alt-neu land, the son began to rise and we mumbled our thanks to the Pae in the sky.

Retail therapy !

2011-08-26T19:17:00.000+01:00

God knows, Britain has enough problems right now (time travellers see my next post on immigration). But the law of relativity means that after our first shopping experience back here in Blighty, we are like kids in a candy store, giddy with excitement. When it comes to retail, Britain is still a blessed land. Mothercare, Boots, Tesco and assorted smaller shops - today's brief expedition was a veritable orgy of product, price, quality, design and service.

Pampers nappies in Mothercare, which already cost much less than Brazil, were even cheaper in next door's Boots, thanks to a three-for-two offer. Having bought them from Mothercare it was no problem to do a simple return and refund (virtually impossible in Brazil), followed by a repurchase from Boots, only to be rewarded also with a £5-off voucher for Boots No. 7. I used to be unmoved by all this quotidian stuff but after 10 months in Brazil I hope that complacency has gone forever.

When my mother complained that the saleswoman at Mothercare was a bit, well, dim and dozy, or that the Tesco assistant had seemed arrogant and uninterested in helping her find a product, I remembered my own former irritation with similar "customer is no longer king" experiences in the UK.

But today I struggled to empathise with her, as I pushed Sam's buggy down beautifully designed store aisles, eyeing an endless parade of wonderful food. Tomatoes which looked red and clean and tempting, a million miles from the ugly, blemished rubbish in Brazil. Green peppers and lettuce that won't be either rotten or half-eaten by still-alive worms. Fresh milk ! Cheap, fresh milk ! Natural yoghurt which you can actually give to a baby, unlike the dreadful, additive-stuffed yoghurt in Brazil. Wholemeal and wholegrain bread that is A) affordable and B) great tasting. The list of differences just goes on and on. But most importantly, when you receive your final food bill, it doesn't induce an instant depression.

The sheer choice and variety of fresh food was a marvel to behold, even before we had seen the fantastic prices. Processed food was also infinitely healthier than the junk dominating most Brazilian store shelves - junk that the likes of Nestlé, Carrefour and Walmart should in all conscience not be allowed to flog just because Brazilian palates are so undiscerning and undemanding.

When I later overheard the aforementioned Tesco assistant moaning to his colleague: "She expected me to know what she was talking about and exactly where it was located !" instead of feeling annoyed with his behaviour towards mum, I found myself vaguely impressed that he was at least thinking about and discussing the customer interaction. In Brazil, he would have remained mentally alseep before, during and after the event.

We travelled to the shops in a car that didn't break the bank for my parents as it would have done in Brazil, along roads that were beautifully tarmacked, punctuated by elegant street lights and framed by silky smooth sidwalks. When we got home I revelled in the kitchen's hot tap and the bathroom's centrally heated radiator and properly flushing toilet. No doubt there will be many more delightful rediscoveries of what I shall now call the "miraculous normal".

Update: My mother would like it to be known that she is usually very impressed by the customer service at this branch of Mothercare !

Retail therapy ?

2011-08-26T12:34:00.001+01:00

The other morning, our last in Brazil for now, P wanted to find some tokens of Brazil which we could take as presents to the UK. We walked up and down the local hills but came back empty-handed. No great surprise, since there really isn't much that is distinctive about Brazilian "culture", aside from some nice fruit, football, capoeira, samba, bikinis, flipflops ... urban Brazil simply tries to copy what is available much more widely and cheaply in more grown-up societies.

P's hopes were raised as we passed a small shop called "Coisas da Doris" - Doris's things. It had that aura of privilege and chic that is typical of our neighbourhood. But on entering all we saw were a bunch of items that appeared to have been imported en masse from Notting Hill or Portobello Market.

Typical was the framed poster bearing the oh-so-English mantra: "Keep calm and carry on !" As usual with such shops, the apparently sophisticated owner was nowhere to be seen, leaving just an 'umble assistant or two, looking more like maids and probably paid a pittance. Certainly not enough to shop rather than serve in such a rarefied atmosphere.

In the end, we had to do what so many travellers do and grab something at the airport. A few pleasantly smelly items from a shop called Natura, which P said had a decent reputation and was actually Brazilian ! But all items were priced in US Dollars - so much for the mighty Real - and I have a feeling they are available for less in the UK.

Gastronnovation

2011-08-24T00:08:00.001+01:00

Did I just unwittingly innovate in my local paderia (bakery-cum-cafe) ? A rare solo outing, I found myself ordering yet another pao na chapa and cafe com leite. Surely I'm not becoming addicted ? But then, wanting something a little more adventurous, I asked for another old familiar: a pao da queijo, aka little white-bread ball stuffed with semi-baked cheese. Eaten fresh and hot they can be delicious, but stodgy and cold is bad news. So I asked for them "quente" (hot). What I got was this, the aforementioned ball cut in half, squashed flat and grilled just like a pao na chapa. Tasted pretty good, too. But my question is: did a possible misunderstanding by the waitress result in this interesting hybrid or is it just something I've not come across before ? I won't rest until my curiosity's appetite is sated !

PS: That big fat card next to the plate is something many places hand you when you walk in. All purchases are logged on the card's magnetic stripe and tallied up when you pay the cashier on leaving. It's so typical and infuriating of Brazil that when you ask them to give you just one collective card rather than one for each person in your group, thus freeing up precious table space, the underpaid staff look at you incomprehendingly and politely insist that you must have one each. Those are The Rules, and as always in Brazil, The Rules must not be questioned.

Wolves at the door

2011-08-23T22:11:00.001+01:00

Another murderous robbery in Sao Paulo, this time on the fashionable street of Oscar Freire, not far from our house. A 53-year-old systems analyst and another male were gunned down in an apartment, apparently after a violent struggle, as there were blood stains all over the place. The owner's car was then stolen. No CCTV cameras on the building so no visual evidence. But one of the night security guards, who has gone missing, is currently a key suspect.

I know what you did last summer

2011-08-23T17:51:00.000+01:00

A sobering new chapter in Brazil's political and economic life is underway - and it's a far cry from the summery zeitgeist when I arrived here almost 10 months ago. On the one hand, I'm impressed that President Dilma Rousseff is trying to tackle Brazil's deep-rooted governmental corruption. On the other, if corruption is indeed integral to the country's psyche and foundations, the danger is that by kicking this prop away, the whole edifice will have to come crashing down before it can be rebuilt. With mounting macroeconomic problems, Brazil no longer has such a pleasant climate in which to get its house in order.

Casualty !

2011-08-21T02:08:00.001+01:00

The moment had finally come: a dreaded trip to one of Sao Paulo's public hospitals. Sam's increasingly risky attempts to go where no toddler has gone before, especially in a child-unfriendly flat, have kept us permanently on our toes. There have been bumps and bruises but today's tumble in the bathroom, while once again indulging his fatal fascination with the toilet seat, left us both in a state of panic.

After the typically tragic bout of crying there was initially no sign of physical damage to his forehead. I went back to my latest obsession, iPad Scrabble, and my freaky score of 131 for "adjudge".

But then, bam ! A super-bruise started to appear, in the form of a cartoon-type swelling. We rushed over to the local pharmacy but they had no view other than to suggest we go to a nerby hospital. So into a taxi we jumped and, of course, straight into a traffic jam. But we did arrive without too much delay at our destination.

There was no-one at reception so our only aid was a somnolent-looking security guard. While showing barely any signs of life, he somehow managed to direct us to a doctor. She had a quick look at the bruise and told us to register at reception.

The good, if not miraculous news, was that we were the only people in this emergency out-patients section. We were seen by the same young woman doctor just a few moments later. She had pretty decent English and had lived in Cambridge for part of her childhood - both parents were doctors with placements at Addenbrookes hospital.

She did the usual checks on Sam, which he didn't like one bit, and pronounced him absolutely fine ... probably. We just needed to keep an eye on him and make sure he continued to show his usual loud signs of life. After my frayed nerves yesterday, with more bellowing from his TARDIS-like lungs than I could cope with, I smiled at the irony of now desiring nothing more than to hear those same ear-splitting sounds. On leaving, I asked the doctor why it was so quiet, especially for a Saturday, and she replied that on rainy days the number of out-patients drops dramatically.

So there's another reason to rejoice in this newly drizzly Sao Paulo. Sam's bump seemed to diminish pretty quickly; here's hoping it was just nature doing her thing and springing into action to protect the delicate tissue of his still soft skull.

Squeaky men & booming babies

2011-08-20T21:11:00.000+01:00

I do it myself sometimes. Most men do. Suddenly slip into an emasculating high-pitched squeak. Israeli men are particularly funny in this regard, as they instantly skip several octaves and mutate from from macho to mouse. I suppose it happens when guys are feeling stressed or defensive. Here in Brazil I see far too much squeakiness, and of a more worryngly permanent type. Cabbies, waiters and good ol' boy blue-collar workers, they're all at it.

The latest example came today, as our taxi driver replied to a question from P. There was that strange castrato sound again, emanating from a solid-looking Brazilian male. Perhaps this curious cultural quirk is yet another sign of misplaced servility, a timorous tic that constricts the vocal cords ?

The only really manly sounds I hear these days come from my son. His pre-verbal and post-passive phase means a sometimes endless barrage of sonic booms, as in "AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!!"

Singin' in the rain

2011-08-20T19:58:00.000+01:00

Well, more of a drizzle actually. But when it began late last night, accompanied by a few small claps of thunder and flashes of lightning, I couldn't have been happier. Roll on, you merry torrents, nature doing what humans won't and cleansing this city of its relentless toxins.

The "Maple Syrup index" revisited

2011-08-20T19:52:00.001+01:00

And it's a new world record, ladies 'n gentlemen ! A local deli / supermarket has achieved a fantastic all-time high for maple syrup - 52 reais or £20. The same quantity of Tesco's Finest costs £5.50. It's not as if this Brazilian brand is even very good. I tried going for a poor man's Maple last time, buying a cheap plastic bottle of synthetic goo but it remains almost untouched.

Non-blow-up

2011-08-18T21:20:00.000+01:00

Enjoying an epic sushi rodizio lunch today, for 38 reais (£15) a head all in, I ordered the "soufflé" dessert. It turned out to be some ice cream surrounded by small pineapple chunks, covered in the ubiquitous condensed-milk-and-creme-de-leite combo. I said to the waiter: It's not a souffle. He agreed and helpfully added that a "real" souffle "is hot". I agreed. He laughed. I laughed. After I'd eaten the quite pleasant non-souffle he returned and asked if we'd like a coffee. "This time it will definitely be hot!"

And there in that tiny grain of gastro-comic interaction is contained an entire Brazilian world: a parallel universe in which things that might normally lead to conflict are so often deflated by a generous dollop of warmth and good humour.

Geography and destiny

2011-08-18T15:59:00.001+01:00

Since reading John Mauldin's report on Brazil the other day, I've been thinking about geography, identity and destiny. To what degree do our physical surroundings define who and what we are ? I suppose it's the old nature-nurture debate, except transposed onto entire countries and cultures rather than single individuals.

Mauldin's report makes much of Brazil's brutal inaccessibility - in marked contrast to, say, the US or Argentina. As a result of this national handicap, development of the country was delayed by about a century. And when it did get going, the huge upfront investment required played into the hands of a small elite who were able to muster sufficient funds. This left everyone else in a state of virtual serfdom.

The massive imbalance continues to this day, says Mauldin, with a pathetically small land-owning middle class in Brazil. The only hope of societal change rests on Brazil's ability to change it's geography, bit by bit. Formerly inaccessible areas finally become linked, to each other and to the main population centres, transport hubs and ports. It's painfully slow work and with no absolute guarantee of success but, without control of the Rio de la Plata, Brazil has no choice but to keep chipping away at its hostile terrain.

That's all very macro stuff. Back down here in the everyday world of the micro, I find myself applying this grandiose backdrop to things that I see and hear about the culture and character of Brazilians.

For example, when someone tells me, "Brazilians are so unreliable / unprofessional: they will make an agreement with you and then break it just like that and without any notice."

Or when I hear: "Robert, you are like so many foreigners here: too open and trusting with people. Brazilians can't be trusted, they are backstabbers. We were colonised by the wrong sort of people (the Portuguese)." Etc.

With the hand of geography upon my shoulders, I now interpret these kind of comments as follows: Inhospitable country leads to mix of big business / oligarchs and big government - effectively the worst of both capitalism and socialism. Taken together they act as a sort of duopoly. The "little guy" is buffeted between these two overarching forces and feels a sense of impotency.

All he can do is follow orders and make nice with both "parents", which takes up most of his time, energy and initiative. When not doing so, he interacts with his fellow impotents in a manner that is often irresponsible or childish. After all, the intrusive and overbearing Big Government and Big Business have no interest in making him truly independent or responsible. They don't want him to feel accountable for his actions; they just want him to do as he is told. He is not important; only the land is important.

Such thoughts led me to perhaps coin the phrase, the "robber nanny state", as in robber barons being in cahoots with those supposedly representing "We the People".

Which, I suppose, brings me back once again to one of my recurring themes on this blog: the need for Brazil to prioritise its human resource (aka "intellectual capital") over its "natural resource". Other countries, such as Japan, South Korea and Israel have overcome nature's stinginess by using their brainpower. They defied geographic determinism by dint of sheer human determination.

But Brazil - "God's land" - has never had enough of a crisis to force a change of direction. If God really does have a soft spot for this country, he should engineer something that will change the national psyche once and for all.

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

A $3 trillion headache

2011-08-18T05:08:00.001+01:00

As I sit here, late into the polluted night, still sniffing, sneezing, eye rubbing and throat clearing (sadly not just "I" but "we"), right on cue comes an Economist article showing how LatAm megacities are collapsing under their own unsupported weight. Desperately under-invested, congested, polluted, dangerous, etc. etc., they are a $3 trn collective problem. No surprise that Sao Paulo features prominently. (Just how bad, I wonder, can the even more notorious Mexico City be ?) Before I came here I would never have guessed that the biggest pollution problem happened in winter rather than summer. But if you rely on rain as your main anti-pollution measure, then this driest time of the year is not good. Not good at all.

Brazil in 2014 ?

2011-08-18T02:19:00.001+01:00

... after an "embarrassing" World Cup ? Just asking ...

Sky News reports on India's reaction to hunger-striking anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare:

"His message has struck a chord with millions of ordinary voters. Indians - especially the growing and increasingly assertive middle class - are sick and tired of the endless cycle of corruption scandals. The disastrous start to the Commonwealth Games is now a symbol of the harm caused to the country by corruption.

Unfinished construction work and a dirty athlete's village is a consequence, it is claimed, of having a political class which allegedly pockets billions of pounds from the public purse. Analyst Raja Mohan told Sky News the government is facing a major crisis to its authority."

Update: And this just in ! The question is whether all these ministerial resignations in Brazil are bad news or good - the latter because maybe the country is now beginning to deal with it's corruption problem rather than sweeping it under the carpet ? No doubt I'm being overly optimistic.

