Not quite sure where this one came from but I think my Facebook post pretty much covers it.

The sleeper

  My name is Paul Harrison

  I’m a creature of habit.  You should know that about me.  I get up at 6.45 every morning.  No snooze button.  What’s the point of purposely disturbing your sleep when you can get more going straight through?  I put on my dressing gown, have breakfast, brush my teeth, get dressed drive to work (at Lester, Lester, Grout & Lester, the accountants), actually do some work, have dinner while keeping up-to-date with all the changes in the high-flying world of accountancy, work some more, come home have dinner watch my television shows (or TV if you prefer!) shower, cover myself in baby oil, masturbate, shower again, get my jammies on and am asleep by 10:10, usually.

  That’s my routine.

  Nothing disturbs it.

  Ever.

  I like that.

10:21.

  I open my eyes.  My boss (Grout jnr) is slumped at his desk.  A neat round bullet hole sits Squarely in the middle of his forehead.  It seems to be in direct contrast to the gigantic fragmented hole in the blinds and window behind which are matted with everything that contained Mr Grout junior’s consciousness.  The blood, assorted brain matter and skull fragments which are currently coating the blinds behind my former boss resemble a gory children’s collage.  In life he was an awful man, a bully and a sweaty liability who had three out-of-court settlements for sexual harassment on his CV, but, as we’re supposed to say nice things only about the dead I suppose I should say something pleasant myself and obey the convention ...He always had a perfectly trimmed moustache.  

  There are screams from behind me.  I hear them as if far off.  Must have been the noise of the shot.  Yes, I definitely have some ringing in my ears.  As I move my head to shake off the noise I catch a glimpse of my hands.  The gun rests neatly in them.  There’s a small amount of blood there as well.  How the hell did that get there?  The screaming is getting louder now.  I turn to face it and try to calm everyone down but they merely duck down and scream some more.  Oh, of course, the gun.  I drop it to the floor and head out of the office walking past Mr Grout senior and one of the Lester’s, in my current state I couldn’t tell you which one.  I need to get my head together and work out what happened?  

  As I walk down the central aisle to the elevators people try and speak to me.  I see their mouths move but it’s a far-off noise like the screams.  I press the button and wait for it to come, and wait and try to figure out what happened and wait and try and figure ...and wait ..and try ...and wait ...

12:35

  I open my eyes and immediately wish I hadn’t.  I’m outside my work building now.  London may have the Gherkin and of course it gets all the headlines, but here we have the pepper, a three sectioned whole that’s a bit of midget at 20 storeys.  Designed with a slant as a supposed deterrent to suicides, that’s the idea anyway, I think for many of my colleagues inside they see the building as more of a reason to actually commit suicide, but I digress.  Due to the curved nature of the building it means that the usual lowered boxes method of cleaning windows is undoable.  Therefore they have these bars, while I say a bar, it’s four-bar horizontal that you can walk on, three lots of them, this is what the window-cleaners click their harnesses to.  It’s also what I’m holding on, like my life depends.  

  The metal bars are hard to hold onto and as my legs flail in the air I can recognise without sight that I am about fifteen storeys up.  I hold on tight to the bars ledge and wonder how the hell I got here from my late boss’ office.  A few feet away a man is trying to help me by holding an outstretched hand.  I reach mine up so he can pull me back inside.  The wind up here even on a sunny day is noticeable even if you’re indoors.  Why was I out on the ledge in the first place?  

  He’s reaching over, his face a picture of fear as he holds onto the window frame with his left hand and stretches out with his right.  I wrap my right arm round all the bars and grip hard, stretching out as far as my left will let me.  I’m about a foot away.  I thrust myself up so my body rests on the bars and I get a further six inches nearer.  Stretching further I get two more inches and then another inch.  The bar makes a yawl and a squeak that is never good and the bar that holds one side of the bars sends me dropping about twenty feet.  I close my eyes and wonder if I’ll be able to get inside, in where it’s safe ...Back inside ...In where it’s ...back.

16:30

  I open my eyes.  I’m at the bank.  The counters and general ambience tell me that immediately.  The various people looking down on the ground in tears is not a good sign today though.  There is no-one behind the counter they’re all in front of it.  The other worrying thing are the five people with bombs attached to them.  They are also in tears.  As I look in my hand I can see why?  I’m holding a hand-trigger device.  If I let go the pressure will trigger the bombs going off.  What have I done now?  Today I’ve killed a man, nearly got another killed and now am holding five people hostage.  What kind of bastard have I become in the space of one day?  I was a creature of habit and yet look at me now.  What the hell has happened to me?  The only question I’m left with as people tremble at the sight of me is can I live with it a moment longer?  And the answer is no.  I look out of the glass doors and can see police cars waiting outside, presumably for me.  I head for the door and there are a number of screams.  Why are they trying to stop me from giving myself up?  I hear footfalls of someone running behind me.  I’m not trying to flee the scene merely stop the monster in his tracks that has taken over this suit I wear.  I break into a sprint to the door and head out into the glorious sunshine.  Whoever was behind me has stopped in their tracks and is screaming at me.  I open my arms and wait for the bullets to fly and save me from the evil that courses through my ever fibre at the moment ...

