Shaun the sheep visits the Big City

Ever since I saw the Shaun the Sheep 'switch off your mobiles' trailer in the cinema, I've had it on my list to see the movie.

It's crazy capers as Shaun and accomplices visit the Big City looking for their missing farmer. There's so much detail packed into every scene, I'm sure I could watch it another couple of times to try to pick up on other jokes.

Sheep don't speak English (although some of them can understand the written word) so the film doesn't really have human dialogue. Even the doctors speak in bad handwriting.

There's also a recognisable Britain in the town scenes, with shopping centres of closed dry cleaners and charity shops, busy elevated road sections and realistic looking bus stations. I slightly found myself thinking "Ooh, is that the bus station at Chichester and is that the hospital in Southampton?"

Of course not. It's all plasticine and models. In some scenes you can even see the fingerprints.

But its crafted with a real heart and some delightful story telling.

A lovely movie and not just for kids.

better call Albuquerque?

Excitement today as the first couple of episodes of Better Call Saul landed in my in-tray.

I see there's even roadside bill-boards for the prior Jimmy McGill version of 'Saul'.

Time to re-immerse in the baked lands around Albuquerque.

living by wits with the new fact free political diet

The latest tax avoidance allegations rippling through the City are showing how certain politicians live by their wits. There's a stern message from the Prime Minister about how no government has done more than the current one to tackle tax evasion and regressive tax avoidance.

Maybe that's the same government that didn't chase when Vodafone avoided most of a tax bill after its £84bn windfall from selling its stake in Verizon? The curious reasoning was that Vodafone with its London headquarters and 19 million UK subscribers isn't British, it's based in the Netherlands.

Perhaps its same government that changed that coffee-shop chain's tax situation? They were also based in Netherlands. Then Chancellor Osborne and Lord Green created a new territorial taxation scheme, with a modernised Controlled Foreign Company (CFC) regime which trumped the Dutch option. Certain multinationals could move to UK for their European operation but then only be required to pay tax on their UK 'royalties'. Worth gaming the system to obtain this advantage for companies of a certain size?

Could it be the same government that has allowed a big mail order company to have 8 major distribution centres in the UK, yet that company seems to be able to operate from Jean-Claude Juncker's well constructed tax haven of Luxembourg?

And it's the same government that appointed the ex-head of the bank providing the Swiss tax avoidance advice to be minister of trade and investment to Cameron's cabinet until 2013.

Cameron's economic measures seem to be extending to the truth.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

We stopped off at the Electric to watch Kingsman: The Secret Service at the weekend. Comfy seats for a bonkers movie.

Screenplay from Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (who worked together on Kick-Ass). Colin Firth playing a toffish Steed-like spy, complete with the umbrella. There's his new working class apprentice Eggsy played by Taron Egerton, who has to go through various secret service joining trials to avoid being taken away in a black taxi. Stereotypes prevail throughout the characterisations.

The movie is pure wild escapism, with the baddie tech genius played by lisping Samuel L. Jackson, and his lithe accomplice Sofia Boutella using her razor sharp legs to devastating effect.

All the Bond bits are there somewhere. Alpine lairs, tunnels into mountains, big places to explode, car chases. Martinis (but made with Gin and no vermouth). There's cuddly animals (one with initials J.B.), Sarf-London hows'ya'favvers, Mark Strong as a gadget-man and even Michael Caine turns up in the tinker-tailor-soldier's shop.

The product placement is there too, although set to tabloid rather than glossy. We get Guinness and -er- McDonalds. A Royale with cheese moment, maybe with Château Lafite.

Fast paced, although with a plot line that runs on rails, you kind of know what the next section will be like. All the good bits from Saturday morning pictures. Okay, there's more gore than ABC Minors would have allowed, but you get the idea.

set shields to high

Like many, I probably receive most of my phone calls on my mobile phone nowadays. The landline is still there although for incoming calls it gets used more by family than anyone else.

Despite the Telephone Preference Service, which is used to block out nuisance calls, I'd say we were still getting several such calls every day. TPS doesn't exclude so-called survey calls. It also doesn't exclude pre-recorded calls nor those silent calls - when a call dialler is checking for pickup or is simply overloaded.