Maid in Brasil

2011-08-17T21:28:00.001+01:00

As our taxi passed by a swanky shop in Jardim Europa this morning, P noticed the sign outside shouting "Kitchens made in Germany !" Her response was to the effect that Brazil will only hold it's head high when it can boast "Kitchens made in Brazil !"

Of course, in a globalized world we should avoid protectionism and seek access to the best and best value, no matter where it originates. Brits often complain about the decline and fall of their once glorious manufacturing base. They hark back to the days when "Made in Britain" was a byword for quality and national pride. But things move on. As long as the destroyed old is replaced by the creative new, change doesn't have to be a bad thing. Nostalgia has a way of alchemising the bad old days into the "good old days".

The problem with Brazil is not so much that it has declined but that it never was. It has been selling the family jewels on the cheap for as long as it was colonized and industrialized. Equally, it has often been buying back those same rough diamonds after they have been cut and polished abroad. A country obsessed by status looks ever-outward, far beyond its borders, for confirmation of social standing. So secure as a nation-state, Brazil seems to be populated by some of the most insecure people on earth.

Give a man an expensive German kitchen and his maid will cook for a day; teach him how to build an expensive German kitchen and his economy will be simmering nicely for life.

Talking of maids, I have been commenting to P on the absurd contrast in our domestic lives now that we have moved from "poor" to "posh" neighborhood. I wrote a post a while back half-bemoaning and half-celebrating my epic amounts of washing up. Well, these days we have a maid to do "that kind of work". It's part and parcel of our rather strange living arrangements at the moment.

I actually find it a hassle having to make way for a "domestic" every day, especially since we have a baby getting under all our feet. The woman in question, Bettania, is a pretty wonderful cleaner and a lovely person. But there's something ridiculous about seeing anyone, however nice, on a daily basis to perform such duties.

I've begun to wonder, though, as I look at some of the hardcore luxury apartment blocks in our neighbourhood, how long it would take before this became my new normal ? How long before I began to feel that a maid was one of life's essentials ? I mean, I'm already (almost) used to the idea that I must not flush all of my toilet paper, so no doubt these cultural quirks go both ways ?

It's not really about luxury living. "Luxury" to me means having access to things like technology and baby equipment, and at the right price. Luxury means not feeling that you are being poisoned on the streets and in your own home, as you sneeze endlessly and your eyes itch. Luxury means sidewalks that exist in more than just name.

And of course not forgetting our old friends: properly flushing toilets, decent insulation and heating, and hot water in the kitchen.

Our taxi took us to P's recent employer, a large investment bank in the "Canary Wharf of Sao Paulo" - Itaim. After a quick stop there we walked along the endless Faria Lima in the sun and smog, often pulling Sam's buggy backwards in order to prevent the low-slung solar rays from hitting him.

In marked contrast to Canary Wharf, this so-called avenue has benefited from almost no urban planning. Why should the wealthy care about the environment beyond their cars, offices and restaurants ? It goes without saying that the Government is too busy lining its own pockets to give a damn. There are no trees to offer shade, no half-decent paving for the sidewalk, and a fat, filthy urban motorway at your shoulder. I can only pray that our pedestrian excursions in this city have not done any lasting harm to Sam's lungs or general health.

Luxury ? Sao Paulo doesn't know the meaning of the word.

Take a breath

2011-08-17T00:11:00.000+01:00

A couple of hours ago, sitting in an open-window office several storeys above Paulista Avenue, I felt my mouth and throat go dry. Then drier. Then positively arid. Later, pushing my poor son home along the same central Sao Paulo thoroughfare, I felt a runny nose and headache set in, accompanied by a general feeling of unhealthy unease. Once again we were forced to inhale the endless automotive effluent of this city, and by extension of all South America. To think how much people pay to live here, in this fume-choked, particulate-drenched atmosphere ! When having any kind of panic attack, the advice is usually to take big deep breaths and slowly exhale. Perhaps better advice under these circumstances would be simply to hold your breath for as long as humanly possible and pray that the torrential rains return muito rapido. Sao Paulo, I promise never again to curse your biblical flooding and undrained roads !

Muddle class

2011-08-15T01:40:00.000+01:00

Here's the latest installment in the long-running soap opera that is Brazil's "emerging middle class". It's in Portuguese but to save you the bother of looking I can sum it up as follows: confused journalist writes confusing article based on recent research into how confused Brazilians see their own social standing, eg AB, C or D class. Seems no-one has a clue what they are. All we can say, as before, is that ex-President Lula's definition of middle class - anyone earning 2200 reais a month - was and is absurdly optimistic.

Tackling World Cup corruption

2011-08-14T22:29:00.000+01:00

"How much money is being invested ? Where is this money going ? How much of it is being spent on an arena rather than other things that the city needs ? ... I wish people chased politicians as hard as they chase footballers ... I'd like Sao Paulo to transform itself as Barcelona did in 1992, in terms of airports and safety. But I don't think it will happen."

- Caio Ribeiro, ex-footballer and now commentator for TV Globo, talking about the Brazilian World Cup in 2014. Quoted in Sao Paulo magazine.

Go, rodizio !

2011-08-14T19:32:00.000+01:00

Food glorious food. I've said quite a few unappetising things about food in Brazil - how anything that isn't natural tends to be stodgy, fatty, synthetic, over-processed, over-salted, over-sweetened, over-fried, overpriced, etc. But I have also mentioned the rodizios, or fixed-price buffets. Not so many where we used to live but loads round here. What is weird is that food in supermarkets is often prohibitively expensive (try finding decent cheese that doesn't break the bank) and a la carte food in restaurants and cafes is also expensive.

But if you look around you can find a few real gems offering wonderful and unlimited food for around 35 reais per head. That's about £14, including dessert. The only danger is over-eating and over-visiting. In fact, it's a pretty big danger when the difference between supermarket shopping and rodizio restaurants is so much smaller than it would be in the UK. If you can control yourself then these veritable banquets of sushi, salad, meats, fish and delicious deserts and fruits are the one bright spot of budget living in Sao Paulo.

Today we went to Chef du Jour, where Chef Patron Renato was his usual warm and welcoming self. Amazing food with the knock-out blow of a homemade Torta Holandesa (Dutch Tart). Other venues locally are Fresh & Natural and Bovinus and further afield is the best value rodizio in all of Sao Paulo (probably all of Brazil, too): Cachoeira Tropical (weekdays a giveaway 20 reais, including fruit drinks and tea, coffee; weekends just three reais more). I've mentioned all these restaurants before, apart from the more recently discovered Chef du Jour.

Brazil's most precious resource

2011-08-14T12:35:00.001+01:00

Feliz Dia dos Pais ! Happy Brazilian Father's Day !

A geography lesson

2011-08-14T11:08:00.001+01:00

Fascinating economic analysis of Brazil by John Mauldin (accessible by email subscription only). We live in an age of air travel, technology and the Internet so it's somewhat sobering to be told that much of what passes for economic activity in the world still centres on geography. For this reason, despite it's vast natural resources, Brazil has always been hampered by major geographic limitations. These are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, so the country has some difficult decisions ahead. Here are some extracts from this long but brilliant analysis:

"To this day, Brazil has very few major highways and railways because even where the topography does allow for the possibility, the costs still are much higher than in flatter lands farther south. The country lacks a major coastal road system, as the escarpment is simply too steep and too close to the coast. Following the Brazilian coastline makes clear how Brazil's coastal roads are almost exclusively two-lane, and the coastal cities — while dramatic — are tiny and crammed into whatever pockets of land they can find. And most of the country is still without a rail network; much of that soy, corn and rice that the country has become famous for exporting reaches the country's ports by truck, the most expensive way to transport bulk goods."

"Only Sao Paulo has sufficient flat lands to follow a more standard development pattern and thus achieve any economies of scale. It is also the only portion of Brazil that possesses anything resembling the modern, integrated infrastructure that follows more traditional development patterns. Unsurprisingly, this single state accounts for more than one-third of Brazil's gross domestic product (GDP) despite only serving as home to one-fifth of the country's population. As recently as 1950, Sao Paulo state produced more than one-half Brazil's economic output."

"[Sao Paulo's high elevation] helps mitigate the climatic impact of the region's near-tropical conditions that predominate on the coast, but comes at the dauntingly high capital and engineering costs required to link the city and state to the coast. So while Sao Paulo is indeed a major economic center, it is not one deeply hardwired into Brazil's coastal cities or to the world at large."

"Brazil is correctly thought of as a major exporter of any number of raw commodities, but the hostility of its geography to shipping and the inability of its cities to integrate have curtailed port development drastically. The top seven Brazilian ports combined have less loading capacity than the top U.S. port, New Orleans, and all Brazilian ports combined have considerably less loading capacity than the top two U.S. ports, New Orleans and Houston."

"All of the [Rio de la Plata river's] navigable lengths were now shared between Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, leaving capital-poor Brazil sequestered in its highland semi-tropical territories. Argentina and Paraguay rose rapidly in economic and military might, while Brazil languished with little more than plantation agriculture for more than a century."

"Nor was Brazil united. Between the economic pull of Argentina and its rivers and the disconnected nature of the enclavic coast, regionalism became a major feature of Brazilian politics. Contact between the various pieces of Brazil was difficult, while contact with the outside world was relatively easy, making integration of all kinds — political, economic, and cultural —often elusive."

"Brazil's biggest problem — which began with the colonial settlement process and continues to the current day — is that it is simply not capable of growth that is both sustained and stable. Economic growth anywhere in the world is inflationary: Demand for arable land, labor, transport, capital and resources pushes the prices of all of these inputs up. Growth in most places can continue until those inflationary pressures build and eventually overtake any potential benefit of that growth. At that point, growth collapses due to higher costs and a recession sets in. Brazil's burden to bear is that land, labor, transport infrastructure and capital exist in such extreme scarcity in Brazil that any economic growth almost instantly turns inflationary."

"First, the capital required for these plantations was so great that smallholders of the American model were largely shut out. No smallholders meant no small towns that could form kernels of education and industrialization. Instead, plantations meant company towns where economic oligarchies gave birth to political oligarchies. In time, the political and economic power imbalance would provide the foundation for the Brazilian military governments of the 20th century. Even in modern times, Brazil's geography continues to favor oligarchic plantation farming to family farming. At present, 85 percent of farms in the United States— a country with a reputation for factory farming — are 500 acres or fewer, whereas 70 percent of Brazilian farms are 500 acres or more."

"Plantation agriculture calls for unskilled labor, a pattern that continues into the modern day. Unlike the more advanced New World colonies — which enjoyed access to easier transport and thus more capital, yielding the kernels of urbanization, an educational system and labor differentiation — Brazil relied on slave labor. It was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to outlaw slavery, a step it took in 1888.

"A lack of skilled labor means, among other things, a smaller middle class and lower internal consumption than other states at a similar level of development. Consequently, Brazil has a small number of landed elite and a large majority of poor. As of 2011, fully one in four Brazilians eke out a living in Brazil's infamous slums, the favelas. According to the Gini coefficient, a sociological measure of income inequality, Brazil has been the most unequal of the world's major states for decades.

"Taken together, Brazil faces inflationary barriers at every stage of the growth cycle. Starting a business requires capital, which is in short supply and held by a privileged class. Shipping goods requires scarce infrastructure, which is insufficient to needs, expensive and often owned by a privileged class. Any increase in demand for either of these inputs puts upward pressure on the associated costs. Expanding a business requires skilled labor, but there is not a deep skilled labor pool, so any hiring quickly results in wage spirals. And holding everything back is the still-disconnected nature of the Brazilian cities, so there are few economies of scale. More than anywhere else in the world, growth triggers inflation — which kills growth"

"[Despite Argentina's squandering of it's geographic advantage] Argentina is still the power in South America with the clearest, most likely growth path. It still holds the Rio de la Plata's river network and it still holds the Pampas, the best farmland in the Southern Hemisphere. What it cannot seem to figure out is how to make use of its favorable position. So long as that remains the case — so long as the natural dominant power of the Southern Cone remains in decline — other powers have at least a chance to emerge. Which brings us back to Brazil."

"Surprisingly, the clear-cutting of the interior provided the basis of Brazilian political liberalization. One of the many downsides of an oligarchic economic system is that politics tend to become as concentrated as wealth. Yet in clearing the land Brazil created artificial trade ways — roads — that allowed some Brazilians to strike out on their own (though they were not as efficient as rivers). Currently there are some 2.6 million landholders with farms of between 5 and 100 acres (anything less is a subsistence farm, while anything more verges into the category of high-capital factory farms). That is 2.6 million families who have a somewhat independent economic — and political— existence. Elsewhere in the world, that is known as a middle class. The environmental price was steep, but without this very new class of landholder, Brazilian democracy would be on fairly shaky ground"

"The rising importance of the interior — best symbolized by the relocation of the political capital to the interior city of Brasilia in 1960 — diluted the regional leanings of the coastal cities. The lands of the interior saw themselves first and foremost as Brazilian, and as that identity slowly gained credence, the government finally achieved sufficient gravitas and respect to begin addressing the country's other major challenge [inflation]."

"The macroeconomic strategy of the current regime, along with that of a string of governments going back to the early 1990s, is known colloquially as the "real plan" (after Brazil's currency, the real). In essence, the strategy turned Brazil's traditional strategy of growth at any cost on its head, seeking instead low inflation at any cost. Subsidies were eliminated wholesale across the economy, working from the understanding that consumption triggered inflation. Credit —whether government or private, domestic or foreign — was greatly restricted, working from the assumption that the Brazilian system could not handle the subsequent growth without stoking inflation. Government spending was greatly reduced and deficit spending largely phased out on the understanding that all forms of stimulus should be minimized to avoid inflation"

"These strict inflation control policies have achieved a high degree of economic stability. Inflation plunged from more than 2,000 percent a year to the single digits. But those gains came at a cost: Between 1980 and 2005, Brazil has shifted from one of the world's fastest growing economies with one of the highest inflation rates to one of the lowest inflation economies with one of the lowest (if somewhat irregular) growth rates."

"As with the interior expansion plan, the success of the real plan has changed how Brazilians feel about their country. When inflation burned through poor citizens' savings, when it destroyed livelihoods and condemned tens of millions to lives of poverty, faith in central institutions was lacking. The real plan may not promise great growth or even great wealth, but it has delivered price stability — and with price stability people can lay at least a limited groundwork for their own futures. Savings holds value from year to year. Purchasing power is constant. These are basic economic factors that most of the developed world takes for granted but which are relatively new to the current generation of Brazilians— and Brazilians rightly credit their central government with achieving them"

"Brazil cannot be truly secure until at the very least it controls the northern shore of the Rio de la Plata. That requires significant penetration into Paraguay and de facto control of Uruguay and of select pieces of northern Argentina. Were that to happen, Brazil's interior would have direct access to one of the world's most capital-rich regions. The marriage of such capital generation capacity to Brazil's pre-existing bulk will instantly transform Brazil into a power with global potential.