  “Hello, Paul,” said the Doctor.

  Paul opened his eyes.  He wasn’t dead.  He was in hospital.  There was a policeman at the door.  No doubt he’d been arrested by now.  He looked down at his wrists and was surprised to see that no handcuffs were attaching him to the bed.  Paul pushed himself up, even more confused than he had been all day.  

  “Where am I?” he asked.  Although the answer seemed obvious he wasn’t taking any chances.

  “You’re at Saint Grimshaw’s Royal hospital,” replied the Doctor.  “I expect you’re feeling quite confused about everything that’s happened today.”

  “Just a little,” said Paul.  as the buzzing in his head was hurting his eyes and grating against his throat.

  “I’m not surprised.  You are quite the unique individual.  It’s not everyday that one discovers a new disorder,” the Doctor smiled as he flicked over the details.  “At least that’s what we think it is.  Just need to run through a few questions first.”

  “A new disorder?” asked Paul.  The buzzing in his head was growing almost incessant now .

  “Yes, seemingly,” said the Doctor, consulting his chart, the smile still not leaving his face.  “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “Sure,” Paul continued, clasping his forehead.

  “Is your job quite boring?” asked the Doctor.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say boring...” replied Paul.

  “Good, good, good,” said the Doctor.  “Would you say that you could do your job without really much effort?”

  “Well, I do put some effort to erm...” Paul replied.

  “Right, right, right,” the Doctor went on, while making further notes on his chart.  “And finally would you say your life is quite routine?”

  “Yes,” replied Paul.  “Definitely.”

  “Splendid, splendid, splendid,” said the Doctor.

  “Is there something you want to tell me?” asked Paul as the buzzing was now so bad he wanted to send a toilet brush into his ears.

  “I take it today has seemed like an episodic nightmare for you?” said the Doctor, finally putting his notes down.

  “Yes,” said Paul.  “I don’t know what’s been going on?  I seem to wake up in these nightmare moments that don’t seem make any sense.  At the bank when I came to and saw the trigger I just, I just don’t know how I got there?”

  “All seem chaotic and disjointed?” asked the Doctor.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “There is a reason for that,” said the Doctor.  “You seem to be suffering from inverted narcolepsy.”

  “Inverted narcolepsy?” asked Paul.

  “Yes,” replied the Doctor.  “It would appear that the routine of your life has created a situation where you’ve been wandering through your day-to-day activities in a largely unconscious state, said routine creating little reason for your conscious self to ever ...Wake-up as it were.  Today during these truly horrifying moments your conscious self has woken up in order to protect you.”

  “But what was I doing at these moments today?”

  “Nothing,” said the Doctor.

  “Nothing?” asked Paul.

  “Nothing.”

  “But my boss,” said Paul.

  “Your boss was about to be arrested for embezzlement,” the Doctor continued.  “He pulled a gun and was going to kill you.  Upon seeing his father and another partner outside he knew the game was up and so turned the gun on himself.  After he shot himself the kick-back from the blast threw the gun to you and you caught it.”

  “Oh,” said Paul as his brain throbbed from what, he still wasn’t sure.  “And the window ledge?”

  “Ah, well there was a man on the ledge trying to kill himself,” the Doctor explained.  “In your unconscious state you didn’t recognise the danger and so went out to bring him back in, slipped and that’s when you woke-up again ...as it were.  The man who was trying to help you was the one who you tried to save.  When the bars broke the people at a lower window pulled you in, when the danger was over you lapsed back into your unconscious state.”

  “And the bank?”

  “It was being robbed, you walked passed the police ring oblivious and when you went in knocked the device out of one of the robbers hands and then picked it up.  It had a five second trigger and the robbers realised that if you dropped it with all the explosives they had packed on the hostages then the explosion would’ve taken them with it.”

  “So why does my head hurt now then?” Paul asked.

  “We’ve given you some anti-psychotics that should allow your conscious mind to take over again,” the Doctor began.  “It may cause some discomfort and you’ll need to take about eight or nine a day, but that should cure the inverted narcolepsy and allow your consciousness to re-assert itself.”

  “And what if I don’t want that?” said Paul.

  “Excuse me,” said the Doctor.

  “What if I don’t want it cured?” Paul asked again.

  “Why would you not want it cured?” asked the Doctor.

  “Doc, it hurts.  I’m a creature of habit.  I don’t need to know what is happening.  Most of the time I don’t care to really think about what I do.  And if this pain in my head is the price I pay, then to be honest ...I’ll stick with my unconscious self doing everything with the occasional moment of clarity when needed,” Paul replied.

  “You serious?” asked the Doctor, not really believing what he was hearing.

  “Deadly,” Paul responded.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” the Doctor said.  “Well the medication you’ve been given should wear off in about two hours and then you’ll be back to normal, if that is what you wish?”