We changed the home phones recently and now have that Truecall thing which seems to be quite effective. Teach the phone the numbers you want to get straight through, (anyone in Contacts) and the phone puts up its own silent call screening for everything else.

The first half day I had it switched on, there were nine calls screened that didn't ring through. I could also see from the phone that it was apparently just three numbers making the calls. So much for that "don't hassle" clause that these telemarketers are supposed to follow.

I don't pay as much attention now, and genuine callers to the home land line don't seem to have noticed the difference. If anything, they are getting faster pickup because we don't need to listen to that first few seconds to work out if it's spam.


Deflector fields are set.

a DVD helps me find the counter-poison in Cosmopolis

A couple of recent evenings out have created some music and film swapping moments. A few of us emailed quick lists of recent music we liked - it gave me some new ideas as a result.

Separately, a different group of us exchanged a single DVD with one another. I received Cosmopolis, which is the 2012 Cronenberg movie adaptation of the Delillo novel. Someone else got Lady and the Tramp.

I read Delillo's book a few years ago, which I remember as a sort of road-tripping life-loop compressed into a single journey.

I hadn't seen the movie, which stars Twilight's Robert Pattison playing Eric, a different kind of blood-sucker.

The focus is a 28 year old billionaire in a white stretched limousine crossing a road-blocked Manhattan to get a haircut. He's received a death threat. The soundproofed limo is configured like a gleaming space capsule and on his journey he meets his wife, lovers, his art advisor, a doctor and colleagues as well as going through the asteroid shower of an 'Occupy Wall Street' type demonstration.

Many of Eric's reactions appear as automaton-calculations, challenging the notion of richness and smartness being linked. A quarter second of a real shared glance could violate the agreements that made the city operate.

The immersive numbers soup echoes current global trading where markets are tweaked and debts offloaded to unwitting consumers.

“Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours...using labour more efficiently.”

As various brainiac accomplices of Eric briefly join him in the car, there's only a fuzzy understanding of the way the markets work. The machine algorithms rule the organic charts. No shoeshine story, but a 24 year old who briefly joins him has had enough and wants to get out of the markets.

From a book written in 2003, there's plenty for 2015. Take falling energy markets where oil slid from $130 to around $60 per barrel. Everyone trades with all the right software. Allegro, Openlink, Triple Point, Amphora. Roll out the names. Roll out the barrels. Yet be surprised.

US fracking increases oil availability, energy efficiency in cars improves, middle east conflicts fluctuate, China shops around, Russia creates embargoes and the Saudis keep production levels for market retention. A few events outrun the systems - halve the price. Now wait to see whether Saudis hold their nerve and American fracking becomes unprofitable.

The machines' trades win over the humans' comprehension with the capture of margins creating an ultra-minority wealth. Just like the 28-year old in the story.

"Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself. as Delillo puts it.

Frankly, it's a tough movie to watch. Tight one-to-one interactions with Pattinson's character, dealing in whip cracks of Delillo thought. Eating and sleeping in the shadow of what these people do.

piloting the platonic deranged, frivolous and oblivious?

I've been watching two different Sky series recently. One is about 700 people stuck in an out of the way place which has a crime free record for ages and then someone gets murdered. The other is about 600 people stuck in an out of the way place which has a crime free record for ages and then someone gets murdered.

Okay, one is set in let's say Iceland (Fortitude) and the other appears to be in outer space (Ascension). There's a whole bunch of quirky characters. In one they can carry guns into the supermarket when shopping, because it's okay in they'd only ever point the guns at a rampant bear. In the other, despite being 1960s all-American, curiously, they don't have any guns at all. Except when one gets discovered as part of the murder weapon for the unfortunate person that was strangled, drowned and shot.

The victim's name was Lorelei, which is coincidentally a great name for a spirit that might re-appear and murmur warnings from time to time. Ideally close to water, of course, like the German folklore.

Later in the same story a Rilke book is found. Rilke, whose haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety. Tellingly, in this story, the pages have been made blank which sets the tone for the rest of the space series.

When I watched the Sopranos, I always thought they'd written two endings. There's one at episode Final minus 3, when Tony Soprano stands triumphant on the edge of the cliff. Then the main script team return for the last two episodes to set up the final Final ending. The one where the audience don't see it coming.