"But not before. Without these territories, the Southern Cone balance of power remains in place no matter how weak Argentina becomes. So long as Argentina can exercise functional independence, it persists as a possible direct threat to Brazil, constrains Brazil's ability to generate its own capital and exists as a potential ally of extraregional powers that might seek to limit Brazil's rise."

"Obviously, this imperative will be well beyond Brazil's reach for many decades. Not only is Brazil's navy far smaller than that of states with one-third its population, it is nowhere close to commanding the Rio de la Plata region. Until that happens, Brazil has no choice but to align with whatever the Atlantic's dominant power happens to be. To do otherwise would risk the country's exports and its overall economic and political coherence."

"A normal trade deal removes barriers to trade and exposes companies in all the affected countries to competition from each other. In Mercosur's case, the various Brazilian industrialists were able to block off entire swaths of the economy for themselves, largely eliminating foreign competition"

"Throughout the past decade, Brazilian governments have sought Chinese investment largely to help alleviate some of the country's transport bottlenecks. The Chinese, hungry for Brazilian resources, have happily complied. But that infrastructure development has come at the cost of granting Chinese firms Brazilian market access, and that access— and even the investment — is damaging the Brazilian system.

At its core it is a difference in development models. The Chinese system is based on ultraloose capital access aimed at maximizing employment and throughput, regardless of the impact on profitability and inflation — about as far as possible from the real plan. This has had a number of negative side effects on the Chinese system, but as regards Brazil, it has resulted in a flood of subsidized Chinese imports.

"Scrapping Mercosur and adopting free market policies would throw the Brazilian market open to global competition. That would decimate Brazil's inefficient industrial base in the short run with the expected knock-on impact on employment, making it a policy the oligarchic and powerful labor unions alike would oppose. But it is difficult to imagine Brazilian industry progressing past its current stunted level if it is not forced to play on a larger field, and weakening the hold of the oligarchs is now at least a century overdue. Two more years of a rising currency and an enervating Chinese relationship will surely destroy much of the progress the Brazilians have painstakingly made in recent decades."

"Success in any free market-oriented reforms would require brutal and rapid changes in Brazil's standard operating procedures — changes that would undoubtedly come with serious political risks. The alternative is to continue to pursue protectionist, defensive policies while allowing international forces to shape Brazil rather than Brazil developing the means to shape international forces. This could well be the path Brazil follows. After all, the damage being inflicted by Mercosur and the China relationship are direct outcomes of policies Brazil chose to follow, rather than anything produced by Brazil's geography."

"We do not mean to belittle Brazilians' achievements to date. Taming their lands, taming inflation and crafting a series of economic sectors fully deserving of international acclaim are no small feats. But insufficient infrastructure, an ossified oligarchy, a shallow skilled labor pool and the looming question of Argentina continue to define the Brazilian position. The maintenance of that position remains largely beyond the control of the Brazilian government. The economy remains hooked on commodities whose prices are set far beyond the continent. Their ability to supply those commodities is largely dependent upon infrastructure in turn dependent upon foreign financing. Even Brazilian dominance of their southern tier is as much a result of what Argentina has done wrong as opposed to what Brazil has done right.

"For Brazil to emerge as a significant extraregional power, Brazilians must first address a lengthy list of internal and regional issues. These include — but are hardly limited to — moving beyond their oligarchic economic system, ensuring that Argentina will never again threaten it and formalizing their dominant position in the border states of Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. These cannot be accomplished easily, but doing so is the price Brazilians must pay if they are to be the masters of their own destiny rather than simply accepting an environment crafted by others."

The insurance road less travelled

2011-08-13T20:25:00.000+01:00

The other day I received an email from my UK bank, Coventry Building Society. It was encouraging me to buy their travel insurance product, guaranteeing, among other things, up to £5m of medical cover. That seems par for the course: all such products in the UK offer a multi-million pound cover when it comes to matters of medical life and limb abroad.

Yet when we went the other day to investigate travel insurance for two of the three people in our party of visitors to the UK, all we could find was insurance costing hundreds of pounds for just three months and covering medical up to a paltry 50,000 euros ! Oh, and we had to pay in cash, of course.

We haven't bought anything yet as I'm still hoping there is something more sane available. Since the insurance we were quoted came from a Swiss insurer, how come the maths seems to be so different for Brazilians rather than Brits or, presumably, other nationals with access to normal travel insurance ?

As usual, any explanations or advice gratefully received.

Update: when we returned to buy the insurance the price had gone up to 1600 reais ! (£640). We found a student travel specialist and got something similar for 1300 reais (about £500). Still with a piddlingly small cover on medical expenses.

More from Jonathan, the ratings winner !

2011-08-13T17:26:00.000+01:00

In journalism people used to say that such and such "makes good copy". Perhaps they still do. The implication is that, irrespective of the truth or importance behind the "story", it will get people reading. And as we were always told in Journalism 101, without readers you might as well pack up and go home. Journalism is "infotainment", information always allied, however slightly, to entertainment. If you want to read something just for the "facts", pick up an instruction manual or a dry academic thesis.

A blog is obviously something different. It can be as slavishly self-indulgent as you wish, knowing that primarily you're writing it for yourself and perhaps just one or two others. This blog's readership to date suggests that, like most blogs, my ramblings remain an extremely minority interest. And that's usually how I like it. But occasionally my inner-megalomaniac hopes for more, and that's when the Google Stats become fascinating reading. If, like yesterday, the viewing figures seem to jump unexpectedly for a particular post, the old journalistic ghost in me can't help getting a bit of a kick out of it.

Anyway, with that said, here's more from Jonathan, whose controversial comments a couple of posts back surprisingly generated more than the usual number of "eyeballs". As before, the same caveats about this being just one person's views and experiences apply.

"Rob, am I pushing some buttons with my crisp language such as "primitive locals" ? I mean, that's what they are: self-styled professionals who think they can outsmart those with more than an eighth grade education !

"You see, it's a pervasive mentality in Brazil. For example, when I was in the emergency room of Hospital das Clinicas in Sao Paulo, this security bozo monitoring the ridiculous pick-a-number queuing system kept insulting the patients waiting for medical care ... until he barked at me. Then I confronted him and his obnoxious behaviour. I asked him to sit down and sarcastically added that he should not put himself out for those sick and in need of emergency medical help. I told him we were all merely inquiring about how this primitive system worked.

"He then backed down. Once in the treatment room, the surgeons asked me about my profession and where I was from. As soon as I told them, everything was sweetness and light and I was treated with the greatest respect. Things moved fast. I had major surgery using the Federal system within thirty days, which is very unusual.

"Another incident happened in a Brasilia hospital when I finally confronted the person in charge and said I would not tolerate being insulted anymore. I also reported him. At that point, I was attended immediately.

"And it's not just me. One of my old Brazilian friends from high school tells me: "I will never return to live in Brazil". Actually, he puts it a bit less politely.

"This basic lack of respect and professionalism is everywhere in Brazil. After interviews with consulting firms, they don't even bother sending out a courtesy email letting you know that nothing is available at the moment but they will keep your resume on file. You hear nothing from them.

"The incident in Brasilia with the Director of a Law School and public prosecutor showed how much they try to take advantage even at the highest levels. I negotiated a million dollar contract for them at no cost, just to show what I could do. But I said if you want the deal sealed you will have to hire me at least as a consultant. He refused to. His position was: seal the deal then we will consider hiring you. To which I said, good luck trying to do it by yourselves, and of course the deal did not go forward.

"My next step will be to try my luck in Manaus. If nothing there, I'll probably head back to Miami. At least there I have a place to live and friends."

India v Brazil

2011-08-13T16:56:00.001+01:00

This just in from my Anglo-Indian friend John:

"For a while I thought India was the same as Brazil. I was wrong. Yes they have the same exclusive shopping malls with tacky global brands but India is more cultural. It has soul and is fiercly proud of being a democracy. Also it's handling growth better.

"In one generation my family has moved from a mud hut in a village with no electricity, toilet or running water (and I have stayed there many many, times), a place that used to take two days to reach - 150 miles by foot, rickshaw, boat, crowded bus - to a big house in a place which is reachable in just three hours. My parents now have electricity, a palatial spanish-style four-storey house, en suite bathrooms, fridge, tv, phone, Internet. The town streets are cleaner and being regenerated.

"One generation ago there were only a handful of brand-name advertisers on radio and the buses (Colgate, Wills, Britannia biscuits). Now it's like the West. Most importantly, the country has managed to grow in this short period like no other nation."

Obviously, these kind of assessments will always be prone to emotion and subjectivity. But it's interesting nevertheless. Has Brazil got soul ? Is it fiercely proud of being a democracy ? Are the favelas being transformed into properly functioning towns and suburbs ?

Judge not

2011-08-13T03:26:00.000+01:00

Same old, same old as Brazil "cleans up it's act".

Go to hell, bankrupt Britain

2011-08-12T18:08:00.000+01:00

Today I received a short email notification from UK immigration authorities rejecting my son for a second time. They apparently have no interest in allowing him to collect his birthright of British citizenship and they are certainly being impressively prompt in slamming the door in his face. Thank you, UK Plc, for your efficiency. We have already spent thousands of pounds for nothing and now I look forward to spending much more, not including endless man-hours and aggravation, as I try to get my son what is already his by blood. You, faceless, cowardly immigration bureaucrats, don't deny this but because of a piece of deeply unjust red tape concerning his mother's marital status when giving birth, you don't give a damn. BRITISH COMPUTER SAYS NO. Again.

Fortunately, Brazil, for all it's faults, has NOT denied me my natural rights as father of a Brazilian child. We went to Policia Federal today to check on the progress of my probationary visa and all is well there. So I am not yet a Bazilian citizen but nor am I a mere tourist here. Hopefully, when I get my CPF card shortly I will be able to work legally.

Since we are currently a group of two Bazilians and one Brit, we have had to book our much-delayed visit to see family in the UK as "visitors". We are having to jump through a million hoops to prove that we, or more specifically my son and his mother, are visitors and nothing more. We have been lucky enough to receive very active support from the office of my "local" MP Simon Hughes. His assistants are trying valiantly to cut through the madness and help with my son's visa. Thank you so much for that, guys.

But will P and Sam be allowed into the UK even as mere visitors, something possible for millions of Brazilians with no blood ties to the country ? Well, stay tuned folks because your guess is as good as mine. I have tried asking the British Embassy in Rio to help - they are fully aware of our situation and indeed they were the ones who declined to register my son as British in the first place. I have since been told that there is no reason why they still cannot do so, despite the red tape problem. There is apparently some degree of autonomy over this unusual grey area. But so far all they have been good for is expediting the decisions to say NO. As in NO visa, NO way, NO can do, NO further comment. Thanks, guys, really appreciate all your "efforts".

I didn't think life could get much sh**tier after the armed robbery we experienced in June. But somehow, it has. It feels like another kind of armed robbery, this time by Bankrupt Britain. A country which let too many of the wrong sort of people in for year after year, which fed them and clothed them and bent over backwards for them, no matter how much thy bit the hand that fed. Meanwhile, it was growing its own human trash, hooked on benefits. And now morally bankrupt Britain has looters and fires where it should have responsible citizens and calm streets. So no doubt the only way this wretched, despicable country can earn it's crust anymore is to charge "foreigners" like us what amounts to extortion money for something that should have been completely free of charge.

What happens next ? I am being advised to apply for a different visa, starting all over again and waiting many more months. But I don't know, I really don't. I'm looking for an alternative country to call home, if anyone has any suggestions. Britain is clearly bust. In every sense.

Honest living ?

2011-08-12T08:40:00.001+01:00

Update to my post below on insanely low remuneration and dodgy employment practices. The Brazilian-US chap in question has added the following comments, based on his sorry experience with a Brazilian employer up in the North-East. Obviously, this is just his perspective and I'm not saying it's the last word but I think his experience is salutary. Over to you Jonathan:

"The world needs to see how Brazilian companies operate and think. This amateur game playing is something that will cause the global audience to be reluctant in doing business with them. As someone described it to me: they are takers, it's in their DNA.

"They don't plan and they don't strategize. If there is any concern for the future they toss it aside because "God will take care of it as he sees fit." A pathetic excuse and an asinine mentality.

"It's truly amazing how these primitive locals behave. They begin by insulting me with R$1000 a month without any documentation to prove that I officially have a job: no Carteira de Trabalho signed or even a contract. I then push the guy for R$1500, only to be told: "I'm only going to pay you enough to survive because so far you haven't generated any income", this being only one week in !

"My reply was: 'The practice of Arbitration and Mediation is not selling used cars. And even if it were, salespersons receive a base salary and commission whereby their base salary is more than enough to merely survive.'

"Yet this manager has his entire group convinced he is looking out for their best interests by paying them only enough to survive on a weekly basis and not signing any documentation. This is illegal and a Federal offense. Moreover, they are misrepresenting themselves in the market as lawyers; none of these self-proclaimed Arbitrators are lawyers.

"The more I asked questions about the organization and practice the more uncomfortable he became, resulting in him telling me: "This is not going to work out." I have three more weeks left where I've been staying here in Fortaleza then off to who knows where ?

"Their treachery in taking advantage of others is not even subtle. They're amateurs."

A second byte

2011-08-11T05:21:00.000+01:00

Yesterday Apple became the world's most valuable company, an even more impressive achievement on such a bloody day in the markets. The mighty oil giant Exxon was finally unseated as king of the corporate hill. It was not so very long ago that Apple was being crowned "world's most valuable tech company", having overtaken Microsoft. That was surreal enough. We've travelled a long, long way from Apple's near-demise in 1997, just before founder and current CEO Steve Jobs returned to the helm after years in the wilderness.

A fairytale second-coming that seems stranger than fiction, with a big dose of pathos thrown in: Steve Jobs' serious health problems in recent years have been cause for genuine, personal concern to millions of Apple acolytes.

Like many in the publishing world, I was weaned on and wedded to Apple. But then, under the influence of a Windows XP-loving girlfriend and fed up waiting for a delayed PowerBook update, I defected to the dark side for some years. My hardcore Apple evangelist friend Matt never forgave my treachery, and stupidity. (Well, maybe now you can Matt ?) Finally, I came to my senses and returned to the fold, where I remain.

It seems entirely appropriate, indeed somewhat belated, that the world's biggest company, here in the twenty-first century, is not just a computer firm but a consumer-focused computer firm. Congratulations Apple for coming back from the dead and sticking it so magnificently to your now Pygmy-rival Dell, whose leader will forever have to eat his infamous words.

Congratulations also to Steve Jobs for battling on and staying alive, long may he be around. In addition to being an inspirational corporate leader, Jobs also delivered one of the most moving and inspiring commencement speeches ever given.

A tale of two cities

2011-08-09T22:18:00.001+01:00

London's burning. Anarchy in the UK. But this time much more like serious Brazilian anarchy than punk rock in it's prime.