  “It is,” said Paul with a smile.

  “Very well,” said the Doctor before holding his hand out.  “Good luck then, Mister Harrison.”

  Paul shook the Doctor’s hand vigorously.

  “You too.”

  In a few short hours Paul knew that he’d be back to his usual unconscious self and clarity and awareness would slip away and routine and normality would be restored.

20:41

  I open my eyes.  The woman behind the counter is jumping upside down excitedly.  The woman next to me is smiling joyfully.  The lottery machine is ringing with the number eight hundred and fifty thousand flashing on it.

  After the day I’ve had I’m not gonna worry.  It’s probably not even my ticket.

Fin.


For those new to the blog please feel free to check out the previous posts, short stories, forgotten film assessments and various other things.  Also I would like to point out that my first book FREE AT LAST: A NOVEL by MIKE LAMBERT & ZOE LAMBERT is still available on Amazon Kindle for £2.09.

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THE SEVENTH IN A FAR LESS OCCASIONAL SERIES OF FORGOTTEN FILMS THAT SHOULD BE REMEMBERED! 

It seems like only a short while ago that I started this mini-series of mine that remembered films time had long-since sent to the recycled bin because the DVD (and soon to be blu-ray DVD  process) ignores films that were neither blockbusters (like “Batman and Robin”, Eurgh!) nor deemed of critical importance only to be resurrected on late night TV every now and then when the schedules don’t know what to put on.  But this one is what I would class as a truly fantastic movie.  It’s a feel-good film that feels almost cliche BUT it is not only based on a true story, but some of it’s even more fantastic elements were left out because they were almost too unbelievable.  Based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand (A truly great sports book and one I would recommend to anyone who considers themselves human) it tells the story of three men and a racehorse that was Oscar-nominated but overlooked by the Academy as it was already a foregone conclusion that “Return of the King” would win everything (I was first told about that rumour in 2002) but that shouldn’t put you off.  The cast is fantastic and the DVD extra of the original footage of the “Race of the Century” just adds to what is a great film for anyone to watch but so few have.  

So ladies and Gentlemen, I present the case the “SEABISCUIT”

SEABISCUIT (2003)

For anyone who doesn’t have any idea what the unusually titled film is a bout I’ll start with the book.  Laura Hillenbrand writes that in 1937, Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler had fewer newspaper column inches attributed to them than Seabiscuit, a racehorse that was just all wrong, ridden by a jockey who was too big, owned by an owner who didn’t know what he was doing and trained by someone who was perceived as a whack-job!  I came to the book after watching the film and I would recommend that course for anyone.  It is a tale of America during it’s darkest period of recent history, the depression.  

The film is, I have to admit, a bit of a slow burner when you first watch it, with it being hard to see how Toby Maguire’s Red Pollard, Chris Cooper’s Tom Smith and finally car-loving Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges, majestic here as in so many other films) will work as a team.  But this isn’t their story in a way.  It’s Seabiscuit’s story, and the tale of how this, almost magical, creature brought them together.  Seabiscuit is like the Rocky of horses.  A horse that had potential but seemed destined to be an also-ran, until they figured out what it was that made it run, that made it strive to be better than any other horse, a horse that both of its riders, Red Pollard and George Woolf, rated as the best horse they ever rode.

There have been many standard reviews given for this film and its one of those that infuriates me because for any normal person watching, i.e: not a critic, they can’t help but get caught up in the inspiring tale that they’re witnessing, AND, like I said, some of the more fantastic elements of the story have actually been removed which is so un-hollywood.  Usually they add sentimental fantastical stuff to true stories not take it away.  

This is one of those films that I can’t recommend strongly enough and as I said the extra’s on the DVD version include, what was dubbed at the time, the race of the century.  Add that to what is one of the greatest sports movies ever made and you’ve got one hell of a good purchase and 2 hours of an evening well spent.

ENJOY! 

(PS:  The thing that makes this trailer that little bit better is the music from Shawshank Redemption I think ...But I'll leave that up to you to decide)

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THE TRAGIC LONELINESS OF THE FEW HIT WONDERS!

Everyone knows the one-hit wonders ...Well, they think they do.

Usually there are two types of one-hit wonders.

There are those genuine one-hit wonders.  One number hit ...and that’s it.  Forever.

Then there are those who people think are one-hit wonders who have one massive hit and then a few far less popular that no-one knows about but still mean that can’t qualify as one-hit wonders.

Now because people are people they usually lump the two together.  Good examples of the first are Lee Marvin: Wand’rin Star, Fern Kinney:  Together we are Beautiful, Simon Park Orchestra: Eye Level (something that seems to only mean something to me and Peter Kay) Partners in Krime:  Turtle Power and recently Nizlopi: The JCB song.

Examples of the other kind are Bombalurina:  Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, 2 Unlimited:  No Limit, D: Ream:  Things can only get better and Rednex:  Cotton Eyed Joe ...all of who charted more than once.