The same for Breaking Bad. There's a change of tempo for the finale when Vince Gilligan is clearly back in the driving seat.

Not so for Ascension. It looks as if the moment when the Rilke was discovered becomes the point when the plug was pulled. It reminded me of that ending of the original Prisoner series (closed world with maybe 200 people in it) when the Beatles play 'It's all too much' or something similar. For Ascension they brought in some fixed-price context-free scribblers who were told to repurpose a defunct and humourless kitchen sink drama and add space bits.

For Ascension, I get the Narrenschiff idea. The ark of salvation and the ship of fools. The Catholic Church and skittishly the rest. Albrecht Durer famously illustrated the original German version of the ship. The pigs from the Durer seemed to make it to the deck of the madship in this story.

There were some half-hearted allegorical references to Eurydice and Orpheus too. People being rescued, but don't look behind you or you'll get zapped.

Fortitude is still on Episode One. Great scenery. A super cast. All High Definition arty colour palates. A metal bar that makes the Underworld at World's End in Camden seem jolly quaint. Mysterious Mammoth remains. A Science Research Block That Seems Too Big For Its Stated Purpose.

My fingers are still crossed.

time to set the gorilla onto the Hershbury cads?

George Cadbury, the original creator of Cadbury's chocolate was famously known for his Quaker beliefs and for the well-being of his workforce. He built the Bournville garden village adjacent to the factories, to 'alleviate the evils of modern more cramped living conditions'. It became a blueprint for other similar worker villages and set a high bar for worker care.

Cadbury's was sold off a few years ago and their products diluted. This season's Cadbury's Creme eggs have a recipe change, as well as moving from half a dozen in a pack to that well-known egg quantity of five. That's the effect of Kraft, the processed cheese slice people that manage Cadbury's in Europe.

Now it's the American version of Cadbury's brand that has created further mutants. Hershey's operate the Cadbury manufacturing in America and have been dabbling too.

To my palate Hershey chocolate tastes chemical, as if it has some kind of antiseptic injected. I'm told it's just got a higher percentage of sugar and lower amount of cocoa, but whatever it is, nowadays I won't even accept the English 'dare' to eat it.

Hershey's money-savers have also re-engineered the Cadbury ingredients. Less cocoa, more sugar, less milk, more powder. More like Hershey.

And now I see the Hershey lawyers have prevented British-style Cadbury chocolate even being retailed in the USA. They might as well lose the purple Pantone 2865c packaging on the American variant to avoid confusion.

Far removed from George's principles of improvement?

swap, twist or spin?

I often drive past a huge advert on the M4 near the North Circular off-ramp which says something like 'Been mis-sold SWAPS? Phone this number'. It's been there for quite a while and another sign of the times.

Wide boys in the city create ostensibly fixed rate business loans but then embed derivatives to hedge their position. It's another round of sharp practice and some big name banks have been implicated.

And I'm expecting the next few months to be full of politico mis-selling as we hit the election on-ramp.

According to Parliament.uk, I see the UK national debt is up at around £1.48 trillion, with £48.1bn in interest per year. That’s without adding in the extra bit for the part government owned banks.

This debt is about 80% of GDP, or about £25k per person.

Now between, say, the mid 80s and around 2009 the debt was in the 40%-50% range, but since 2009-ish it has risen steeply every year and looks set to continue at least until 2016/17. Not my figures, they are from the Office of National Statistics and the Office for Budget Responsibility.


So despite any pandering give-backs before the election, it's highly likely we’ll see another taxation rise after the election. Nothing new there, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, each of the last six new elected governments have announced net tax rises, which average £7.5 bn per annum.

That's unless we go back to printing money, I suppose, like the £375bn that the Bank of England electronically issued during UK quantitative since 2009. Instead of channelling the money into public schemes like, say the NHS and schools, it shunted the money directly into gilts, consequently driving bonds and equities.

And guess what?

The richest few percentage of share owners own 40% of all the shares and saw them rise 20%. They liked this and invested even more in upwardly mobile shares. Not in trickle-down spending. Okay, maybe some champagne and caviar. The banks could use their quantitively eased books to create more twisted financial instruments aimed towards those from whom they could make quick bonuses.

