September Holiday (Not Much)

I was on holiday last week. I didn't go away, in fact, because the sky was grey, the air full of some fungus that set off histamines in my bloodstream after ten minutes, the temperature neither hot nor cold, the air damp, there was nothing much on at the movies, plus I do not have £1,000 to blow on air fare, hotels and decent meals in, say, Nice or Paris, so in fact, I stayed indoors at home. I listened my way through a fair chunk of the Mariss Jansons' mix of Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies. I read a couple of books, kept trying to get started on Sartre's Being and Nothingness - which is a lot to get started on - and finished watching the first series of The Guardian, which is not a newspaper but a series about a corporate lawyer who has to work as a child advocate or go to jail for doing drugs. It's pretty good. Also I kept waking up at 05:45. I wanted to sleep late - 08:00 would do fine. But no, there I was, bouncing around at 06:00.

And at some point, it dawned on me that it's not me who doesn't get it, it's the management in The Bank. The senior management and the talk they talk? I thought they are smart people being cynically manipulative, but now I know they are ordinary, dull people who actually believe what they say and do. None of them would last a day in a real private sector company, though they might survive in British Telecom or Cable and Wireless. They read pop management books if they read at all. Somewhere inside they know that the whole financial services sector is a badly-run mess, and they think it's cute.

Anyway. On the one day I did go into town, I passed by the Lazarides gallery and had a look at the Botulism exhibition by a Brooklyn artist called Bast. I liked a lot of it. Here's one - Utz - that caught my eye even if it is beyond my wallet. The gallery were kind enough to send me a pdf catalogue.

As ever - if you need me to take this down, I'll be happy to oblige.

Also I downloaded and tried Evernote which is a cloud notebook application. It's way useful - I now draft stuff in Evernote rather than Open Office Word  - and it's on my MacBook Pro and Asus netbook. It's right up there with Dropbox as a must-have.