BUT what about the others who do decidedly better but are tossed onto the scrapheap once there star fades, the tragic few-hit wonders.  In the eighties during the second British invasion there were some acts who went massive like Spandau and Duran and Wham (or should that be Greco-Brit invasion?) anyway there were loads BUT a few of them came, had a few big hits, seemed like they’d be around for a long time to come and then, with the merest of whispers ...Fucked off, and no-one seems to remember them.

Who speaks out for the Howard Jones’s’s or the Thompson Twins’s’s or the Nik Kershaw’s’s’s who come, have massive hits and then go, never quite climbing to number one in the album charts or single charts but doing very well for a year and a bit.  For the Slade lads and the Mud gang and the Roy Wood fella's and even The Darkness boys, because they had the fortitude to pen a massive Christmas hit then for them the royalties never dry up but for Nik and the rest all the can hope for is the occasional royalty cheque from a gold station doing a where-are-they-now hour, a request to use their music in an advert for haemorrhoid cream or, if they’re really lucky, a request to use their song on a retro film (THEY REMEMBER ME!)

Those with one massive hit are special, those with a few decent size hits are nothing.  Living in a box may well be living in a box at this minute.  Who feels anything for the Johnny Hates Jazz gang, left along with only one tub of hair gel between them ...and no hair.  And who speaks for Dina Carroll who for one year was not a stranger and almost had a perfect year before disappearing, and what about Mis-teeq, how do the afford clothes any more?  Can they still afford three sports bra's, six handkerchiefs and three bits of string (Apart from Alesha ...she can afford her own string!)

Just £5 a month could keep these acts happy and off the streets, you can get a T-Shirt, a poster and even a pen emblazoned with the words “FEW-HIT WONDERS”.  The acts will write to you and let you know how they’re doing and will keep you up-to-date with all their comeback plans from now until they finally kick the bucket.

So please, remember, a few-hit wonder person is not just for Christmas or Ice-Dancing-on-a-Celebrity-Big-Brother-Masterchef, they’re for life.

Thanks for listening.

(Mr Chatable:  What the fuck was that about?)

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MONEY’S FOR MORONS (AKA: The Rise of the Turd Polishers)

In 2008 the world suffered what can only be described as financial armageddon due to people investing in shit thinking it was gold, and this is pretty much true across all spheres of life, from people paying for consumer products to clothing to collaterized debt obligations.  But since then the world has moved on from that and has learned its lesson ...except, worryingly, it hasn’t.  In fact ...things are getting dumber still.  Point in case ...

Charlie Sheen

Which is what started this post off.

But why?  ...I hear my regular readers ask.  What? ...Ask those people who’ve stumbled across my blog by accident and Who? ...Ask those for whom celebrity bollocks is just not worth their attention.  I will answer the first, say welcome to the second and congratulations to the last by managing to avoid the mindless drivel that the rest of us have to put up with.

Anyway back to Charlie Sheen ... At one time he was considered to be genuinely leading man material having been in back-to-back best picture Oscar nominated flicks, “Platoon” and Wall Street”.  Ten years later he seemed to be, well, troubled, but somehow he came back to become the highest paid actor on US TV (a fact that hasn’t really been understood by those outside of America, but I digress).

Until last year, of course.  Until the meltdown.

Because he was the highest paid actor on US TV this seemed to equate in his mind that he was actually talented and so he decided to rant against the show’s producer, Chuck Lorre, whose words he called tin cans that he was turning into gold, he seemed to come unstuck when insulting him choosing instead to do a simple rhyming rip-take of Chuck Lorre’s name saying it rhymed with Suck (Yes, without writers that was the best he could do ...By contrast the best Chuck Lorre could do was Big Bang Theory ...I think there’s a clear winner here.)

So Charlie was sacked.

But Charlie didn’t need the show.  After the comparison of the name Chuck to suck this meant to Charlie that he was some kind of comedy genius.  As such Charlie decided he could do a one-man show called “Charlie Sheen’s something something Torpedo of truth”.  It was a one-man show and with Charlie being such an internet sensation and TV star he could simply talk on stage and it would easy, as he said he turns tin cans into gold ...right? ...Well, no!

The show’s first night as done by Charlie (Hence it being one-man) bombed.  The audience (his loyal and loving fans) hated it.  One fan commented  “I want my money back!”  After paying $150 for two seats she said “I was hoping for something. I didn't think it would be this bad.” (WHY?)  Clearly he was not performing the comedic alchemy he had previously boasted.  So what to do?  Well, instead, he hired a writer (Writers?  It may have been more than one) and, shockingly,  the was ...Better.  Now you would think this would lead Charlie and all the other saps out there to figure it was not Charlie turning Chuck’s work into gold, but Chuck turning Charlie’s work into gold, but it doesn’t seem to (It’s a fact that America’s funniest men forget every year until they have nothing to say during the writer’s strike and can’t think up any jokes of their own.) 

