Peer to peer lending

Carney was on the 'phone this morning. Did I hear Lord Turner on the BBC? Peer-to-peer lending grown to £6billion. Couldn't believe it had got so big. There were only about a thousand peers, right?
Seven hundred and ninety, I corrected.
OK so that makes it ... erm..about £750k each?
Seven point five million each, I corrected (numbers were never his strong spot).
Seven point five mil each!!???
During the stunned silence that followed, I reflected upon the tawdry business that Carney had brought to my attention. It was not news to me, of course. I knew first hand that it was not possible to walk from one end of the House of Lords bar to the other without being pestered by swarm of peers offering or begging for loans. I also knew what Carney possibly didn't, that an informal derivatives market had been established in the members' cloakroom on the second floor, where IOUs were more numerous than the paper towels.
Carney's shrill voice recalled me from my reverie. How can it possibly be seven point five mil each? Surely they don't all have that kind of money, even with all the bungs?
It took time, but I finally explained, through a series of childish analogies involving the exchange of baseball cards, that the £6billion figure was a simple sum of the absolute values of each of the individual peer-to-peer transactions- many of which where simply selling a loan on, or borrowing money at a lower rate to offer it on at a higher one- rather than representing a real indebtedness of £6billion among our noble peerage. He didn't quite understand me, but he could at least appreciate that it was more complicated than he had first thought, and he signed-off promising to 'think about it a bit more before the next MPC'.

Trump's defence concerns

I confess I had been somewhat puzzled by the agitated reception given in some quarters to the news that I had supplied the missing technical expertise that allowed the North Koreans finally to complete their inter-continental ballistic satellite launcher. A call this morning from Trump supplied the answer...
Trump alone among recent US presidents has never quite trusted me, and in fairness I can understand why. Early in his career as a property speculator I ...lured is not quite the word I want.... I involved him in a rather complex deal that financed the establishment of the main campus of my charitable research foundation, leveraging the value of the oil rights for a large section of the eastern Mexican Gulf over which I had an option. Through the deal I acquired the campus and he the option; how was I to know the option was worthless?
You might think Trump would at least credit me with the value of the experience, which has allowed him to become a somewhat shrewder player in the property market, but reasoning has never been his strong suit (odd the reinforced clothes some of these speculators wear), as this morning's call made clear. He started on his usual pugnacious note. Hey, what was I doing helping those commies. Why was I making missiles for them. Didn't I know North Career was unstable (I assume the spelling). And more of the same. I continued with the crossword until he lost steam, then patiently explained that the rocket which the North Koreans had launched with my help was intended to launch satellites, and I let him know, having exacted suitable promises of secrecy, that into the microprocessors that ran the guidance system for the rocket I had embedded firmware that, unbeknown to my clients, would never allow a ballistic trajectory outside their territorial waters.
I could tell that Trump didn't entirely trust my answer. OK wiseguy, he went on after a few moments of muttering to himself, if you're so smart answer this. Suppose they launch a satellite, and suppose it can get itself into a geo stationery (I assume the spelling) orbit. And suppose that orbit is right on top of Washington DC. How do we know there ain't a nuke inside it? Huh? And how do we know one day they flick a switch and a bomb-bay opens under that baby and out drops an H-bomb straight down on DC. I don't remember quite what he said next, as 17 down was really bugging me: 'Cervantes wearing cricket pad has a bit' (9).

The North Korean Connection

I hear murmurings from Stockholm about my role as advisor-in-chief to North Korea's nobel- sorry, I meant noble, programme to escape our pedestrian terrestrial environs and reach the lofty purity of space. Dear me, the world is such a nest of hypocrites. Virtually every country in the west, and most in the east, has its own satellite, so why should North Korea be denied the convenience? And if my charitable research foundation in Nassau makes a million or ten from correcting a few fundamental failings in the design of their inter-continental ballistic satellite-launcher, where’s the harm in that?

Braking Bad

This morning I received a charming letter from a young lady who asks whether the unbearable congestion on our inadequate motorway network is due in part to an increase in the average length of the motor car.
Not appreciably, is the short answer.

To increase the capacity of our motorways we need to reduce the length not of the vehicles but of the gaps between them, which account for the greater proportion of the space on a carriageway.
As long ago as 1971 I sent detailed proposals to the Department of Transport, complete with drawings and specifications and even a working prototype. The idea was simplicity itself. Each car would be fitted with a frontal probe, the remote extremity of which would support a sensitive pressure switch wired to the braking system. A car would be driven with the tip of its probe ‘kissing’ the rear of the car in front, so that when the leading car braked each preceding car would have its brakes activated by its pressure switch. The photograph of the handsome prototype tells its own compelling story…

Of course the Luddites at the DoT came up with various objections. The probes would make parking difficult. The probes would trip pedestrians. The probes would project into the transverse carriageway at T-junctions, and more of the same. But when within two weeks I had dealt with those objections with revised telescopic probes, made to withdraw discreetly with a few pumps of a dashboard-mounted lever, more followed until it became obvious that they were ‘false’ objections, raised with the sole aim of discrediting the proposals. We can only guess at what sinister motivations were at play, what backstairs influences, what bungs, bribes and other sweeteners from vested civil-engineering interests concerned only with maintaining the demand for ever-more highways to be built. And today you, the poor commuter, are paying the price. It makes my blood boil.

