life coaching for free range humans

Walking along the quayside today, I spotted what looked like two large cardboard boxes walking along the other side of the road.

They recognised me, and asked if I'd help with the accompanying flat pack chairs, on their way to the Broad Chare.

Once inside the venue, I could see the enormity of the task ahead, requiring extensive home assembly furniture knowledge as well as an understanding of glitter and twinkly lights.

Yes, it was the get-in for the first performance of Choirplay and Breakfast Hearts, at Live.

most of the day in the car won't be good for my step count

Back to the North again today. Google is hedging its best and estimating between 5h20 and 6h34 for the journey. I'll go with the slower time as my own estimate.

For those in this week's fitbit challenge, I think I'll be losing a day's step count over this, nosediving from second place to somewhere in the lower part of the pack.

At least my destination is hilly, so maybe I'll make up with some climbs.

in which we we star spot at the what's on theatre awards

Entertaining to see Tom Hiddleston, Josie Rourke and David Tennant amongst the stars out on Sunday evening.

Yes, a quick wander along some comically densely surrounded red carpet to the What's On Theatre Awards at the Prince Charles Theatre, which was taking a night off from Book of Mormon.

The awards were hosted in suitably raucous, irreverent and sometimes chaotic style by Mel Giedroyc (of Mel and Sue and that cake show on telly) and Steve Furst (Made in Dagenham).

Miss Saigon claimed a huge stash of awards - including Best West End Revival. Actually Cameron Macintosh didn't do so badly in person, with a couple of awards to collect on stage.

Other shows claiming awards included A Streetcar named Desire, Great Britain, Memphis, Oliver, Wicked, Sweeney Todd and to show that Shakespeare is alive and well Coriolanus, Richard II and Shakespeare in Love.

Most were present to claim their awards but Billy Piper as the phone hacking editor from Great Britain had a dialled-in iPhone acceptance in full snapchatty wobblecam.

And some said that David Tennant's hair extensions from Richard II should have won their own award.

i spend ten minutes fixing a new timer to the dualit toaster

Thrills as the new bit for the toaster arrives. Ordered one day, arrived the next.

Our Dualit toaster makes lovely toast. Except that after about twelve years the little clockwork timer dial stopped working reliably. I've just received and fitted the new one, which cost about £15 and took about ten minutes to swap over.

I idly looked in the local supermarket a couple of days ago when I passed the toasters aisle, and I noticed that there were new toasters crazily on special offer for £4.50. I picked one up and noticed that the thin metal prongs to hold the bread were already bent out of shape.

But that's the dilemma. I can have my 'Crafted in Britain' toaster self-service repaired for £15, or buy another boat-ballast 'Made in China' toaster for a fiver.

I'm still much happier with the shiny Dualit which, despite its recent glitch, again makes fresh toast with just the right amount of crunch and feels like something built to last.

silkily locking a few secrets away

The wheels on the bus go round and round and people still stay that London buses come along in twos and threes. I'm less convinced of that last point, with the 137s and 452s coming along at nicely spaced frequent intervals.

I'll settle for some of the current political scandals coming along in twos and threes though. Not that it will be easy to work any of it out. Now that Prime Minister's Question time has become Prime Minister's Evasion time, or even Prime Minister's Distract and Blame The Others time, its almost impossible to get a straight answer in anything.

The current interest could be in the various Grey Enterprise Holdings and their off-shore frolics as they find ways to save tax and aim political donations towards gaining influence, power and honour.

Why is it in twos and threes? We see Conservative and Labour caught up amongst the donors. We see knowledge of the events from around 2005 (Labour) and then repeated in 2010 (Conservatives and Lib-Dem).

But in case this all seems to be about Switzerland as a tax haven, let's not forget the other locations like the Cayman Islands. Is it too old school of me to mention Luxembourg? That's another two or three. If I decided to go with just British options I suppose I'd have to resort to Cayman, Jersey, Bermuda, Guernsey, British Virgin Islands, Isle of Man, Gibraltar and maybe Anguilla. That's their order in the Financial Secrecy Index, last updated in 2013. In fairness, only 5 of them are in the FSI Top Twenty and the UK itself comes in at number 21.

But that all leads in to another set of twos and threes. This is the banks themselves. The current focus is on HSBC, which was the one mentioned in the recent Swiss leakage of information.

So let's pick one of the other places on the list and have a quick look. Cayman Islands sounds very John Grisham novel. The sort of place that Christian Grey might take Anastasia to on a private jet for some privacy.

Hmm. Barclays have reduced their number of subsidiaries in the Caymans. From 181 to 134. Only 134 subsidiaries on that island with a population of 57,000? But wait. A couple of the part Government-owned banks have some interests too. RBS has around 37 companies in the Caymans and Lloyds Bank around 24.

Presumably there's more than two or three Grey Enterprise Holdings style organisations and Christian Grey type people around to need that kind of support?

Okay, so Christian is completely fictional. The Prime Minister appears to blend both fact and fiction.

His own family have dabbled in creative tax management too. Blairmore Holdings Inc was set up by his father, and then another fund based in Jersey and a third in Geneva. David was still at Eton when Blairmore Holdings was started.

The Blairmore Prospectus makes interesting reading: "The affairs of the fund should be managed and conducted so that it does not become resident in the United Kingdom for UK taxation purposes."

Blairmore's original registration is in Panama, its principle trading office shows in the Bahama, yet the Smith and Williamson Investment Manager is in Moorgate and the Simmons and Simmons Legal Advisors in Ropemaker Street, both London, EC2.

I suppose the respectable London connections made it convenient for British investors to get signed up. Blairmore's opaque structure also makes it difficult to see where the money has gone.

So let's summarise:

• Donors to both the biggest parties can be implicated in off-shore tax matters.
• Other banks than HSBC (including those part-owned by the UK Government) appear to operate tax avoidance processes.
• The UK itself has various related sovereign states with tax avoidance operations.
• The Prime Minister's statements could appear to blend fact and some less factual points during an increasingly distracted and more Punch and Judy based question time.
• Blairmore and its related implications may be worth some clarification?

I realise I've spent more than my usual 10 minutes writing this post. Longer than I'd normally wait for a bus of whatever colour.

uno mijo nacho hero jello

Saul Goodman's prescience regarding his future after Breaking Bad was baked into the opening of Better Call Saul. So much so that I genuinely thought I had selected the wrong show or that Netflix was having a meltdown.

Okay, about a minute later I worked it out, and was then pleasantly surprised to see that the series won't just play for laughs, as some had originally predicted.

The show is set six years prior to Breaking Bad, and notwithstanding the Nebraska monochrome, it is still splashed in the supersaturated colours of Albuquerque.

I'm waiting for Episode Three now and actually relieved that they are giving the plot and characters a time to develop rather than rushing straight into 45 minute episodic bursts. There's already a slew of hooks and unanswered questions developing, so I'm expecting this to be a good series.

And my own self-preservation rule about Cinnabon is to only eat them in America, despite the high-calorie tourist venue in the Trocadero.

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.