BUT this in itself, interest me, it does not (Nice Yoda-ism there!) it is what was said on the Channel Five show “Most Shocking Celebrity Moments 2011” and that is that people still meet with Charlie because ...He still makes money!  And that statement is what really stood out.  because here is a guy who, on his own is a comedy turd ...but thanks to the contribution of the turd polishers, and the unlimited amount of people out there who will still pay good money for stuff that is, well, shit, then Charlie can still do well.

But before we feel all smug and delighted that such shit could never happen over here dear readers, do not feel so secure.  It already has in the beloved world were talent and genuine class have long since taken a back seat.  You see we have our own version of Charlie Sheen, we have our own delightful version of car-crash TV in a man who we can trace as a downward talent-descendant from The Cheeky Girls, to Chico, then down dramatically to Jedward before finally plummeting further with the man himself, Frankie Coccozza.

Frankie Coccozza is not even to music what Charlie Sheen is to comedy, oh no, he is far worse.  Give Charlie Sheen a GOOD comedy line and he’ll deliver it (give him any other line and he’ll probably devour it!) but even if you give Coccozza a good song he will be incapable of delivering it anyway other than badly.

Now, Coccozza was also on the same Channel Five show I mentioned previously and the thing I found interesting was how most of the commentators on the show were of the opinion that Coccozza had “an okay voice” which baffled me because having listened to him myself I found his performance to be sub-par, certainly not one worthy of the next manufactured pop-star bearing in mind that in a competition like this (a TALENT one!!!) THAT should be the over-riding factor, but of course, these days it ISN’T what it’s about.

Over the last few years we have seen the music industry pour tons of money into pop videos, so much so that radio is probably the second favourite choice for many young people to listen to music, with them preferring to SEE it on music channels.  For the industry this is a dangerous precedent (as is having Apple virtually controlling what many people can or cannot buy due to their industry-wide monopoly) because it is music ...it should all be about the sound BUT thanks to judges maintaining that it’s about having the X-Factor then what we have seen is the product being separated from its purpose.  But, I am not one without fairness so below I give you Coccozza and, no not the single version, that would not be lab conditions, but also a live version by Coldplay of possibly their best ever song for you to pass Judgement on.

Now this should be the end of the story for Frankie but no.  If the turd polishers can make money from someone and some people will be stupid enough to invest in the product then those turd polishers will break out that brown polish and brush!  Which is why Coccozza is now already on the desperate celebrity treadmill, appearing on Celebrity Big Brother 2012 hosted by Brian Dowling (an “Ordinary” person who won two previous shows) and Amy Childs, a woman, who due to her appearance on reality TV, recently showed that she had lost the ability to judge what was real and what wasn’t (4 minutes 40 ...it’s unbelievable!)

But if people hadn’t realised that they shouldn’t pay for UTTER SHIT then surely after everything that happened in 2008 then surely the credit rating agencies would have learned something?  The following tale is one that will seem both exagerrated and ridiculous but I assure you dear reader ...every detail is true.  So to start, I get the bus to and from work each day (Hate it!) and one day last year on my journey home I had the misfortune of listening to the following young woman who was, and I mean this with every disrespect, as SKANKY as it gets.  She was talking on her phone to someone (wasn’t sure who) and then after that to her Dad but here is what I gleaned from her call.

As time went by she mentioned that she had been into Manchester to have her Apple i-phone repaired as she had broken it by throwing it at her boyfriend (How lady-like.  Why, Mister Darcy ...Eat my phone!) Since then she went on to ring her Dad to inform him that she didn’t have money and needed to borrow THREE THOUSAND POUNDS!  Now don’t get me wrong I love my kids but if either of them asked for 3 grand I know I couldn’t afford to do that, which made me wonder what kind of profession her Dad was in that he could give her such money, but she could be that skanky without any of life’s privileges.  Three options sprang to mind ...security guard, builder or professional criminal, he ended the cal with delightful phrase “AW THANKS DAD.  I’LL COME DOWN AND SEE YOU ...IF YOU SEND ME MONEY FOR THE TRAIN FARE!”  But I digress.    

The first thing she bemoaned about was the fact that she was on the bus and she had to sell her 40 GRAND LAND ROVER (What the Fuck?) as she had been banned for drink driving.  The car was taken out on HP and she was trying to sell it for 25 grand.  

This was a woman by her own admission had no money, was presumably on benefits and yet, AND YET, she managed to obtain credit to buy a FORTY GRAND vehicle.  Who the fuck was asleep at the wheel for that loan to be authorised?  We’re supposed to be at a time when the industry’s irresponsible lending practices had been curbed because now we own a number of the main banks.  Now obviously I can’t legally state which lender let this deal went through but you would think that one of the lessons of lending to people without a secure source and just charging more interest is not a way to secure the risk.  

So so far we’ve looked at how people are still buying shit expecting it to be gold, are still hungry to get money from turds, and how the banks are still lending to those who they really shouldn’t BUT ...the rich people who were saved would surely have learned their lesson, right?