Decades of social corrosion in the UK have led to this. Back in the day, circa 1980, UK riots had a bit of "class". They were "about" something, usually inequality and unemployment, albeit still no excuse for urban warfare. But today there isn't even the pretence of ideology. Just DIY "summer sales" by Blackberry-touting louts, of both sexes, spurred on in their looting by a national religion of cynical, celebrity-led consumerism and the almost complete extinction of personal responsibility.

Allied to New Labour's 13-year misuse and abuse of the benefits system, plus its bureaucratic handicapping of the police and social services, what you are left with is a corresponding sense of entitlement. Never an attractive quality, it now sits particularly awkwardly with bankrupt Britain. If the 1980s was the yuppie decade, swinging to the tune of "work hard, play hard and you can have it all," the last decade and a half has been, simply, "you can have it all ... because it's your right". Or more succinctly, as in the advertising slogan, "Because you're worth it!" No need to work for it; just demand it. Or steal it.

For these mollycoddled teenage thugs, the old Dire Straits line, slightly modified and irony-free, serves as a perfect rallying cry: "Get your money for nothing and your kicks for free." Or perhaps it should be an inversion of JFK's famous line: "Ask what your country can do for you !"

However, the "haves" in today's Britain are just as much to blame: they were too busy feeding at the trough to care about the creation of this superficial, ignorant and vicious underclass. A cynical society, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, created a generation raucously demanding "respect" yet utterly clueless as to the real meaning of the word.

As my neighbour Mark, an expat Brit, said to me: "If it was in Brazil they'd just shoot them and that would be that." While obviously not in favour of such extreme methods, I can't help feeling doubly angry at the yobbish freeloading morons who have no idea how easy life is in the UK compared to, oh let me see ... Brazil ?

Back on "home" soil, I note a big red cover story in the current issue of a leading business magazine: "Consumers in the Red", it shouts. A quick scan of the piece suggests dire warnings about a naive nation that has embraced the consumer society a little too warmly. Things are now approaching boiling point, as increasingly unaffordable monthly installments push many to the brink of financial ruin. I fretted about this in my very first blog post.

Brazil-the-commodity-exporter and Brazil-the-consumer-society are two completely different countries, residing on different continents, if not planets.

And how will Brazil-the-consumer-society deal with it's mounting problems, particularly the widening current account deficit ? Well, President Dilma Rousseff yesterday told her fellow Brazilians not to stop consuming. Parroting her predecessor Lula's words, she said "We should not stop consuming because we're not under any threat."

Sure you're not, Dilma. As a politician you have a big fat salary, inflated by a recent and obscene pay rise. Brazil's governments are VAT junkies and since there is never any Plan B in this country the only thing they know is to do more of the same: keep collecting those consumer taxes so you can squander them on yet more inefficiencies and corruption. Live for today Brazil, to hell with tomorrow.

London's consumers are becoming indistinguishable from thieves while Brazilian consumers allow themselves to be robbed every time they enter a shop or pay a bill. But when enough of them are drowning in debts, a day of reckoning will surely arrive.

This article in The American Spectator covers a similar theme. Here's a sample:

"It may seem a bit unfair to rain on Brazil's parade, but just as Lula's personality drove the success of his presidency, that same flamboyance obscured the reality of his country's shortfalls. By focusing on easily accessible credit for low-income and no-income households, there has been a burgeoning of the availability of all manner of consumer-oriented products. Government-backed credit facilities encouraged buying that in turn manifested the illusion of general well-being. Ultimately, even though the economy gave the appearance of blossoming, it was not because of real structural changes but rather speculative investment based on a perception of broad economic gains. Without the confluence of a historic rise in commodity prices and massive orders for raw materials by China, Lulismo had no real base.

Inevitably inflation has pricked the credit bubble, forcing a tightening of monetary policy and thus restricting access to the past's extravagantly affordable lending rates. The consumers, especially the least advantaged, have lost their ability to keep up their newly found ability to buy. An environment of substantial interest rate rises is now too burdensome to sustain the high level of investment necessary to keep Brazil's economic pot boiling. Things may turn around again come Olympic time, but it certainly won't be because of Lulismo or any other game of political mirrors.

The illusion of Lulismo may still exist across Latin America, but not in the more financially hard-nosed environment of European and Asian financial capitals. Caution is the word when it comes to Brazil -- in spite of the charm and fashionable socialist objectives of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his political heiress, Dilma Rousseff."

Update: Found this quick analysis of the London riots interesting (via Sky News):

Clive Bloom, author of Violent London: 2,000 Years Of Riots, Rebels And Revolts, told Sky News Online that for the capital unrest was unfortunately, nothing new. He said London today is much like it was three centuries ago and the lawlessness of the city has always gone up and down.

"The 18th century was essentially a lawless period. The underclass areas were surrounded by very wealthy areas - pockets of wealth were surrounded by poverty. So there were times when the areas of poverty wound spill over and there would be days of rioting, just to let out the adrenaline. When you ignore very poor people, they decide to take the law into their own hands.

"The morality of property - the idea of the morality of property - they don't understand that a pair of trainers has to be sold to you - they can't just take it. And now they realise, no one's stopping them.

"The action is entirely criminal but the underlying social issues are not criminal, and they need to be dealt with very carefully." But Mr Bloom added that gang culture also played a big part in the wanton criminality.

"The inward looking nature of those in the poverty areas has exploded onto the streets. There's no political agenda in roaming the streets - it's just thuggery. It's the spending of the underclass. They see some trainers they can't afford, so they steal them. It's buying without money.

"Young people in these areas gain their social status from gang culture - not from, like before, church or teachers. It's gang culture spilling out onto the streets. They have built themselves up outside the church and youth club networks.

"It's inward looking, rather than looking at the wider society... These are kids who would probably not have gone to youth club - youth clubs represent authority. The old fashioned youth club is gone... what's replaced it is social media, Twitter. And that is distance relationships... You're having a relationship with someone you don't know. You're someone who's like me, let's go get some trainers."

Update 2: Thus article arrived in my inbox today:

Criminologist and author of Scared of the Kids, Dr Stuart Waiton argues that there are clear reasons for the riots - the key one being the collapse of authority in society.

RIOTS IN LONDON

As a director of a youth charity, a criminologist and author of a book called 'Scared of the kids' it may appear strange to call on the police to get a grip - but somebody has to. The impotent approach of the police has helped to encourage these copycat riots, as one rioting youth in Manchester explained, 'It's the government. The government has no authority'. Describing the clear lack of authority demonstrated by the police who stood back and watched the rioting take place, this opportunistic youth recognised an open door - a vacuum of authority - when he saw it. Consequently a number of antisocial youth have acted and a relatively minor event in London that could and should have easily been nipped in the bud has subsequently escalated.

At the same time however the kids rioting need to be told to get a grip. Some resentment of the police may have triggered events, but from the images online and on YouTube much of what is taking place is clearly opportunistic and narcissistic. Where the 80s riots had a genuine political undercurrent and were formed in response to serious police harassment and discrimination in society - these rioters are more like joy riders, getting a thrill (and a free Widescreen): Not part of a community but the reflection of the loss of one - asocial individuals laughing as they trash shops and set houses on fire. Unfortunately today's 'non-judgemental' therapeutic culture has encouraged the more asocial and self involved aspect of some young people's personalities to come to the fore. For many of these rioters, hearing the black Hackney women screaming at them (seeYouTube clip) and telling them how infantile and inadequate they are would have been a new experience for them. Today, from the top of society down through professionals there is a tendency to flatter and patronised the young - something that again appears to reflect a loss of a sense of purpose and authority by our leaders and within societies institutions.

At the same time as there being not enough policing and the assertion of authority with these riots, more widely there has been far too much policing and regulation of relationships between adults and young people in communities. In 2001 when Scared of the Kids was first published I argued that the rising regulation of communities via ASBO's, curfews and even the new vetting of adults who want to work with young people would have the impact of making local adults impotent, discouraging them intervening, engaging with the young and socialising them. This is what has now happened. Excessive state intervention and 'support' of communities has in essence undermined local adult authority.

Too much attention (and money) has been spent on antisocial behaviour in recent years when the much more fundamental problem is the creation of an asocial society - one in which the authorities may discuss 'respect' as an apparent antidote to antisocial behaviour but do so in a morally and politically empty, self referential and therapeutic way. When everyone and everything is deserving of 'respect' it simply turns into a form of indulgence and flattery lacking content and actually limiting the capacity of older people and communities from forming and indeed enforcing a sense of what is right and wrong. When another young woman on the streets shouted, 'You show me respect and I'll give it you back' (as her friend giggled in the backgroud), she was simply parroting the message of the empty Respect Agenda developed by the last Labour government which likewise was built on the idea of 'Give Respect - Get Respect' - as if 'respect' is something that can be bartered rather than being a reflection of clear adult and societal values you look up to.

The result of all of this, the crisis of elite authority, the undermining of spontaneous adult authority in community and the more patronising and morally vacuous 'self esteem' obsessed approach of authorities and educationalists has helped to create a more disconnected and self absorbed group of youngsters.

Coupled with a confused and impotent police force the result has been mayhem.

Dr Stuart Waiton is a sociology and criminology lecturer at Abertay University and chair of the youth research group Generation Youth Issues.

Credit where credit's due

2011-08-08T14:19:00.001+01:00

For everything else there's the Post Office. Before I travelled to Brazil last October I was alarmed to hear that my credit cards might not work, such is the country's reputation for fraud. I had a longish, rather pleading phone chat with someone at the Post Office, hoping they could ensure I would not be cut off from my financial lifeline. Still, I feared the worst when I got here, which is why I just wanted to take a moment to thank the PO and / or my lucky stars that the card has proved such a trusty and reliable companion in what has been a money-pit existence here. Sadly, I can't say quite the same for my Nationwide debit card, which temporarily died just when I most needed it (after the robbery) but now seems to have mysteriously sprung back to life.

Salaries in Brazil

2011-08-08T14:02:00.000+01:00

Just heard from a friend, joint US-Brazilian nationality, who's been in Brazil for some time trying to settle here after many years living in the US. Well-qualified and experienced, he thought he'd finally landed a job in a legal field. Only problem was the salary: 1000 reais a month, about £400. That should just about cover his Telefonica bill.

Wonderful, wonderful Kopenhagen

2011-08-07T00:55:00.001+01:00

There are a few chocolatiers around here. We've tried several but tonight reconfirmed Kopenhagen (corner of Rua Augusta and Rua Tiete) as our undisputed hot chocolate champ. Exquisite and not too expensive either. Just don't be tempted by the bomboms, which at 10 reais (£4) a pop are a temptation too far.

PS: Last time here I said it was a shame another Brazilian chocolatier felt the need to give their brand a European twist. But the staff told me it was actually the family name of the owners, so can't argue with that.

Baby steps

2011-08-06T19:36:00.001+01:00

Oh do get over it, Hobert ! So they can't make pavements / sidewalks. So they force you to walk up and down insanely steep streets, pushing a baby buggy, and then they think it's perfectly ok to abandon the pavement altogether and dump some kind of excuse for steps ? Steps which are sometimes so gigantic they can't even be classified as steps, but more like a form of rock climbing ? And you still haven't got used to it, Hobert ? ... Well, no, I'm afraid I haven't and I never will. Apparently this country produces a ton(ne) of engineers. Apparently it has a booming IT industry. But here in one of the poshest parts of town, as everywhere else, they somehow can't find it in themselves to produce the most basic and essential infrastructure for any civilized society. I know that as mere pedestrians we must ipso facto be losers, pathetically reliant on public investment. But still it would be nice to know that someone else in this town gave a damn.

The foolish foreigner's tale

2011-08-05T22:25:00.000+01:00

A line from my previous post, about reinforcing prejudices, got me thinking: did I come to Brazil with a desire to see only the bad side ?

It's true, I did arrive in, shall we say, an unusual state of mind. The headline might read: "First-time visitor to Brazil comes to 'take delivery' of his first-born child", whose Brazilian mother had partly decided and partly been forced (by UK visa problems) to give birth in her home country. A home she hadn't seen in over five years.

My experience of Brazil, therefore, has been as an all-hands-to-the-deck full-time parent. And until the robbery, we lived in a less affluent part of Sao Paulo. It's not a "lifestyle" most visitors to this country, or well-remunerated expats in their bubbles, would recognize. Still, for all it's challenges, I've been given some unique insights and perspectives, the kind of reality you couldn't buy and the kind of strangeness that does indeed make you stronger. I've never been one for packaged holidays anyway.

But before this experience, there was in fact one other brush with Brazil. A very, very expensive brush, it now appears.

Back in the final sputtering moments of our formerly "strong" global economy, I did what so many other fools before me have done: I rushed in and bought an off-plan "villa" in a "piece of paradise" by the sea.

Just outside Maracajau, a fishing village which is now quite famous for its coral reef snorkeling, my fantasy island went by the exotic moniker of "Portos dos Corais", Coral Port. About 65 kilometers north of Natal, in north-east Brazil.

First payment was in the dying days of 2006. Further payments followed but then came to a halting stop, along with the development. The man in charge was a Swede married to a Brazilian and living in Natal. Among the many dumb ideas clouding my judgement at the time was the assumption that a Swede gave credibility to the project: it would surely be run competently, honestly and efficiently. After all, many of the buyers were from that country or other Nordic lands.

As with other bad investing decisions from the same period, it now seems impossible to untangle personal culpability from malign global economic forces. Sure, the sensible Swede turned out to be just another wideboy whippersnapper who'd bitten off more than he could chew. But the bottom line is that a tsunami of almost free money which had propelled the foreign property and other bubbles for many years suddenly disappeared in the blink of an eye. No more Peter to pay Paul, no more money-go-round. The old saying about bricks and mortar being the safest of all investments was completely upended: it was the one place you did not want to have your savings.

Amazingly, The Port of Corals is still running. Well, that probably isn't quite the word to describe it. Slumbering, resting, mothballed, comatose would be nearer the mark. Many of the European buyers, including myself, have tried valiantly to get things unstuck and have used the Internet to add a sense of "order and progress" where basically there is none. Listening to the developer and other assorted characters connected with this ill-fated enterprise is a form of surreal entertainment to rival anything offered by Family Guy ... but with tears instead of laughter. How do you revive trust ? Apparently, no-one in Brazil, including these people, could care less. It's the one commodity you can't buy.

I finally managed to visit my imagination's wonderland. We spent three weeks last December staying in Natal and touring the area. The development is accessed either by a drive down the beach in a trusty four-by-four, sloping into alarmingly aggressive waves, or else via a circuitous ride along deserted terrain. As we drove back one evening, we were approached by police, having stopped to fill the baby's bottle. They told us to be careful since we were vulnerable to hijacking by thieves on this lonely, unlit stretch.

All over the region you see home-made signs saying "Se vende" or "Vende se" (must be that famous illiteracy again). "For sale". Seemingly endless tracts of scruffy-looking land with or without already constructed dwelling places. It's all for sale. And that hardly inspires confidence. Plus the fact that the area seems so, well, empty, so devoid of human life, human enterprise, industry, progress; it just makes all this property speculation seem even more absurd. I imagine that in reality there are few actual buyers and sellers.