An insult to the intelligence

I switched on the BBC classical music programme Radio 3 this morning in time to catch the last 23 bars of Szell's Tyrolean scherzo in f. The recording was clearly that of the Budapest concert in May '06 with Marajeck on first violin- I remembered it as much for the post-concert show that Marajeck put on at my suite in the Gellert as I did  for a disturbing  rattle from the  tail piece of the second 'cello, which was quite impossible to ignore. After the music had finished the dim presenter reminded herself of the name of the piece, and then made a most unexpected confession.  She was sorry, she said, she didn't have the name of the conductor among her notes, but she would find it and let us know as soon as possible!
Whaaa??!
Does she think that we....don't know the conductor?? I was still in a whirl when the next piece ended, and she tells us that she's got that name for us, it was Ernst Massendorfer. Of course it was Massendorfer. Does she think we can't tell the baton work of Massendorfer from that of Furtwangler, Alsop, Barbirolli and the rest (I will leave out that other annoying Rattle)?  What will  she tell us next- that the music was played on violins and other orchestral instruments? I am all for giving a chance to young radio presenters struggling to learn their trade (remember my work with Wogan, after all), but I won't sit there and be insulted by my own radio. There have to be yet another letter to the BBC Board in the STERNEST POSSIBLE TONES.

Hawking's Tourette's

Hawking has Tourette's. Oh yes, don't you doubt it. Think of it, why else would all his public talks be pre-recorded? They say it is because Steve  can only drive his voice synthesiser at five characters per minute. If you reflect for a moment you will  conclude that simply can't be true. There's Steve solving the Einstein field equations to calculate the entropy divergence of colliding black holes- how is he meant to do that if he can only write five digits per minute? And if the  public facts were not enough to convince you, I can tell you privately that as long ago as 1997 I had written, and he had tested, an optical device-driver that allowed him to speak in real-time through a vocabulary of eyeball movements, somewhat like the strokes of a pen in short-hand.
No, the real reason for the charade of the pre-recorded speech is his tragic development of Tourette's, as if motor neurone disease was not a sufficient burden in itself. Through consultation with Stephen and his family, those of us who act as the guardians of his public image decided that we could not risk the damage that might arise to his noble intellectual persona if his talks were peppered with the whistles, clicks and obscenities that he could  no longer find the power to suppress. But surely it would have been possible for you, people ask, to have implemented an algorithm to strip out the swear words and other ejaculations in real time as he 'spoke'. True, but no algorithm  could have disguised the resulting pauses, and we thought that any hesitations in his speech would have been almost as damaging to Stephen's image as the cursing and monkey noises they replaced.
While the case was easily made for suppressing the evidence of his Tourette's in public, a more subtle moral dilemma confronted us in relation to his work at the university. While they started out with great forbearance and sympathy, the other theoretical physicists at the Cavendish soon became intolerant of Stephen's limited and repetitive repertoire of intrusive and disrespectful sounds, claiming it rendered them  unable to concentrate on their analysis. There were demands made at the senate that the 'voice-box' should be switched-off when Stephen was working alone- a reasonable request, you might think, but a cruel one in actuality. Stephen  had made it abundantly clear to me that the act of uttering the obscenities and other animalistic noises had a profoundly soothing effect, and to switch off his voice-box would be like a physical gag, which surely no-one would allow in this enlightened age. Fortunately a simple solution- headphones- allowed both Stephen and his irritated colleagues to coexist in harmony once more. Stephen is now able to chirrup and swear as he likes when performing his calculations, while his colleagues are undisturbed in performing theirs. And so I continue to improve the lot of mankind wherever I can.

Keeping it up

Grandad, the little one asks, what happens to all those letters you get?
She is referring, of course, to the sacks of mail emptied daily onto the Etruscan marble top of the table in the main hall that once belonged to Pious IX (the hall that is, not the table, which was ex Francesco Medici via contacts in Argentina best not mentioned further here).
Why little one, Grandad reads them all, then they are kept in those books over there. Points vaguely to the east wall of the library, where countless books bound in Cardinal red kid hold the correspondence generated by my work, meticulously indexed in 12-point Sushing Immacula printed on hand-scuted 250gm paper. Pick any volume at random, open it where you like, and the same sort of drivel will be found- typically questions about the inspiration for my writings, usually from those in search of some inspiration of their own.
Take this one, from June 2015. Why, it asks, are there sometimes such large gaps between the entries in my blog? Is it because I am working for long periods in other media? Well, yes, I suppose that accounts for it partly. I have my other means of expression- film, music, theatre, opera, my bronzes, the sketches I send to Foster and Piano, the choreography, my old Leica L3, the wrapping of the Grand Canyon in cling film, programming Deep Blue- and so on, and  they all, to some extent, eat into the time I have to enter the character of the bloggeur Peluxes. But I can't entirely dispel a suspicion that behind the question there is an assumption that posts such as these- golden nuggets of literary humour- can somehow be.... just made up. That they can be...dashed-off in a moment, and that if it weren't for other distractions my blog could be a near-continuous outpouring.  One might as well ask why the seven-year gap between the Special and General Theories of Relativity? Was Einstein doing something else?  Why the eight year gap between War and Peace and Anna Karenina? Did Tolstoy take up photography? Blog posts such as this are not simply...written. They are conceived, nurtured, refined, examined from every angle. The actual typing of them is like the birth of a child- a few short moments of painful effort after months of development.

It's as if people think that I come in from the pub, tell the lovely wife to put her feet up and I'll get her a cup of tea, then type the first old nonsense that comes into my head while the kettle boils. How do people get these ideas?

Shouted from a distance: Where's that tea? I'm dying of thirst here.

Self: Sorry sweetest, just coming.