But, NO.  My final story of money for morons takes us into the world of business, a world that is perhaps the most important because it is this world that will as always shape out future and it is here where the biggest mistakes are STILL BEING MADE.

Let’s take a look at Sheikh ManCity and his deal with the club.  Obviously with EUFA’s fair play rules bearing down on them Manchester City Football Club need to increase their revenue stream, especially with losses over the last three years in excess of £194 million pounds (although it is unclear in itself if this is a carry forward figure or an amount for each individual year.)  NOW, the plan is of course for the £400 million sponsorship deal with Sheikh ManCity’s relative’s airline to be used to expand the stadium, build a new super-dooper training ground/academy and gain revenue from opening this ground up to the public for community use, etc.  

Clearly whoever is behind this plan didn’t read my blog on the folly of the western businessman.  The manufacturing jobs that are the mainstay of any economy are leaving the UK and are not coming back.  Therefore people have less money to spend on things like, well, football tickets, which has been proven by Man City’s less than impressive turnout for the Carling cup which, although a mouth-watering tie with Liverpool, was left 5’000 bums-on-seats short by the home fans.  If Man City cannot fill a stadium for a cup semi-final how can they get the money from the community to watch training matches or even hire it out as clearly there is not enough revenue within the local community for them to do just that

So, the public aren’t learning, the media aren’t learning, the banks aren’t learning and the rich aren’t learning, so ...What have we learnt? 

You see the worlds of the media and finance would have you believe that capital wants to self replicate itself out of nothing.  Personally I see this assessment as being wrong.  With everything that’s happened both recently and in the past it occurs to me that capital’s main aim is not to be made a fool of.  Monetary capital abides by one overwhelming rule, that was first verbalized by Mr P T Barnum and is one of the most famous sayings on the planet and goes something like this ...You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you cannot fool all the people all the time.  Money doesn’t want to be made a sap of, and as soon as it does, it bites back!  All the suckers out there who invested in bank-shares and went down then went into sovereign bonds, and are currently watching that investment go down, a lot of them have since moved to gold ...THE ONE THING PEOPLE ACTUALLY DON’T NEED, IS WHERE THEY PUT THEIR MONEY!  It doesn’t take a smart man to figure out what will happen next, BUT, it does take someone smart to figure out when. 

I’ve been Mister Chatable.  May your time be pleasant but your pleasure not timed.  Do remember that FREE AT LAST: A NOVEL is still available on Amazon Kindle and if you enjoy reading my blog and become a follower you will automatically receive updates when the next post comes along.

Till next time ...Adieu!


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TALES FROM INSIDE THE CREDIT CRUNCH (0r the mathematical formula for how the credit crunch happened.)

While everyone and his dog has talked endlessly about the derivatives market being the big reason behind the credit crunch and subsequent ONGOING recession what hasn’t been looked at (or certainly discussed in ANY book or program) is the lack of restraint by the banks before the crash in their unsecured lending.

You see we might like to look at the credit crisis as one created by the US sub-prime lending and out very own housing bubble in this country BUT as with all things like this there are more reasons than just those big ones that commentators speculate on, and in this blog we will look at all of them on an individual level.  So let us take a look at all the different villains that there were within this terrible debacle that, in spite of all the commentary to the contrary, the world never really escaped from in 2008, and the first of the fiends that we will take a look at is one of the worst of all things, one of those that has become almost a byword for mis-selling and that item is? ...PPI.

PPI or payment protection insurance may be, by most commentators standards, a reality small player in the entire credit crunch debacle, a sort of Mini-me to Doctor Evil’s subprime lending, but that doesn’t mean that we should devalue its impact on the world of finance and I remember seeing it first hand when I worked for a large debt solutions company.  When I first saw the scale of payment protection insurance I was flabbergasted.  For many people it seemed to be making their problems so much worse without any benefit at all.  For example, policies were sold to people who were self-employed BUT when it came to claiming on the policy they could only claim it if they had confirmation from the Inland Revenue that they had stopped, BUT the only way the revenue would confirm such a thing would be if they had those details in writing from them in that year’s tax return which could only be submitted at the end of the tax year, by which time a bucketload of interest and charges and court actions could well have been taken.

But even on a micro-level it seemed weird to me, as a layperson.  A loan for a car that was unsecured for say £10,000 may have had £3000 or £4,000 of interest over 60 months but with PPI could add an extra £5000 or so.  I remember seeing high street banks with loan agreements were a £10,000 loan saw total repayments (including PPI) of over £18,000 which always struck me as odd because with the PPI essentially the total amounts they were paying were not dissimilar to the interest that some companies regarded as loan sharks were charging.

But then we get to the real bug bear for PPI and that is the unwillingness of the banks to pay out.  You see that’s the problem with the banks being the people who were meant to pay out the PPI because, to put things simply, they didn’t want to, in fact it has been commented by the FSA that hardly any policies were ever paid out.  