I spoke at length to a retired Norwegian couple, living in a completed villa on PDC. Nice people and with that wonderful Scandinavian restraint that makes the English look positively Latin. They seemed totally torn between, on the one hand, joy at being far from a Norwegian winter and, on the other, frustration at being in the ghost-town that was, and by all accounts still is, Porto dos Corais. They were undecided on whether to return there in the new year for a longer spell and from what I hear they did not. Probably a wise move since this year brought reports of break-ins and robberies. A lack of security was blamed, which also explains why one of the local free-range cows was found in the swimming pool !

Ah, what fun ! What stories I have to tell for my many thousands of probably-lost-forever euros. Thankfully, what is also lost is the armchair traveller, the off-plan fantasist who, rather than fearing the worst about Brazil, imagined it to be heaven on earth.

The haberdasher's tale

2011-08-05T19:38:00.000+01:00

Do I go looking for negative comments about Brazil ? You'd be forgiven for thinking so; after all, it's human nature to want to reinforce our prejudices. Perhaps if I relentlessly asked locals what they love and adore about Brazil I might get a rosy-looking picture. But I don't. Take this blog's apparent bias with a pinchful or sackful of salt. I am just one small voice. However, subjective as I am, my intention is to try to reflect, accurately and honestly, what I hear.

The other night, we had a woman friend of P's round for dinner. She brought her 16 year old daughter along, same as the last time we met a few months ago. Once again I got into a long conversation with the daughter about Brazil. Despite enjoying an affluent lifestyle, Marianna feels pessimistic about her country and its people. The overwhelming sentiment behind her words was that Brazil is dog eat dog and that behind the smiles and obrigados there is no esprit de corps, no fellow feeling. In answer to the question of why "the system" here is so dysfunctional, she said: "It's because people feel they have not been helped so why should they help you ?"

Today we went to have a chat with a woman who owns a small clothes shop just around the corner on Rua Augusta. P's parents also have a clothes shop in the small town where they live on the periphery of Sao Paulo and she hoped to get some business tips from this woman.

What we got, mostly, was a cry of rage and despair. She told us how just buying the right to rent a small shop in this town can cost up to $200,000 - that's US dollars. She was quoted $180,000 by a place in not very salubrious Bom Retiro. "My husband said, for that money you could stick it in the bank and live off the interest, never mind throwing it away on a shop !"

Once the lease has been bought, you will have to spend about 12,000 reais a month on rent, that's about £5000 or $8000. And we're talking small shops here. Hers sits on an arterial road in the middle of Sao Paulo, with endless traffic jams allowing buses and lorries to saturate the air she breathes with poison.

This woman has children living in ... can you guess ? Miami, of course. "Our former president (Lula) had no education and ended up earning millions." By contrast, her children paid 2000 reais a month (£800) to go to university and still couldn't find any jobs here paying a decent wage.

Now she is holding her breath in anticipation of the day when she can join her children in blissful exile. She is trying to sell the lease on her own shop but the only offer received so far was from a rich woman wanting to open her third franchised store for chocolate specialist Cacau Brasil. Although she had already spent 500,000 reais just to acquire the franchise, she wasn't prepared to offer more than 10,000 reais for the lease. It was on offer for the relatively bargain price of 50,000 reais.

So our friendly neighbourhood shop owner, specialising in locally-tailored clothes for the "fuller-figured lady" sits and counts the days until she can sell her shop, receive a Green Card and make her escape to the US. She hopes to sell her clothes in the new country but if not, "I'd rather sweep floors there than stay here !"

What does she think about Brazil and the country's future, I ask ? "Uma merda," she replies without missing a beat. She then expands: "Uma merda, Uma merda, Uma merda !"

Bullshit.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

PS: She also noted that areas outside the city, once considered safe, are no longer so, thanks to rising and widespread crime. P's own family can vouch for this: drug dealers and other undesirables have moved into what was once a pretty crime-free town.

The Holy Trinity

2011-08-05T01:35:00.000+01:00

Family Guy. The Cleveland Show. American Dad. Seth Macfarlane is the latest Shakespeare. I used to say that of Matt Groening and The Simpsons, to a lesser degree of South Park, King of the Hill and other assorted pieces of animation comedy genius. But evolution is a wonderful thing and somehow the creators of FG, TCS and AD seem that bit closer to the summit of comic-satiric-surrealistic perfection.

Isn't it just too clangingly obvious that as on-screen human actors become more and more two-dimensional, cliched ciphers spouting paint-by-numbers dialogue, so their animated alternatives have reached a kind of uber-mature sophistication ? If you're looking for signs of intelligent life on our dumbed down planet, head straight for the sagacious, rarefied realm of cartoon japery. It makes everything else seem like child's play.

PS: And once again thank you, iTunes, for giving me access to this stuff out here in the back of beyond, a culture where Family Guy might as well have come from Mars.

PPS: Fate's a funny thing: "Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane had been scheduled to be on the flight (American Airlines Flight 11) but arrived at the airport late." The free world will always have the last laugh.

Who is rich ?

2011-08-04T18:51:00.001+01:00

If a country's wealth is measured by the contents of its collective head and heart rather than its abundance of forests, beaches, fields and mines, then Brazil is not rich.

P has recently made contact with a fellow Brazilian who emigrated from Sao Paulo to northern Israel a few years ago. She and her (Jewish) Brazilian husband now have three children. I found this woman's comments, made off the cuff and without any hidden agenda, equally revealing about her new home and the place she left behind.

Bear in mind that Israel's ongoing summer of discontent clearly indicates much unhappiness among its public, regarding the cost of living. But this only makes the ex-Brazilian's positive comments even more remarkable and proves, yet again, that everything in life is relative.

A few quotes:

"Before I came here (Israel) I had a million doubts and questions."

"I never suffered any robbery in Brazil but I have many friends who did. And on a visit there in 2009 we were followed by robbers. We luckily found a police station and told them we were being followed but all they did was to advise us to hide our valuables. This experience reminded me how unsafe it is in Brazil and gave me an unpleasant feeling that I hadn't experienced since moving to Israel."

On healthcare: "We pay 300 reais (about £120) a month to cover the entire family, including all dental care for my children up to the age of eight. My husband had an operation on his vocal chords and I had my twins by caesarean: we didn't need to pay a penny more for either of these procedures. Everything is included and medication is also super-cheap. For example, my husband needs to take pills for his stomach which costs 50 reais in Brazil but only 7 reais here !"

On education: "My (seven-year-old) son's schooling costs 400 reais a year (about £160), including books."

On security: "No question I feel much more secure than I ever felt in Brazil. There are no gates and doormen at the entrance to buildings. My son can play outside the house and I'm not worried that someone might come and kidnap him. This makes the children here very independent. We have the same peace of mind that our parents had when they used to ask us to pick up a loaf of bread or something from the corner shop. You can't even imagine being like that in Brazil today."

In conclusion: "Moving to Israel was the best thing we could have done for our family. I'm sure if we were still in Brazil I wouldn't have got pregnant yet. Here we received government aid and my children have access to a safe, healthy and educational environment without having to spend a fortune."

"We don't have to live in fear of violence."

City of God

2011-08-04T05:58:00.000+01:00

"After five deaths in 25 hours, Sao Paulo Police create a special robbery-murder department," says a headline in today's Estadao. It seems when the victims put up any kind of resistance they were fatally shot, some in front of their children.

Sao Pollution 2

2011-08-01T23:01:00.000+01:00

So was it a winter cold I had recently and which has left me with a permanently irritated throat, eyes and sinus, not to mention my son's sneezing more than average of late ? Or was it pollution ? As I suspected, seems to be the latter, according to this article in Veja.

I never thought I'd be wishing for a return of the torrential rains that blight this city for much of the year but the prolonged dry spell of winter has whipped the city's notorious pollution into an even worse state than usual. Seven million cars combined with virtually no anti-pollution policy and substandard building construction mean that pollution is even worse inside apartments than outside, according to the Veja article. Four times higher than the World Health Organisation's recommended maximum.

Beam me up Scotty. I think I've been punished enough.

Injecting debate

2011-07-31T23:02:00.000+01:00

Contraception in Brazil, like elsewhere, centres around the pill, implants and injections. If you don't have health insurance and wish to get any of these via a doctor, you will either have to pay for an expensive appointment or take your chances with the dreadful public health system. Unsurprisingly, a popular third alternative is to go to your local chemist and, in classic Brazilian fashion, get the pill or an injection under the counter. Some sort of technical loophole means they can provide these services if you ask for the brand name specifically rather than for what the drug is meant to do.

Apparently, the use of pharmacy-administered injections is on the rise. But for the past year or so, and certainly over the nine months that I've been here, the three-month injection has been "out of stock", leaving only the one-month alternative. Multiple times at multiple pharmacies we've asked why the three-month is "out of stock" and when will it be back in stock ? And of course, this being Brazil, the answer is always a pleasant but impossibly incurious "I don't know". But aren't other people also trying to find out what's going on, you inquire ? No, they aren't. Or at least that's what the pharmacies assume from their customers' silence.

Today we managed to find out a little more. The manufacturer of the three-month injection is, or rather was, Pfizer. Its drug had apparently been in use and widely available for about a decade before suddenly disappearing. A local branch of Droga Raia, one of the big pharmacy chains, told us there had been problems with the injection: women were having too many adverse side-effects. The injection was withdrawn and then briefly reinstated before being withdrawn again. The reason given on the second occasion was that Pfizer had problems getting access to the necessary raw materials with which to manufacture the product.

Yet a quick Google search doesn't seem to indicate problems with the supply of this Pfizer contraceptive in any other countries. For example, this website has mainly positive things to say about it.

So once again we are left with a deafening silence as to why things in Brazil have to be the way they are. The issue here is not so much about contraception but about the perennial passivity of Brazil's masses. There will never be any accountability in this country until people start holding others to account and stop behaving as if everything they get is some kind of gift from on high, no matter how much they are charged for it.

Update, September 9, 2011, Oxford, UK: We went to a sexual health and family planning clinic today to get the injection today here in the UK. Told them P is a Brazilian visitor and prepared to pay. Were given a three-month injection of a drug made by Pharmacia and told "there is no charge, it is a free service." Unreal contrast. PS: Never heard back from Pfizer.

Double figures

2011-07-29T14:41:00.000+01:00

Today Sam turns 10 ... months. And I just turned nine months in Brazil. It's been quite a trip. We're still waiting for our "balloon".

Comfort food

2011-07-27T17:41:00.000+01:00

What do you see there on the breakfast table? I see a coffee sitting next to a lightly toasted white roll, spread with butter. The roll tastes as you would expect something so unexciting to taste. And I'll have it if there's nothing better on offer. All too often there isn't. Brazilian bakeries tend to produce incredibly stodgy food, lacking in subtlety, texture and taste. Croissants are generally dreadful. But my point in asking about this particular toasted roll is that for some Brazilians - perhaps many, maybe all - it is much, much more than a bit of bland, nutritionless carbohydrate. It is ... drum roll please ... the legendary "Pao Na Chapa" or, more prosaically, grilled bread. For P it is a scrumptious, tastebud-titillating treat. If my tone sounds sarcastic, I apologise, it's not meant to. Whatever floats your boat, and if it's an inexpensive treat then so much the better. It just got me thinking about comfort food in general and what a peculiar thing it is, reconnecting us with our own peculiar childhood memories and emotions ... and often making absolutely no sense to anyone else. Fish fingers, anyone ?

PS: P has found a more glamorous picture on Google, presenting this delicacy in a more favourable light. So please click here and ignore my amateurish photo above !

PPS: And here's what a Brazilian blogger has to say about the wonders of milky coffee (Pingado) and pao na chapa. Unsurprisingly, it's in Portuguese but by way of rough transltion she says this combo is one of the most popular Brazilian morning snacks and she often visits padarias (bakery-cafes) solely to get her pao na chapa fix.

Jam tomorrow ?

2011-07-27T15:42:00.000+01:00

Many people have commented on Brazil's need to add value, to take its God-given natural bounty and transform it into products worthy of a fast-developing country. Instead, it lets European, US and Chinese companies buy low and sell high. Jam, for example, costs a fortune here, and only a bit less if you're prepared to settle for the synthetic, over-sugared goo produced by domestic manufacturers. Yet you often see street vendors hawking fresh strawberries, such as these pictured. I bought them just now for 10 reais, which is about £4, or one pound a pack. Granted, that is cheaper than usual, which might be three for a tenner on the street or five reais each in the shops. I'm thinking of trying to turn them into jam myself, guessing that, if I can make a decent go of it, the economics of fresh home-made jam will be very attractive. I imagine that would not be the case in the UK.

Ashes to ashes

2011-07-27T00:38:00.000+01:00

I was surprised to discover, some years ago, that many Jews in the UK are cremated, as was the case today with the late Amy Winehouse. (Always weird using that additional appellation so soon after someone has died. Just a few days ago she may have been "late" for an appointment; now she is forever "Late", by virtue of dying early) She had a Jewish funeral service in a Jewish part of town and her body was despatched by a loyal band of (mainly) Jewish North Londoners. But instead of going into the ground, according to the strictures of traditional Judaism, her corpse made its way into a furnace. There isn't a nicer word for that - and "oven" has all sorts of ugly, historical connotations.

P was intrigued to read a discussion* of this among readers of online news coverage of the funeral. One said Winehouse couldn't have been a "proper" Jew if she made her final exit this way, rather than under the ground. Another noted the seeming hypocrisy of having the funeral take place within a couple of days of her death, according to Jewish tradition. A third reader wondered how it could possibly be relevant to make all this fuss about someone dying "as a Jew" when their entire adult life, if not childhood as well, seemed to have been lived as a heathen !

Halachically - that is according to halacha, traditional Jewish law - you are Jewish if your mother is Jewish. Simple as that. And you remain Jewish, except in a few extreme cases, such as Spinoza's (he was excommunicated), until your dying day. It may seem ridiculous to make so much fuss of someone's purported identity only as they are being laid to rest.

But let's face it: funerals are more for the living than the dead. The reassertion of some kind of meaning and community at times of tragedy is most welcome to those left behind, especially if they happen to be the parents. Moreover, Judaism will always remain somewhat confusing to non-Jews (and many Jews too) in being neither just a "people" nor merely a "practice" but, somehow, both.

As for cremation, I understand that it became the most common form of burial in the UK quite a long time ago, mainly for financial reasons - it costs a lot less in a country where land is scarce. And, freed of religious shackles, an increasingly secular population perhaps viewed cremation as "cleaner" and more efficient. No doubt a significant number of British Jews, at the more liberal end of the religious spectrum, saw no reason not to follow this practice. Amy's own grandmother was cremated in the same Golders Green cemetery.

