In the 1950’s a couple of my former school mates found
themselves in Cyprus
in the military. Both regarded the spell
as the least enjoyable two years of their lives and swore never to return. What will happen next there is becoming
difficult to work out and all I can do is stick to Zero Hedge and hope this is
good enough.
As the row on privacy and Government regulation of the press
rumbles on The Economist, a journal I have read for sixty odd years makes its
displeasure clear about what is being proposed, elsewhere in the real world,
privacy is no great matter.
The supermarket we have to use for a few items has mailed me
with a personalized effort which clearly shows where we shop, at what times and
by an analysis of the spending what sort of meal we would like on Easter day
with the recommended wine.
There is one thing that they have not picked up on yet,
however. We have ceased to use their
lavatory paper for reasons I do not wish to divulge on grounds of privacy.
But it will be only a matter of time before they offer me
personalized rolls or at least by looking at my age profile make suggestions
about texture and capability.
The trouble is that as the post below indicates, the techies
are always ahead of the game when it comes to security and privacy.
Another false dawn is all the spin, spout and shout about
budgets etc. in the UK , the USA ,
the EU and the rest of the world. What
really matters is what the money men are going to do and how.
When Mark Carney takes over at the Bank of England we are
promised a very new strategy and attack on the economic problems. This could be the economic equivalent of the
1st July 1916 when in the Battle of the Somme after nearly two years
mostly on the back foot, the British Army attacked in the hope of pushing the
Germans out of France.
At least there has been some entertainment. The Daily Mail today had a piece about the
life and larks of Sir Winston Churchill in the first decade of the 20th
Century when a young man about town.
He comes across as perhaps a model for the character of
Bingo Little (see Wikipedia) in Wodehouse’s stories about Jeeves and Wooster .
This is not Churchill as we know him. More to the point a short while ago I posted
on Leslie Stuart, (see Wikipedia) born Thomas Barrett, of humble origins who
made it to the top in show business at the time. In the same decade he was making a great deal
of money and spending even more.
One interest that Leslie and Winston had in common and it
seems at the same time and in the same places was entertaining chorus girls and
not stinting on the champagne. Leslie
was unlucky falling into bankruptcy and divorce. Winston on the other hand was
bankrolled by press barons and married well.
Curiously, these two men were not quite so far apart as they
might have believed and I do not mean in terms of which particular girl or
girls whose company may have delighted them.
Trawling around the primary sources, it appears though from
decidedly humble origins one of Stuart’s/Barrett’s relations by marriage was
from a family where some had gone down but one part had decidedly gone up. They were connected to the family of one of
Churchill’s forlorn female hopes.
But another had been one of the leading huntsmen of his day
riding the same country and with the same packs as Bay Middleton (see
Wikipedia), now alleged to be the real father of Clementine Hozier, the
eventual wife of Sir Winston.
Which brings us back to the beginning. Between 1924 and 1929 Churchill was
Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Conservative Government that had declared that
its mission was to clear up the mess in the economy but failed.
A major reason was putting too much trust in and following
the advice of Montague Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England. The Great Crash that followed, involving Wall
Street, European funny money and the rest is one of the dark periods of history.
At the time, one of relatively recent acquisitions of Empire
was Cyprus
where we were then busy building up our army and naval bases.
That’s the trouble with wandering you finish up back where you
started from.
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