I remember one occasion were a gentleman had been made redundant from work and was told by his bank that his policy covered unemployment and not redundancy.  To me, this is staggering and shows just how hard it was for people to be able to claim.  The banks had inflated the payments to a point were people were struggling to keep up when in work and then if out of work they pressured them to maintain payments when they had no money which usually meant people using credit cards to pay their debts leading them into a viscous cycle.

You see the problem was that somewhere along the way the banks decided high up that making a little bit of money from a lot of money wasn’t enough, even though that was the essence of banking.  The way it works is quite simple and I am convinced if the combination of PPI and aggressive advertising to entice people (especially young people . . . Remember those adverts on the music channels in the early part of this century for Barclaycard, capital one and egg amongst others and those are just the ones I can remember!)  then the banks would’ve been in a lot better shape than they are now.  Banks should be a sound business, it is an easy business to make money from if you’re mark up is correct and not so disproportionate that your products are unaffordable.

For example:

If say I as an investor put 10 million quid in the bank and £800 000 of that was leant out in 10,000 chunk over five years (holding back £200,000 in case of emergency) with a return of £4000 on each loan and if 90% of those are paid back that would leave you with a return 0f £52,000 profit per year.  Even 80% gives you a paltry £24,000 a year.  Now that sounds like peanuts until you consider that the UK’s supposed savings in UK banks is supposedly a few trillion pounds.  The RBS bailout initially was supposedly 37 billion pounds OR £37 000 000 000.  If this was everything they’ve lost (and I would think it was probably more) and 80% had been lent out in £10,000 chunks then the expected profits from that (if 90% of those loans had been repaid) would have been £296 000 000 over 5 years or £59,200 000 gross profits a year, which wouldn’t have been that bad bearing in mind that credit card and store card interest is more and Mortgage repayments pay back double the amount borrowed, UNTIL, we look at the other thing that went wrong with the system.

Which was ...

...CREDIT SCORES

A credit score evaluates a persons likelihood of default for debt purposes which means if you’re not in debt you have no score even though you may have a regular source of income, BUT, conversely, if you are loaded with debts cannot afford to repay them but maintain the minimum repayments then you will keep your high credit score.  With the changes in just how much credit you can get these days one would think that the models that are used to credit rate individuals would have changed but seemingly not.

Now when I did this work I remember seeing people with 10, 20 credit cards and untold loans and some of them still had flawless credit ratings, but the thing that I remember most of all at that time working there was niggling thought that didn’t go away until I left the job and it’s one that was frighteningly accurate.

“With all these bad debts out there how are the banks gonna make money?”

The answer as we now know is not well.  Now of course this isn’t the be all and end all for what caused the credit crunch, there are a thousand and one reasons why it happened, but there are two things that appear to be a constant through all the financial fiasco’s of the last few years the credit crunch, ENRON, long-term capital management, AIG, Lehman Brothers, RBS, MF Global and all the other huge businesses that have collapsed is the dangerous almost lethally toxic combination of two personality elements that the free market seem to look on as the best of thingz (Thingz is like things, but, trendier) . . . Greed and Ego.  These are the traits that convince seemingly sharp minds that nothing can go wrong and so take no precautions in case it doesn’t.  

It allowed the entire banking clan to believe selling on debts of people who can’t repay their mortgages and buying them back was sensible, or using 98% of your customers money to invest and not taking into account that 3% of your investments could go south was a great way of doing business, or how about hiding losses and projecting fake profits so that you can still award yourself a fucking huge bonus when you haven’t actually met your targets (a strategy that also took Arthur Andersen with it for shredding the evidence . . . An act the company may have survived had it kept the books like, well, like book-keepers should really) and, and, well, and countless other versions of the same story.

Ego perhaps is the more dangerous of the two forces here.  Greed is what convinces a gambler to keep gambling, ego allows these maniacs to convince others to let them gamble.  So how do we stop these things from happening increasingly, well, like many I would say that stopping rewarding failure is one step on the road to fiscal recovery.  Treating executives the same way individual traders are treated is the second.  When a rogue trader is found to have acted in a way that contravene’s the rules they are arrested first and questions asked later, when senior execs are suspected of acting outside the rules they are told “Yeah, you’ve lost enough” like the Arthur Andersen crew, or are merely fined (yeah, like that’s the same as sharing a cell with a guy called “BUTCH!”) an amount of money that is dwarfed by what they pay their team of high-priced lawyers.  

One of the suggestions being bandied around is for Director’s to be struck-off in a similar fashion to Doctors and I can certainly agree with that one, but there’s another option I would wager would also be a good way to go and that is to impose similar rules on directors as there are on bankruptcies in regard to shares.  When companies become nationalized there is always talk about how much will be paid for shares so shareholders can be recompensed for directors destroying their companies (banks do anyway, car manufacturers, train manufacturers, kitchen makers can all go under but put a banker in trouble and watch ministers bend over backwards to hand over money) but very often in these cases directors and executives hold huge amounts of shares and therefore in spite of their utter failure they will be entitled to, what is often a huge amount of compensation for that failure, I would bring in rules similar to those currently operating in regard to bankruptcy with shares being removed from senior directors as repayment for their failings, ALSO I would suggest that bringing in similar rules as to the disposing of company assets where trades to dispose of assets within a three year period can be reversed to prevent ENRON type trades that Jeff Skilling and (I think) his wife engaged in up to the companies demise, because these bailouts that we have seen are doing exactly that . . . they take the risk out of failure.