Nevertheless, it remains a dramatic contrast to the funerals of orthodox and traditional Jews, who, like Muslims, must be buried in a plain white garment and in a simple wooden coffin. In hot countries, such as Israel, there is in fact no coffin at all, just a shroud. The thinking behind this is the literalistic notion of Messianic revivification, thus requiring a "complete" body, returned to it's Maker in the same humble state as when it arrived in this world.**

It is this demand for physical completeness that prompts groups of specially trained orthodox men to scour the ground after a terrorist bombing in Israel. They are looking for every possible piece of flesh, all of which must be buried. I always wonder how they can know that some of the terrorist's flesh isn't mixed up with that of the victims ?

This physical burial requirement obviously makes no sense at all if you were one of the millions incinerated in a Nazi death camp, or if you were lost at sea, eaten by an animal, forcibly decomposed by your murderer in an acid bath, etc. etc. But as with most things religious, ours not to reason why ... well, you can try but you're unlikely to find a satisfactory answer.

This desire for "completeness" in death is also why traditional Judaism, like Islam, prohibits organ donation. This is beginning to change now, no doubt based on the overriding principle that nothing is more important than saving a life.

A fascinating, if unappetising subject. In death as in life, different strokes for different folks. The loss of any loved one, especially when so young, leaves a feeling of incompleteness. That, rather than the theoretical state of the deceased, is what must be focused on and, hopefully, fixed. One minute they were there, now they have vanished. Where exactly the now-empty husk of a human resides is perhaps not, in the end, a matter of life and death.

* I initially wrote "heated discussion" but quickly thought better of this unintentional pun. Respecting death means tiptoeing through a verbal minefield. I recall my sister once walking into a roomful of subdued mourners and exclaiming: "Deathly silence in here !" before realising too late her mistake.

** In fact, traditional Judaism makes much of the idea that our bodies never actually belonged to us in life: they were on loan. Just as they must be "respected" in death, so they should be protected while in use; hence the ban on piercings, tattoos and substance abuse. Hard to see Amy Winehouse as a traditional Jew in that regard.

Update: Having just seen a photo of a man carrying Amy's ashes out of the crematorium, looking for all the world like a bodyguard who could have been escorting the living, breathing woman only a few days ago, I can't help feeling a little queasy at the merciless rapidity of transition from now-you-see-me to now-you-don't. A high-speed Jewish burial followed by high-speed bodily destruction is perhaps a little too much for me. But I wouldn't dream of imposing my particular sensitivities on anyone else.

Update 2: Oh dear. The bodyguards-posing-with-ashes photos get worse.

Update 3: Just realised I forgot to explain why Jewish burials take place with what some might consider indecent haste. It is because Judaism draws a huge iron curtain between life and death. The latter is considered a form of impurity to be kept strictly separate from all living things. As soon as death occurs, the soul leaves the body and has no further use for it. Indeed, any kind of focus on the now purely physical object could be considered akin to idolatry, something which is anathema to Judaism. Thus, the imperative of a speedy burial, after which the focus can return to the living, in terms of a seven-day period of mourning to comfort the bereaved and accompanying prayers to "help the soul on Its way". Such is the "uncleanness" of death that certain Jews, considered to be of priestly descent, have very specific restrictions preventing them from coming too close to a dead body. And a very religious Jew will, upon waking in the morning, give top priority to washing his hands and saying a Hebrew prayer thanking God for reviving him (obviously, religious women too). Sleep is considered to be a mini-death - a 1/60th fraction of death to be precise !

On a practical level, the typical high-speed Jewish burial can cause terrible problems, with far-flung family and friends often unable to attend. I remember my own mini-drama when my aunt died. A rookie reporter at a magazine, I was told to finish my news stories before being allowed to leave work. As a result I had to bomb up the motorway from London to Manchester at breakneck speed and, having parked at the wrong corner of a large cemetery, then found myself running like a madman past endless gravestones in order to arrive at the small Jewish section. I had missed the service but was thankfully just in time to see the burial.

One last thing: It is not very orthodox Jewish these days to say "rest in peace", perhaps because this valediction seems to blur the physical body and the soul. Ironically, the phrase seems to have it's origins in the book of Isaiah and was used on ancient Jewish gravestones, written in a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic. The sentiment and words live on in Hebrew prayers recited during regular synagogue services.

The traditional Jewish words acknowledging a deceased person are "zichron l'bracha", often abbreviated to z"l, which means "may their memory be a blessing"*** The focus is on life and the living, as is the traditional death-notice wording: "May X's family be comforted among the mourners of Zion" and the in-person greeting to family of the deceased: "I wish you long life". It seems to me an unsatisfactory and rather clumsy thing to say, appearing to focus on quantity rather than quality and at a time when the duration of a grieving person's life may be the last thing on their mind.

But the Jewish way is to consign death to a separate metaphorical room, and while honouring the dead for at least a year via special prayers, nevertheless to remove them very quickly from among the living. In Judaism, the memory of a person and their good deeds is all-important, rather than their former physicality, which those of a Kabbalistic disposition would no doubt say was all an illusion anyway, since this world is simply the dreamlike ante-chamber to the "real" world that is to come.

*** This is often translated as, "May his / her memory be FOR a blessing" but I've never understood why this jarring, foreign-sounding inclusion of the word "for". As any decent translator knows, you don't do a literal translation if it doesn't sound right in the second language. One might say the same of "I wish you long life", rather than "I wish you A long life", but as all fans of Fiddler on the Roof know, tradition is tradition ! Grammar shmammar !

No comment

2011-07-25T20:12:00.000+01:00

A perfect example of what I'm talking about in the last-but-one post are the ongoing problems I've been having with people's comments not showing up on this blog. There is no-one at Google prepared to help so you must somehow find your way through the online maze of Googe discussion groups and pray that a kind soul will suggest a solution. And lo and behold someone has just responded to say that I should try clicking a different box, allowing another format for comments. I have now done that ... so, once again, here's hoping.

iMad !

2011-07-25T18:04:00.000+01:00

I love my iPad and since using it as my sole computer post-robbery have come to think of it as the main event rather than a supporting act. Except for one thing: this HORRIBLE autocorrect ! Its endless errors (often embarrassing) and interruptions, forcing insane over-use of the delete button can only really be described one way: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhhh !!!!!!!!

PS: Yes, I have tried turning it off but that seemed to make it worse. This device needs a reworked keypad and a more intelligent autocorrect feature that actually learns how you write rather than making the same mistakes again and again.

Update: Seems I'm in good company. And there's an entire website devoted to Apple's evil autocorrect.

Beware geeks bearing gifts

2011-07-25T16:41:00.001+01:00

I once saw an illustration of how Englishmen viewed the future. A bewigged character from the eighteenth century imagined seeing his spitting image staring serenely back at him; a nineteenth century fat-cat industrialist saw a perfect reflection of himself, only many times bigger. But the twentieth-century Englishman's perplexed inquiry into what was around the corner found only a giant-sized question mark.

And here in the twenty-first century it has become commonplace that "the only constant is change." We have the old habit of hoping that the future will bring more of the same, albeit "new and improved", yet we keep finding that with change come unintended consequences.

Take Google, for example. It arrived like some sort of Messiah, offering us access to untold riches of information. And like a Pied Piper it led us children off to a land in the Cloud where we could store our entire digital lives and never have to worry again about filing things inside physical objects. Because Google had its own physical objects that we didn't need to bother our little heads about. All we had to do was allow ourselves to become advertising fodder, an "eyeball" for the companies who were paying the Piper.

People like me loved this new form of info-liberation, cutting out the gatekeepers and going direct to what you needed to know. Equally, storing all your personal data online always seemed infinitely safer than keeping it on hard drives which could either get lost or stolen, or as in my own case, accidentally erased with no hope of recovery.

As human beings seemed to get dimmer and less able to think for themselves, this form of self-service was the perfect solution. Faster, cheaper, without all the aggravation, and done from wherever in the world you happened to be. True freedom !

But then the giant question mark popped up again, staring us in the face. What happened when this new datopia didn't quite work out as planned ? What happened when, for example, you clicked the wrong button and accidentally deleted your entire Google Calendar, used as much as a journal as for simple diary entries? Or as friends of mine have found, when you found yourself locked out of your email account or had all of your YouTube videos frozen for no apparent reason ?

If only the world advanced without jettisoning things you took for granted in the past, you would at such times be able to call up customer services, speak to someone and sort it out. But we soon found with companies like Google that a bunch of geeks in California had neither an interest in nor a concern for the human dimension to such computer malfunctions.

As so often, I tried resorting to my status as a journalist to go where I could not as a mere customer, or more accurately a "number". I managed to get someone at Google's UK media relations department to "look into it and get back" to me. Six weeks later, when she had still not got back to me, I had a brief email exchange which demonstrated 1. her complete lack of interest in helping and 2. her and her Google colleagues' complete inability to understand why this kind of data loss might be so upsetting. During this time, I had started a new calendar and consigned my maybe three years of old calendar data to the waste bin of history.

Of course, I was by then far too hooked on Google to change my behavior but this jarring encounter with Google-the-uncaring-corporation left its mark. Some years later I found myself in the Palo Alto swimming pool of a man who claimed to be Google's first ever chief engineer, now comfortably retired at the ripe old age of 30-something. I told him what had happened and he simply said: "I would never trust online storage."

Yet the world has been moving increasingly into the Cloud. There are two things I would like to see, and have been wanting to see for a long time:

1. Geeks and self-service can only get you so far. In order to trust these people with our most personal and vital data, indeed our very memories, we need a new model in which those who wish to pay for some kind of "old-fashioned" customer service can do so. By this I mean access in times of emergency to an individual who can think outside the tick-box and give the sense that the company with which you trust so much of your life actually has a beating heart and does give a damn. Of course, this will almost certainly cost money. As a customer we can all make the judgement of whether we want and can afford to pay. I would have been happy to pay something just to use the basic Google service, and indeed do pay for things like extra online storage for photos.

This model, free self-service alongside a paid-for service, can apply to a myriad of other modern companies too, not just the ones founded by geeks.

2. Some years ago I floated the idea of an article asking what happens to our online data when we die ? No-one seemed very interested. I tried to get a comment or two from the likes of Google but they had nothing much to say: apparently it was a non-issue. But our online archives are becoming evermore vital to who we are and to how our family and friends will remember us. For some people, this data may have even more value to society and the world at large. In the old days, a deceased person's "papers" were often saved at the last minute, despite their wishes to have them burned (Kafka, Emily Dickinson etc.) Today, there is no need for any bonfire, just the split-second click of a button and an entire life can be erased. Maybe even the life of a geek with a brilliant, world-changing idea.

Then we really would be faced with a giant question mark.

Update: Just found this article on Google Calendar's other unresolved problems.

Update 2: Just read this recent article on the subject of digital legacies.

Update 3: September 21, 2011, 5am: Sam, I am desperately sorry: I have just accidentally deleted about 100 Youtube videos of you. Once again, your crying woke me up and I came here to the computer obviously not compos mentis enough to function responsibly. In an attempt to change all of your uploaded videos to "Unlisted" from "Public" (the iPhone's upload default was "Public" and until now there was no way to change them all in one go), I went through the 500-plus videos on the My Videos section of Youtube and clicked the multiple-highlight "change status" button. Unbelievably and unbearably, on one batch of videos I clicked "delete" instead of "Unlisted" and, despite the brief "Are you sure" warning, I went ahead anyway. Since I don't have a back-up of these videos I have instantantly erased a chunk of your documented life. There are still non-video photos - many - of the erased weeks but I am sitting here in shock, mouth dry. It is unbearable to know that I have done something so fatal and so stupid in the blink of an eye. Google, the owner of YouTube, has nothing more to say on the matter of such user errors, other than to inform you that such deletion is irreversible.

Update 4: Just received this response from Google UK's head of communications: "Hi Robert, Thanks for your email, and very sorry for the slow reply, I've been away and am catching up on messages. I'm afraid that as far as I'm aware, there's no way of getting the videos reinstated once you've deleted them. I totally understand how upsetting this situation is, and apologies for not being able to help you out." I appreciate the reply; I appreciate the empathy and the candour; but I don't appreciate Google's continued corporate indifference to this most human, rather than geeky, of areas. It seems to be a massive cultural blind spot, for all their brilliance.

Update 5: Facebook's policy on deceased people's profiles.

Giving with one hand ...

2011-07-25T09:17:00.000+01:00

... and taking away with the other. This seems to sum up so much of what passes for philanthropy. You become rich by squeezing people's pockets and then you "give back to society" by handing over a small fraction of what you took. I was thinking of this when reading that the recent cottage cheese boycott in Israel was quietly sparked by a UK venture capital firm, Apax Partners, whose desire to make its Israeli asset "sweat", as they say in the business, was also making the poor Israeli consumer sweat.

The founder of Apax Partners, Sir Ronald Cohen, is hailed as a great friend of Israel and he has indeed given large amounts of his time and money to the country. I'm not sure what financial interest in or influence over Apax he still wields, perhaps none. But reading the following unappetising nuggets made me realise once again how so much money that is "generously" donated should never have been taken in the first place.* It's heartening to see how effective the cottage cheese boycott has been. Now let's see it replicated far and wide.

"Report: Tnuva was Advised it Could Raise Prices by 15%
Israel's Tnuva Food Industries was advised that it could raise its prices by 15% without affecting demand, Globes reports, quoting unnamed sources. According to the report, after Tnuva was acquired by Apax Partners it hired the McKinsey consultants to look at its pricing. McKinsey found that demand for hard cheese, white spreadable cheese, and cottage cheese was "inelastic" and that Tnuva could charge more. Since the advent of the cottage cheese crisis two weeks ago, which sparked a consumer boycott, Tnuva's cottage cheese sales have dropped by an unprecedented 25%."

And this from the Wall Street Journal:

"... in 2008, Tnuva was sold to Apax Partners, a London-based private-equity fund that moved aggressively to maximize profitability with an eye to reselling it down the road, according to people close to Tnuva and to Apax's own stated investment strategy.

"'[The cottage cheese boycott]is an expression of frustration of citizens who started to realize that Israel went very far from being an equal society to being a society controlled by a very small number of very rich people,'said Ariel Rubenstein, an economist at Tel Aviv University."

* I'm pointing out the irony of anyone who claims to love a country while simultaneously milking that country's inhabitants for all they're worth. Is it more acceptable to milk the inhabitants of country A in order to help country B, robbing Peter to pay Paul ? Of course not. But it is less ironic.

Update: George Soros, the billionaire Jewish investor and philanthropist, once made the following comment on the subject of private profit versus public good: "I have made it a principle to pursue my self-interest in my business, subject to legal and ethical limitations, and to be guided by the public interest as a public intellectual and philanthropist. If the two are in conflict, the public interest ought to prevail."

Update 2: Recently I learned that Sir Ronald Cohen is a non-dom (read the end of the piece). That is quite, quite unbelievable for someone who immigrated to the UK as a child ! Calls himself a social do-gooder yet has avoided paying taxes by being a "foreigner" when it comes to the Inland Revenue. Despicably unjust system - and sickening hypocrisy.

With "friends" like that ...

2011-07-24T19:27:00.000+01:00

Is having a madman on your side "good for the Jews" and Israel ? Never. If true, this is a deeply depressing revelation that will just increase antisemitic paranoia in Europe.

