travel lightly and carry a big stick

Back in Blighty, Proust in Prague, Incitement in Istanbul…..

It wasn't long between touching down on the tarmac at Heathrow and being back at my desk at Morgan Stanley watching the minutes tick by. I put my Asia honed negotiating skills to good use right away securing a 15% pay rise on the initial offer. I took a temporary job, knowing that I couldn’t be relied upon in my position, which means being paid by the hour. I've never worked by the hour before; it strikes me as conspicuously more honest to me. It’s an accepted economic truth that charging people according to usage rather than a flat rate is desirable - i.e. the move to water meters, the planned abolition of road tax in favour of a by the mile toll system etc. Why this isn't always applied to pay seems criminal, or more precisely like usury. Clearly paying salaries allows the inefficiencies in a work place to remain, as the employer has no incentive to solve them. They do pay for them of course in people taking 'stress' related sickies but they are too short sighted to link the two phenomena. So being paid by the hour, it’s fairer - I calculated that if I’d been paid by the hour when I worked at the bank previously it would have translated into a 180% rise - now I realise how much I was used, but then, as I heard the other day, employers like to employ young people because they have no idea what they are worth. So I've resolved that my first action as minister for employment would be to ban unpaid over time.

The strangely amusing thing about being paid for your time in this way is that your brain starts to convert everything you buy into your time spent and you start to sound like a Master Card advert.

Train ticket - one hour
Lunch - 15 minutes
Your entire life - sadly not priceless, just a few hundred a day

Of course if you're of a pedantic nature like me, you have to recalculate this on an after tax basis, meaning that lunch takes considerably more time to earn than to eat. The nature of time changes when in an office environment. Months can pass in the blink of an eye, a year in an astonishingly short amount of time. Time is, after all, completely relative. Being just the way our mind orders our memories, when you create no new memories time does compress. This being the case, my re-entry into the corporate world draws strong parallels to an astronaut being put into suspended animation before a long space journey. Unfortunately, instead of waking up at Mars it'll just be with a couple of extra zeros on my bank balance and a few months chipped off of the quota.

Being back in London, I resolved that this time around I'd actually take advantage of it and do some of those cultural things that you don't get elsewhere. With this as our aim, Liz and I tried to fit at least one gallery and play into every week and pretty much succeeded. The National Film Theatre was also hit several times. Although Liz had only spent 9 months here previously, she knows the city much better than I do so did a pretty good impersonation of a guide. Highlights were a hilarious and thought provoking 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf', which we picked up front row seats for, and the 'Wild Life Photography of the Year' exhibition at the Natural History museum. What a couple of culture vultures. Unfortunately there aren’t any anecdotes about cleaver wielding cooks here, but nowhere has everything.

Getting up at 5 for work and home exhausted about 6 pretty much ensured that I've been piling the pounds back on at an impressive rate. I've spent so long sitting in front of a computer in the last couple of months that I actually wheeze trying to make it up to the top of the stairs in my house. In my defense I am on the second story. Canary Wharf is as much a temple to consumerism as usual. Apparently the average Brit wears around £600 of clothes on any given day. I doubt that that paltry amount gets the average Wharfer safe from an indecent exposure charge. Spend, spend, debt and more debt, work and work. Credit cards undoubtedly are the contemporary tickets to indentured servitude and they're selling fast. The masses of Indians who left their homes 150 years ago to toil on British plantations indentured themselves in order to eat and escape the poverty of their homes. These days we do it for a flashy handbag and I can't escape the feeling that it’s completely nuts. It’s almost comical but when put in a wider perspective it is really saddening but speaks volumes about the power of image and advertising. So action number one as home secretary: ban advertising.

After a couple of months of toil we decided to take a break, as I needed to catch up on some sleep. Ummmed and Ahhed but in the end got some flights to Bratislava in Slovakia. Touched down about 11pm and found the airport’s 24hr information desk, which was conveniently closed. Luckily had brought the LP, which told us which bus to get to the train station in town and after a bit of wandering around outside the airport found the bus stand. We found out that we could get an overnight train to Prague and decided that that sounded like a good idea. So less than an hour after entering the country we were on our way out. We found one of those cabins with seats facing each other, like the first class cabins BR trains used to have. Locked the door and slept. I woke up with a start with some guy standing over me in the middle of the night, which gave me a shock and had me convinced we were about to be robbed. In retrospect I’m not sure which of us was more worried as he hurried from the cabin after I exclaimed loudly and start furiously checking our bags.