As for where the gap gets hidden. As gilt yields fall, so do pension annuity prospects. No biggie for the ever decreasing number of people still on final salary pensions, but for those in pension pots or whatever follows in April, it's a another devaluation.

So, most of the quantitive easing money didn't make it to the 'real' economy. That's the economy where a mere £1bn will rebuild more than 500 schools and £10bn will build 200,000 starter homes. The real workers that would be deployed could spend their sovereign money on stuff, which boosts other parts of the economy.

Oh no. This would never make a Westminster Village scheme, would it?

Even with my profligate spending above of £11,000,000,000, there's still the other £364,000,000,000 of the quantitive easing scheme to consider. That's still more than half a year's total UK government spending.

There's still arguments being trotted out around future austerity - sometimes that's also a code for punish the poorest. Another argument is about how low growth deepens debt so the private sector cuts spending - not what they said when the money was being printed. All of it seems like broken logic after the 2009-14 performances.

The political classes need fresh thoughts as we enter the last 90 days. I suspect it will all be trite polemics whilst the meaningful graphs remain hidden.

another snowflake falls on London

Just about enough snow overnight to adjust the plans this morning.

The usual combination of people and things in the wrong place.

That full one centimetre depth might not sound much, it is still enough to disrupt things. Read today's sensationalist newspapers and they are talking about 5 months of Arctic conditions.

Frozen?

I don't think so.

Yesterday's equally loud headlines were about all the people in Europe's largest city with its now record-breaking population.

Surely all those people will cause it to thaw more quickly?

And, that reminds me, anyone for a Frozen flashmob at Waterloo??

the day breaks instead so you hurry home

A curious side-effect of the evening's drinking was that time-effect compression, where time moved suddenly faster in the later part.

It's not like that thing where as you get older, time is supposed to move at a different speed. I get that a single day to an eleven year old is only 1/4000 compared with to a 55-year old when its 1/20000. No - it's the more pronounced effect that somehow kicks in (in my case) between 1:30am and about 4am, where waking time can then seem to pass much faster. 'Gosh is it that time already?'

My theory is that there are some kind of bio-chemical reactions at play. I don't just mean booze-related, because the same thing seems to happen with or without alcohol.

I suppose if the middle of the night is normally low threat then the body may deliberately slow things down to a lower frame rate, which could have the effect of compressing the perceived action? Maybe a 20%-50% reduction, but it would need some experiments to work with this.

Some say 11pm to 1am is the body's bad fats, smoking, caffeine peak processing time (gallbladder). Then 1am to 3am peaks with liver processing - prime cortisol and epinephrine time - sugar pull and detox. 3am to 5am can be lung and allergy processing and then - let's face it we're on to 5-7am large intestine and all that.

Some also say that a regular time night wake-up is mainly to do with one of these functions mis-processing.

So I'm wondering if the 1:30am to 4am is a kind of cortisol reduction, lower the speed, thing? The body usually doesn't need as much cortisol (adrenaline-like booster) in the small hours, so this could just be slowing things down, creating the telescoped time effect?

Or maybe it's just me??

a few drinks by the river

A view from the top deck of the routemaster bus today.

This would be the 'going to' picture rather than the 'coming back from'.

We'd all arranged to meet at the Barrow Boy and Banker, and I took a bus and tube to Cannon Street before walking over London Bridge to the pub. Turning into early evening Cannon Street looks something out of a near future sci-fi movie nowadays. Glittering glass and ever more white lighting all around. Like parts of the West End, there's a Day for Night substitution walking around the area.

We'd agreed to start at the Fuller's pub. Predictably rammed it took me a while to work out that I was the first of us to turn up. When the first drinking buddy turned up we made a subtle land grab to acquire a table, where we could watch for other arrivals.

Much later we decided to move on, towards the Borough Market and a selection of other equally busy 'Londoners at play' pubs, mostly of the spill out onto the pavement variety.

We joined throngs standing outside the Wheatsheaf, with its mysterious pipe-works channeling the beer from ceiling mounted storage tanks, across its yard and into the bar.

Even later we'd head back to warmth, this time to the Shard's cocktail bar. A wholly different experience where we could observe London from a hawk's height. A prime position to continue to enjoy good company.