Life (before and) after death

2011-07-24T19:10:00.001+01:00

Some people never live, while others never die.

Who is strong ?

2011-07-24T15:26:00.000+01:00

The evil Norwegian mass-murderer quoted John Stuart Mill in claiming that one man with a belief is more powerful than 100,000 men who have only "interests". Poor JSM must be turning in his grave. In fact, the latest slaughterer - a neo-Nazi "Christian" who no doubt looked for other father figures having not seen his own since 1995 - has more in common with Islamic fascist jihadists. No question that many such killers have possessed similar "belief". But as much damage as they do in the short and medium term, which obviously feels like an eternity of grief, in the long run their destructive, monomaniacal obsession always reveals itself to be a weakness, not a strength.

I prefer to quote Ethics of the Fathers: "Who is strong? He who conquers his evil inclination, as it is said: 'Better is one slow to anger than a strong man, and one who rules over his spirit than a conqueror of a city' (Proverbs 16:32)."

----

At the risk of an unseemly juxtaposition, I was also reminded of this quote when, like everyone else, I thought about the tragic death of Amy Winehouse. Some say it was inevitable but the news still came as a terrible shock.

Having bought and downloaded her first two albums last night, I was listening to the track "Stronger than Me", in which she berates an older boyfriend for being too weak and effeminate, forcing her to be the one to wear the trousers in the relationship. "Feel like a lady but you my lady-boy". Wonderfully comic lyrics but no surprise that the relationship ended. Winehouse clearly looked for strength in all the wrong places, notoriously in her use of drugs and her ill-advised marriage. Her junkie ex-husband is currently in jail for armed robbery.

And it seems her most recent boyfriend, whom she apparently wanted to marry, did not feel up to the job of battling her deep-rooted demons. I'm sure he was no lady-boy either.

Rest in peace, Amy.

Tel-Aviv

2011-07-24T05:27:00.000+01:00

After the Arab spring, the Israeli summer. Granted, a milder social revolution by a factor of about one million. But a revolution nonetheless. Israelis are falling out of love with the particular brand of winner-takes-all capitalism that has swept over the country during the past quarter-century. High-tech Israel has boomed but where once there was an Israeli-flavored socialism holding things together, now it is every man for himself. And too many Israelis, especially the young, are finding themselves priced out of the market. Tel-Aviv in particular has become impossibly expensive, with rents going through the roof. Hence the sudden appearance of Tent City on one of the poshest streets, as protesters stage an open-ended lie-in.

I spent much time in Tel-Aviv during the last decade and almost moved there permanently in 2004. It would have been perfect timing for a property investment but I had other, less hard-nosed considerations affecting my judgement. As I returned on subsequent visits I was shocked by the rapidity of the city's transformation from a low-rise town full of old-school charm and quirkiness into a thrusting, high-rise yuppie utopia, a wannabe New York. Overnight, sushi replaced felafel as the favourite snack, while slick apartment blocks, restaurant chains, modern art galleries and wine shops elbowed out the more ramshackle and idiosyncratic former occupants of central Tel-Aviv. Prices for everything rocketed and the number of street beggars multiplied.

Of course it's easy to fall into the trap of nostalgia. Tel-Aviv in the late 90s and early Noughties had been defaced by dreadful terrorism. It was the relative lack of this which helped pave the way for the city's unprecedented economic boom. In addition, globalisation and the blossoming of Israel's technological and entrepreneurial talents (see "Start-up Nation") combined to put the country in an economic sweet spot.

But having lived through the UK's material decade of the 1980s and the leisure and lifestyle boom of the 90s, during which time bland corporate sameness began to dominate, I couldn't help but cast a rather jaundiced eye on the new, booming Tel-Aviv. The city was losing it's innocence and becoming just another cynic, whose wheeler-dealer speculators knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. In that respect the "Bubble" was simply a more intense microcosm of this newly capitalistic country.

Of course the past can never be revisited. Tel-Aviv has moved on but what the tent city protesters are trying to bring back is a sense of collective responsibility and social justice for which Israel was once famous (and, no, I'm not interested in getting into a wider discussion of Middle-East politics here). Israel and Tel-Aviv's current tensions reflect the new inequalities that have been plaguing our globalized world for some time now. Brazil is obviously an extreme example, especially for a country with so much natural wealth.

If Israel can find a way to bring its society back into balance, fairer and more equal, obviously without snuffing out its famous entrepreneurial dynamism and creativity, perhaps this rebalancing act could serve as a beacon for others ? We all now live in a world that, in its mad rush for gowth, is in danger of losing more than it gains.

Update: interesting perspective here.

More magic

2011-07-23T23:25:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was another minor milestone for Sam. He climbed onto a coffee table and, separately, put his dummy in his mouth (several times). Magic. Although requiring evermore eagle eyes, and fast reactions, from his parents ! Yes I know, I've become a cooing cliche but at least I'm under no illusion that these baby updates are for anyone's benefit but our own - and perhaps one day for Sam himself.

Holy big brother

2011-07-23T17:52:00.000+01:00

Walking along Paulista, we were stopped by a camera crew who got P to say some fun but silly soundbites as publicity for a new series of The Farm. It's a Big Brother copycat on Brazil's second most popular TV channel, Rede Record. Although it is even crasser than Globo in its opium-for-the-masses programming, Rede Record is actually owned by "Bishop" Edir Macedo, founder of the evangelical mega-church, The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

Somehow this company manages to condemn its bigger rival as "the devil" while actually offering even more inane and sexualised content. The Farm is a perfect example, pandering to the prurience of what is actually quite a sexually repressed country.

Today's Brazil is high on reality TV and Christian evangelism. Big Brother, which runs on Globo in the summer, is now into something like its 13th season.

PS: Having performed for the camera and parroted back to the director lines like, "Wow !! The Farm is now on at nine o'clock !! That's wonderful !!" P wisely refused to sign the consent form, having thought twice about seeing herself plastered all over this channel.

PPS: Speaking of the devil, it seems Bishop Macedo's Church, the UKCG, may have played a less than saintly role in the sordid death of Victoria Climbié, a blast from my UK past. Wikipedia has this:

Victoria Climbié was an eight-year-old child whose cruel death led to major changes in child protection policies in the UK. She died from abuse and neglect while living with her aunt Marie-Therese Kouao and the aunt's boyfriend. Victoria was seen by dozens of social workers, nurses, doctors and police officers before she died, and by the UCKG, but all failed to spot and stop the abuse as she was slowly tortured to death. Kouao and her boyfriend were charged with child cruelty and murder. During police interviews, both claimed that Victoria was possessed by evil spirits. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment.[30]

Victoria's murder led to a public inquiry which investigated the role of social services, the National Health Service, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, and the police in her death.

On 19 February 2000 Victoria was taken by Kouao to the UCKG on Seven Sisters Road. The pastor, Alvaro Lima, told the inquiry that he suspected she was being abused. He said that Victoria told him that Satan had told her to burn herself. According to the inquiry report "Pastor Lima expressed the view that Victoria was possessed by an evil spirit and advised Kouao to bring Victoria back to the church a week later".[30] Lima decided to pray and fast with an assistant; he did not call the police, hospital or social services, and took no further action.[31]

On 24 February 2000 Kouao took Victoria back to the UCKG, where Pastor Lima advised them to go to hospital and called a taxi;[30] when she arrived at the hospital her temperature was 27 °C (normal temperature is about 36 °C). She died the following day—the same day the UCKG was planning to hold a service of deliverance for her to cast out the devil.[32] A post-mortem examination found 128 injuries on all parts of her body; the pathologist reported that it was the worst case of deliberate harm to a child he had ever seen.[30]"

Wedding blues

2011-07-22T22:51:00.000+01:00

As I said, it's the worst possible time to be applying for a UK visa. This catastrophic cock-up by the UKBA must be the wedding equivalent of what those disgraceful Met officers did to poor Jean Charles de Menezes. (Although I don't want to seem facetious, since nothing can compare to the horror of what happened to him. It's a massive blot on British justice for which no-one in the Met has ever been properly held accountable or, better yet, imprisoned. Ian Blair, in charge at the time, only resigned after further, lesser scandals, enjoying a million pound pay-off and a vast pension. Sickening.)

Revolution in the air

2011-07-22T19:00:00.000+01:00

... Seemingly everywhere except Brazil.

"We must put together a different social order here, one that will combine economic prosperity with mutual responsibility. But to do this, the strong and the assertive must wake up from the moral coma into which they sank a generation ago." To find out which country, click here.

A law unto themselves

2011-07-21T17:00:00.000+01:00

P was just offered a job at a law firm for which she had previously interviewed. A 12-hour shift as PA from 11 to 11 for a monthly salary of 3000 reais (£1185). Pre-tax. Leaving aside childcare headaches, this is a top law firm in the centre of Sao Paulo - specialising in international mergers and acquisitions - whose partners and directors will be on megabucks comparable with London or New York (certainly with this over-strong Real). What kind of bad joke is that ? The equivalent PA role in the UK comes at a much higher price (see ad below), especially for after-hours work. But in old-school hierarchical Brazil, a mere "secretary", like all the other little people, is supposed to be grateful for any scraps thrown from the table. This is the same "fun" and "sexy" Brazil of which tourists are so enamoured.

Update: ... And this just in: "Brazilian law firms surge on M&A boom"

Update 2: Just by way of comparison, here is a randomly chosen legal PA ad for a company in London:
salary : £30,000 to £35,000 per year
location : City of London
job term : Permanent/Full-time
benefits : excellent benefits

Divorced from reality

2011-07-20T14:52:00.000+01:00

My son's mother was previously married to a fellow Brazilian. They married in the UK and lived there for some years. He returned to Brazil without waiting for the divorce to come through, making the process even harder. P met me while still in the UK, 1.5 years after her previous relationship had ended, and it was in the UK that she became pregnant. But the birth happened in Brazil. And here we sit in paralysis and perplexity: one Brit and two Brazilians. According to the UK Border Agency (UKBA), my son is not my son. He is the son of P and the man to whom she was still legally married when she gave birth.

Now just try this thought experiment: imagine that P had previously been married to me but that we had split up and she had returned, still not divorced, to Brazil. She then met a fellow Brazilian and they had a child. According to the Alice in Wonderland logic we have been given by the UKBA, we must assume that this happy Brazilian family would now be entitled to return to the UK on the basis that the baby is in fact British, being the legal offspring of P's still legally-wed British husband.

Gulp !

2011-07-20T13:56:00.000+01:00

Just retrieved a small piece of P's computer keyboard from the back of Sam's mouth, moments before it would have been too late. And not before some terrifying choking sounds. Thank God I happened to be close enough to him to see the unfolding horror because most of it happened silently. These days there are head and face bangs at which to grimace and shudder, and now throat action too ? Perhaps it's Sam's form of protest at the gross injustice of his visa situation.

My son the "foreigner"

2011-07-20T07:05:00.000+01:00

I always felt like a semi-detached Brit. But that means I was also semi-attached. Now I am struggling to come to terms with the fact that I have produced a completely unattached non-Brit. And until now the only thing I had worried about was the fact that, according to my religion's ancient laws, he was a non-Jew. This religious headache has paled into insignificance compared to the more pressing problem of Sam's being denied entry to a country that I still, just about, call home.

A child's welfare is at stake. His mother is still technically married to someone else because of insanely slow bureaucracy. I honestly believe we have wondered into the pages of Catch-22 or a Kafka novel. Now that the first attempt to get my son a UK visa has so dramatically failed, no-one seems to know exactly what to do, barring the probably pointless and slow appeal process. "Keep calm and carry on !" would be my approach if I myself were more English. But I'm not, and I can't.

While she lived in the UK, P worked, studied, paid thousands of pounds in taxes and as a non-EU passport holder never claimed a penny in public funds. Yet during the time that she was employed in a jobseekers agency, she was shocked by the number of EU benefits spongers, clearly milking the system. P also shared houses with similar characters, such as the Portuguese woman who claimed child benefit for her two adult children, both living in the Netherlands. It was a world in which fake passport factories were rife and institutionalised fraud was endemic.

I have met so many Brazilians who also have an EU passport, thanks to ancestors from Spain, Portugal or Italy. They are free to come and go, usually to London of course rather than their mother countries. It might suit them now to be back in Brazil but if things should change, no worries, back to Europe we go ! We met a taxi driver of just such a status the other day. It was clear from his comments that he wasn't especially wedded to Brazil but he had repatriated his UK money when the pound was still strong. The Brazilian economy had been good to him in the last few years so why not stay ? If it changes, he and his family will no doubt be off to London again before long.

Passports, visas, dual identities ... What a game it's all become. And yet it's hard to see the funny side when you're worrying about a nine-month-old baby who's now a persona non grata.

What was it ? More than 5 million immigrants arrived in the UK during New Labour's years of social engineering. The biggest single influx in Britain's history. And just like the credit bubble, the immigration bubble also blew up. These days you can't get credit and you can't get a visa.

It's all proving too much for my little head to cope with. I'll just have to keep trying to be British enough to keep calm and carry on.

Sao Pollution

2011-07-20T03:46:00.000+01:00

Mark, I'm panicking about pollution. Are we being poisoned on days like today ?

Mark 23:31
trust me - today is not a bad day
23:31
sometimes they issue health warnings
23:32
just be grateful you do not live in Mexico city
23:32
and be thankful you live high up

robert 23:32
We don't. Only on second floor

Mark 23:32
remember we are between 800 and 900 meters above sea level
23:32
the average altitude of this city is 750 meters ++

robert 23:33
What does that mean re. pollution ?

Mark 23:34
from what I understand pollution is airborne but it is heavier than air - so it sinks
23:34
now maybe I am wrong but that is what I understand to be the case
23:35
we live high up
23:35
compared with most people in Sao Paulo

robert 23:35
Have u experienced health probs re pollution over the years ?
23:35
I worry about my son

Mark 23:35
I mean do not get me wrong - I would not recommend you do a 10 mile run along PAULISTA at rush hour
23:36
but there are worse parts of the city to be in

robert 23:36
Ok

Mark 23:36
when it does not rain at all for 2 or 3 months - then sometimes the air gets really bad

robert 23:36
It just seems worse today, esp. when we were out in streets earlier

Mark 23:36
and you really feel it in your eyes, your nose and your throat

robert 23:37
Is it worse at this time of year or is summer worse?

Mark 23:37
no winter is much worse
23:37
there's very little rain
23:37
summer means rain
23:37
heavy heavy rain

robert 23:37
I see

Mark 23:37
just you wait
23:38
when we get a real downpour you simply cannot walk down MINISTRO

robert 23:38
No I already experienced all the rain. I came in October

Mark 23:38
unless you are wearing boots that go up at least to your knees !!!!

robert 23:38
I have video of the crazy rain. And also the thunder n lightning

Mark 23:38
yes but you were not living here - on a steep hill !!!

robert 23:38
Aha
23:38
Right now I would love some rain to clear the air
23:39
Anyway thanks
23:39
Was feeling panicky

Mark 23:39
I have seen this street look more like a raging whitewater river than a calm city street

robert 23:39
Amazing

Mark 23:39
just you wait

Colour me unimpressed

2011-07-20T00:20:00.000+01:00

Troubling pollution in recent days has made me think of the relatively Alpine air back in Bom Retiro (btw, it's pronounced Bon, as with all Brazilian m's). Instead of going there we went to an exhibition of Bom Retiro photos in the Jewish Centre.