We got into Prague at 5 a.m. in the morning and headed straight down to the famous Charles Bridge before the hordes of tourists arrived. A lucky burst of sunshine through a sky that was largely overcast meant that the photos worked out pretty well. Later in the day the bridge was completely full of people and street performers. We stayed in this great 1920’s art deco hotel that apparently was used in one of the Mission Impossible films. Walks around the castles and Cathedrals, a classical concert, and plenty of beer cellars and wonderful ‘beer snacks’ made up the activities. Any country that has a ‘beer snacks’ section on the menu must be a source of real genius, which of course it is. We weren’t the only ones grasping Kafka novels hoping that Prague might anoint them with some of that wisdom.

We also visited Terezin, a town about two hours north of Prague, which is surrounded by enormous 19th century earthworks and was used in WWII as a concentration camp. We also did overnight trips to Kutna Hora, a town which a few hundred years ago rivaled Prague in wealth and influence but lost out when Prague was picked as the capital. Now it still has many of the grand buildings but set in a sleepy little town. One of the massive central European castles was also on the agenda and lastly Olomuch, a university town in the east of the country which has what we have decided is the greatest cellar bar of all time and some great beer snacks. From there we re-entered Slovakia and caught the plane back.


Back in London, after this break, it was becoming apparent that we both weren’t going to find satisfactory work anytime soon. We decided that Liz would head out to Istanbul and take up a teaching position there and I would follow a month later once the rental agreement was up on our flat. Naturally I used this month to revert to type and become a sloth like hermit.

I’ve been in Istanbul almost a week and I’ve almost got myself stabbed already! The city is pretty modern, at least the area we are in on the Asia side. I’ve been busy training and teaching but what I’ve seen of the old town on the European side of the Bosphorus has been full of character. It’s a huge city though. Back to the stabbing, and unsurprisingly it involved football. There are two teams in Istanbul, which are huge rivals, the local one being Fenabache. It was the last day of the season and Fenabache and Galataserey, their rival, were both in the running for the title. We were invited to watch the decisive game at a local bar but were running late so headed out to have dinner instead. By the time we came out of the restaurant the streets were filled with Fenabache fans and despite their apparent loss they were chanting and beeping horns and waving flags wildly. Great! A bit of local colour and atmosphere, this is what living in other countries is all about. It was about 10 seconds after stepping on the street that I got someone’s shoulder in my chest.
‘What the??’
I, in my ignorance, thought the guy just didn’t look where he was going. However, then I looked up and saw that everyone on the street was looking at me rather strangely – as if they had taken a sudden dislike to my face. Quite understandable I hear some of you say. But honestly even I don’t make so many people so hostile quite so quickly. Someone gabbled something at us in Turkish and Liz replied,
‘Err I don’t know’
Luckily this was enough to let them know that they had a dumb foreigner in their midst. A couple off the street stopped and spoke very urgently to us.
‘You must change now! You are wearing bad team colours!’
‘Quick, quick! Now, now! Take off your shirt!’
They then pointed at Liz’s cardigan and suggested that it might be a better choice? Marching through a crowd of crazed football supporters wearing a tiny, tight, pop up cardigan, with chest hair poking out of the top, and my belly out of the bottom is a better choice?!? OK…. So on what in Istanbul terms is Oxford Street I pulled off my red and yellow striped shirt (the offending colours) and replaced it with the cardigan. A hundred yards down the street a mob of supporters spotted a car moving slowly in the traffic that must also have displayed the evil red and yellow. Within seconds it was enveloped by guys standing of the roof, the bonnet, and boot, kicking furiously at the sunroof, windscreen and rear screen, while others on the sidelines bashed away at the windows. Although, relieved to be out of my red and yellow stripes, my tight black cardi didn’t exactly feel like a suit of armour. We headed on down the street trying to look as completely inconspicuous as possible. Another group of fans about 30 abreast and 20 yards deep marched towards us filling the whole street. Their chanting and air punching arm extensions brought neo Nazi’s to mind. I just prayed that my outfit wouldn’t lead any to start questioning my sexuality, and therefore be forced to pummel me in a similar fashion to the car’s windscreen. Fortunately they passed on, apparently oblivious to anything except red and yellow in combination.

We reached our flat without incident, the only further danger being crossing the road in front of it. Rival fans were driving down the four laned road at idiotic speeds with huge flags flapping from the back of their cars. Like knights at the tilt, opposing cars of opposing colours would race past each other in opposite directions blasting their car horns in auditory joust. Well, I suppose I won’t be wearing that again any time soon!

posted by justplainnigel @ 5:59 AM