FOR EXAMPLE this year of course I wrote a book.  Now, because I live in the real world I did not decide to immediately give up my job, invest every penny in it in the hope that I would automatically be successful, such things take time and also, well, I have bills to pay!  I can’t afford to ignore the real world risks that unfortunately to some degree control our actions, I know if I did quit, get into trouble with the mortgage and lose everything the government would not come along with a magic wand and wish everything better.  My actions are shaped by what I can do and what I can achieve without putting my family at risk!  These clowns however due to their high salaries, share options and willingness for governments to throw good money after bad are not subject to any risks, for the execs at the top their is no downside.  

BANKER and ADULTERER, FRED GOODWIN (You know the biggest kick in the teeth is that if he is still paying to keep that privacy injunction in place, he actually isn’t paying for it WE, the taxpayer, ARE, as payers of his fucking pension!) ruined RBS.  FRED “KNIGHTED FOR SERVICES TO BANKING” GOODWIN created the Titanic of businesses.  At the point just before it’s demise, in terms of assets, RBS was the world’s biggest company, he was Captain Smith piloting the ship as it went smack bang into the credit crisis and ran out of money.  Now some people might suggest that not doing due diligence on some of the companies they took over was not wise, or that investing heavily in sub-prime CDO’s was a big risk for Fred ...but it wasn’t.  His £16 million pension shows beyond doubt that he took absolutely zero risks.  You and I in such a position get nothing if we make stupid decisions and our risk-taking leads us to a dark place ...Fred Goodwin gets the bonus prize because the Government thought that clearly he was too awful to stay in his job.  

Reward without risk creates a climate where those who will do anything to make money will, well, do anything to make money really for as long as they can, and because there are no downsides to taking those risks that is what they’ll do, and, if and when it does go wrong they will all show zero remorse, 100% cowardice and blame everyone else.  The formula of which looks like this

CDO(2) + failing core + ( EGO x GREED           

business      over CONFIDENCE) = CREDIT CRUNCH

And it’s here where I finish with where I really disagree with those who say that said crisis was unpredictable and such events are out of our scope of vision.  If I can think the unthinkable as I did during that year, and I’m someone who is an averagely intelligent layperson then such events are not unpredictable but very predictable, the thing that the rest of us cannot do that the philosophical folks would like us to do is to profit from said foresight, which many of us can’t.  There were several reporters who were investigating ENRON who thought something was wrong with their business model but did not bet against the company to make money because here is where thinkers like NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB get it wrong.  

The crisis for those with good sense was inherently obvious.  Just because said people didn't make money from it doesn't make them wrong.  Where people are adverse to risk is in numbers and text.  Show someone a cleverly worded paragraph that shows an earthquake is coming and they may well stare at you confused, whereas if the ground starts to shake then watch them react.    In terms of risks in the property markets, it was obvious that a bubble was developing and it would burst BECAUSE that’s what bubbles do.  You don’t need complex historical models to figure that out, everyone could see it.  When the mortgage adviser on GMTV was told by a woman who could not get on the property ladder there was no point her getting an interest only mortgage because she could NEVER AFFORD the capital he had no answer and merely sat there looking stunned.  It was like no-one had ever had the gumption to put it into words to this guy why that was a stupid idea.  That was the year the bubble burst.

I think that our instincts for recognising dangers are relatively good for the most part, just like most of us don’t have the psychopath gene that makes us such a danger to others coupled with a bad environment.  These instincts have been honed over centuries and of course how we usually react is wait for the danger to start to reveal itself and then put things into action.  Bankers and financiers do not do this.  They act continually in their own instincts until a crash and then make out that the events were unforseeable BUT there is a way  for us to beat the banking industry and bring some sense and order to it finally.  

Clearly the male-dominated market-based thinking is the problem, this is undoubtably caused by ideas that are flawed due to overproduction of testosterone.  Therefore when idiots get ideas that will create over-valued bonuses that make financiers think they can take bigger risks without anything bad happening they can be sent to ...THE WANK TANKS!  

WANK TANKS could be installed in every financial institution across the world to reduce testosterone by creating a more plateaued environment and prevent the spread of ridiculous ideas and suggestions that puts both high street investors and taxpayers money at risk by reducing the risk of said  testosterone based ideas flowing out into the general workplace and restoring logical thinking to the western economies in order to get to the other side of the ongoing crisis because while we are still battling the financial sector we cannot hope to beat their excesses.

I’ve been Mr Chatable and a happy new year to all my readers.


My first book FREE AT LAST: A NOVEL by MIKE LAMBERT & ZOE LAMBERT is still available on Amazon Kindle for £2.29.

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