As you will by now expect whenever I go to a Sao Paulo exhibition, I was less than thrilled: black and white photos only work where there is interesting emotion, character or architectural / natural beauty on which to focus the eye. When there are dull streets and buildings and dull-looking people, you need either an interesting photographer or, failing that, some colour with which to enliven the picture.

Likewise, blurred black and white is even more visually boring. Some of these photos were worse than amateur. A total lack of aesthetic appreciation strikes again. But never fear: there was the de rigeur wall-projected video to distract our attention, showing pedestrians in a Bom Retiro street, or perhaps Luz train station ... in blurry black and white. And somehow managing to be even more boring than the real thing.

The other day I saw some paintings in that popular Brazilian faux-naif style, colourful North-Easterners in a "busy" setting. The problem is that these sort of paintings are not faux-naif, they are simply naif - genuinely unsophisticated and stubbornly unchanging. The visual equivalent of rice and beans. There is no real aesthetic or artistic vision at work here. Gauguin's ghost has nothing to fear.

Anyway, here are a few of the less dreary photos:

I've saved the best till last:

Never underestimate the benefits of any venue if it has a good floor for crawling !

"Brazilians are a little bit ..."

2011-07-19T18:35:00.000+01:00

Comment from the Swiss-French-Indian director of IMD, respected business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Quoted in current issue of "Voce s/a" ("You Ltd"), as part of an article titled "Globalize yourself now !" Dominique Turpin says:

"When I visit Brazilian companies I ask myself how many foreigners are in their boardrooms or senior management. Generally there are just a few. The danger in this practice is that organizations are focused just on their domestic market. That may be ok for now because of the opportunities. But Chinese companies take commodities from Brazil and sell them back to Brazil as an added-value product. This is very dangerous. Brazilian companies should be doing this themselves, otherwise they will lose. Brazilians are a little bit ... I don't mean slow but they are not prepared for global competition. The only way for Brazil to become economically independent is to have strong companies dominating worldwide markets. Brazilians still don't have a global mentality. Everything in Brazil is predictable and comfortable. Executives here need to become more flexible."

I'll give you an example, from my little guy on the street perspective, of this famous inflexibility: we went to the office of an insurance company yesterday. The usual paranoid security in the building's lobby meant that without my passport we couldn't go beyond the threshold. Could you please then give us the phone number of the company, we asked the gum-chewing woman behind the desk ? No, she could not. Why, pray tell ? Because she wasn't allowed to. Yes, but why could she not call up to the company, located a few floors up, and simply ask for their number so we can call them when we get home ?

As always, no meaningful or logical explanation is ever offered. Just as the exorbitant cost of things here is lazily blamed on "taxes", so the impossibility of basic access and communication always boils down to "security". It really is like wading through treacle and there is not the least sign of this pervasive mentality starting to change.

When Brazilians joke, as one did to me the other day, that Brazil must be blessed because it somehow works in spite of all it's shortcomings, I increasingly want to tell them that living in this way is more of a curse: you are merely surviving when you should be thriving.

PS: With thanks, as ever, to P, whose skills as a researcher and translator are indeed a blessing.

Finally, a (legal) Brazilian bargain !

2011-07-19T05:52:00.000+01:00

Tweezers. Yes, that's right, tiny little tweezers. They're not so cheap in the UK and I assumed they'd cost something like £10 here, maybe more. But we went into a pharmacy and they brought out a cup holding loads of them, going for the minuscule price of 0.7 reais a throw. That's under 30 pence. And decent quality too. So what's the story here: how does Brazil manage to produce this one decent quality product at a great, low price ? Someone please explain to me the peculiar economics of tweezer manufacturing and retailing in Brazil and how it apparently exists in splendid isolation from every other (poor quality, expensive) product here.

Facing the music *

2011-07-18T06:00:00.001+01:00

A late-night downloading of Steve Winwood's greatest hits album, "Revolutions". Done in a few minutes. Thank you iTunes for being such a valuable lifeline - for movie rentals too, such as the brave and bleak documentary, "Mugabe and the White African", which we watched the other day. Puts our frustrations into perspective.

Steve Winwood's 1980s music is something I used to listen to quite often. It was on a home-made tape cassette. But that was long ago and I'd pretty much forgotten about him. Not sure what prompted my memory but very glad it was prompted. Listening to all 17 tracks on this download was the perfect accompaniment to a late-night session in our apartment building's gym.

Spanning his entire career, from the Spencer Davis Group, to Blindfaith and Traffic and finally his solo work, the raw blues and soul moved to experimental 70s and then culminated in the wall of sound of the 80s, ideal for a more warmed-up workout on the cross-trainer.

The synthesised sounds and funkier bass of the Duran Duran decade somehow don't detract from Winwood's soulful, yearning voice. Call me a Winwood lightweight but I think the 1980s stuff is his finest hour. Songs like While You See a Chance; Back in the Highlife Again; Valerie; and Higher Love. Wonderful. Simultaneously intimate, with words you can actually hear, but also a big, wavelike sound.

That said, I was happy to have another blast from the 70s as the final track, whose slower tempo and sparser feel was just right for the cooling down part of my workout.

And as nocturnal music therapy goes, some of these sounds and lyrics are just what the doctor ordered. Poetic and motivational nuggets such as:

"We'll be back in the high life again. All the doors I closed one time will open up again."

"Worlds are turning and we're just hanging on
Facing our fear and standing out there alone
A yearning, and it's real to me
There must be someone who's feeling for me."

"Bring me a higher love." A sentiment that seems to fall flat when viewed as five simple words but which comes alive when cloaked in Winwood's musical magic.

* Also the title of a sadly neglected but inspirational BBC reality-tv series.

Horse play

2011-07-17T16:23:00.000+01:00

Went to a fun gathering on a horse farm outside Sao Paulo last night. Thankfully given lifts both ways. Am still struggling to get my head round the long journies people here make as part and parcel of daily life. Our first stop was in Alphaville, where our lovely friends Andrea and Daniela have a family home.

I mentioned Alphaville on a previous blog post, in the context of a museum exhibit which mocked this entire SP suburb created as a gated community. It was certainly strange as we arrived at the multi-lane security checkpoint, like going through a motorway tollbooth or security barrier outside an airport. But once inside you have a feeling of being in a carefree suburban landscape. In Argentina they call these "country clubs". And of course the phrase "gated community" comes from the US. I suppose little by little these kind of private security arrangements are becoming more normal to me. If you have a choice between danger or safety, you tend to act first and think later. Perhaps these large-scale gated communities are a global growth industry ? Sad but true as the world returns to being a less equal place.

Once out of SP and into the horse farm, it was too dark to appreciate the bucolic beauty. But the warmth of the party and people was enough. Instead of karaoke, we had what they call here a "sarau", meaning more of a good old-fashioned get together and singalong. Would-be rockstars provided live music, albeit with some unfamiliar English lyrics (The Beatles was a favourite). Meanwhile, the horses looked on and seemed to view it all with equine-imity. (Now that the News of the World is no more, we must all do our bit for groan-inducing tabloid puns!)

Exile on main street

2011-07-16T18:59:00.000+01:00

Having paid a £1200 application fee (not to mention a great deal more in UK legal fees); having suffered through unending bureaucracy; and having pleaded with the British embassy to expedite our efforts to get my son a visa allowing permanent entry into the UK ... today we received a package with all our documents returned. Finally, our luck is turning, I thought, finally my half-British son is officially welcome in the land of his father's birth.

"Refusal of entry clearance," said the cover letter.

Written by a faceless moron (I use the polite term) from the UK Border Agency, and addressed personally to nine-month old Sam, it said that I, not he, had been the "target" of our violent robbery and that I, not he, was the one at threat. I'm so reassured that the UKBA understands the motives of potential kidnappers in Brazil far better than I ever could.

This nameless decision maker also told Sam that we have now moved to a safe new location and can live happily ever after where we are. Did I miss the sentence where s/he said they would be covering our living costs in this unfeasibly expensive safe-house ? Finally, Sam's judge and jury decided that he was not my "sole responsibility" because the Brazilian mother had been living with us and co-parenting. Obviously, getting Sam into the UK is just a devious and transparent ruse to get his dodgy foreign mother in too. No mention of the fact that our application form spoke not of "sole responsibility" but of which parent would be nominated "primary carer".

We have the right to appeal. Preferably in person. In the UK. So that's very practical.

The real reason why Sam wasn't accepted is probably because he is not an Islamic hate preacher, or a Romanian robber or an EU benefits tourist. Just as we couldn't be living in Brazil at a worse time when it comes to the cost of living, so we couldn't be applying to Busted, Bankrupt Britain at a worse time. The UK visa-abusing horse bolted long ago and now the immigration stable door is being slammed shut.

I don't like Brazil and I don't like Britain. And I don't particularly like the way the world is going in general. I, we, are in exile from somewhere but increasingly im wondering, where exactly ?

Meanwhile, what choices do you have when shoved into a corner like this ? I loathe bureaucracy at the best of times. And now is very far from being the best of times.

Update: Non-contact centres

2011-07-15T14:26:00.000+01:00

Having given up, I found myself ringing a "complaint" number for AXA Assistance and stumbling across someone who, shock-horror, actually tried to help ! With the encouraging name of Robert, this chap has been trying to get his company superiors to understand my unusual position, writing memos to this effect and contacting me by email and phone to provide updates. Although I will have to wait more days to hear if AXA / Lloyds will be able to make an exception and extend my policy, I was so impressed by Hobert's attempt to think outside the tick-box that I told him so today. Whereupon he, also surprised to hear positive feedback from a call centre customer, asked me to repeat my praise to his boss. Which I did, when she came on the line. So maybe there's a small flame of hope still flickering for contact centre staff being able to interact as human beings, rather than as cretinous "computers" that like to say no.

Update: Have just heard that AXA will extend my travel health insurance for an extra month. At no extra charge. Although sadly it may still not be enough now, it is a LOT better than nothing and greatly appreciated. Thank you very much !
...

Non-contact centres
Once upon a time, in a far-off land called The Past, there were no "contact centres". There was no outsourcing. There were only companies with direct employees. When you needed to get in touch with them you could call a normal landline number and speak to a normal person, by which I mean someone possessing a certain amount of common sense, responsibility, accountability and autonomy. And if they couldn't help personally, they would find a way to escalate your inquiry to higher levels.

If, say, you had spent over eight months abroad on a nine-month travel insurance policy and, because you were now caught in a visa nightmare for your son and your partner, requiring perhaps an additional month of travel insurance .. If this were the case in days of yore, you might expect to find a sympathetic ear on the other end of the line, belonging to someone who could make an exception to the rules and allow you to pay for a small extension. Not just sympathetic but clever too, because they knew that a friend in need is a friend indeed and a pathetically grateful customer would redouble his loyalty.

But that is the dim and distant past. Today Axa Assistance (if only!) behaves like every other company that wishes to keep its customers out of sight and out of mind: it uses a contact centre* to ensure there can be minimal contact, even less real communication and absolutely no thinking outside the tick-box. When you say: what is so impossible about adding an extra "emergency" month onto a nine-month policy, no matter what the additional cost, given the extenuating circumstances and on grounds of, whisper it, compassion ... you are simply met by entities purporting to be human beings but in fact no different to a computer programmed to say no.

Can you escalate the inquiry then ? "No." Can you suggest anything ? "No." Can you consult with anyone ? "Colleague says you shouldn't have travelled if you knew this was going to be a problem." But I didn't know what the future would hold, did I ? "No." That's why I buy insurance. Any final suggestions ? "You can return to the UK and then leave again on a new period of insurance." But that's not really practical right now, is it ? "No."

And so concludes yet another exchange of wasted words that somehow passes for "contact".

PS: No.

* UK not India.

Update: Just been told by a local insurance agent that there is no way to get it here if I don't have a CPF number, ie Brazilian national insurance number, which I don't.

Why I love e-books

2011-07-14T01:31:00.000+01:00

The other day I read a news article about a British journalist just released from a Singapore jail. He had published a book about that country's judicial and political corruption in regard to the death penalty. Impressed and intrigued, I was able within a few clicks to download a free sample chapter of his e-book. I read it immediately and then decided to buy, which I did with one further click. A final click saw the e-book downloaded into my iPad's ever-expanding Amazon Kindle library. (I also use Apple's own iBooks app).

And all this done in the wee small hours, in bed, in Brazil, a country still stuck in the paper book era and with a very limited range of English-language titles.

E-books have now overtaken traditional book formats on Amazon and there is no turning back. Of course, they should have preceded music into the digital domain - how hard is it to digitise words ?! We bloggers go from thought to worldwide published word in the blink of a half-thought.

But the book publishing industry was even more protectionist and myopic than the music industry. Such poor business judgement ! I have already spent vastly more on these kind of impulse e-book purchases than I would have done waiting for an opportunity to visit the right country and the right book store for the desired paper-and-print book. In all likelihood I would have jotted down the title and then simply forgotten about it.

The icing on my e-book cake is that I can read them without any illumination other than my iPad or iPhone's back light; they weigh nothing, take up no space and can be stored as back-ups in the Cloud; I can check word definitions using the in-built dictionary; I can make notes and highlight sections just by dragging my finger or typing; I can see where other people have highlighted, thanks to yet more Kindle cleverness; and I can turn pages with the lightest of finger taps (on the iPhone reading is a one-handed experience, perfect for standing up in a crowded tube carriage).

It's an almost utopian reality for anyone who likes reading. So spare me the Luddite nonsense about the smell and feel of "real" books ! I quite like both (and have some heaving bookshelves in my London flat) but nowhere near enough to want to turn the clock back. Books were never meant to be objects of desire over and above their role as disseminators of information, to be dispersed far and wide, and as quickly as possible. Hmm ... sounds familiar.

Brazilian bargains

2011-07-13T17:31:00.000+01:00

A lovely engineer called Sergio just came round and fixed our wifi problem so we now have the luxury of two devices connected at the same time. As with almost everyone we come across these days, it wasn't long before the subject of the robbery came up and his opinion was sought. He suspected the nanny had been too free with her gossip. But the thing that gave us a real laugh was when he said that the iPhone would probably have been sold for a piddling 100 reais (£40) and I said I would have given them 200 reais for it, prompting this anecdote: a friend of his had, while being robbed of a Rolex watch, asked the robbers how much they were going to sell it for? They told him 200 reais and he wrote them a cheque for that amount with his phone number on the back. They let him keep the watch. A week later he got a call from them asking if he wanted to buy another Rolex !