Bang Bang

There are two things that stop me blowing my brains out: I gave my godson my gun and I’m so curious to know what happens next in the great page-turner which is the book of life.

I sense that North Korea is a slowly developing plot line. Catalonia has suddenly swung into view. Harvey Weinstein is already yesterday’s news. Most important is the fate of the UK and EU after an acrimonious divorce. Couples divorcing often behave irrationally, a trait that enriches their legal representatives and impoverishes them. We are see this playing out now in the Brexit negotiations. The pro-Brexit camp say that Europe has more to lose than UK so a deal will be struck. Their fallback is that if there is no deal the UK will prosper under WTO rules. The problem will be if the EU acts illogically against its own best interest which is what seems to be unfolding.

The game of life seems to me to be binary; either despair and take to the bottle, melancholia and Prozac in a cocktail of self-destruction; or wake up every day with an avaricious appetite for news and wonder what’s going to happen next. My bipolar personality allows me to swing from one to the other.

Did I say that I went to the cinema with Harvey Weinstein? I did and he didn’t lay a finger on me. It was the London premiere of The Artist (that black and white, silent movie released in 2011) and he stood on stage flanked by the cast to introduce the film. It would have been nice if they had stayed to watch it with us but they scooted off to The Ivy or somewhere similar (the Grope-o Club?) for refreshment. Poor old Harvey. He behaved as movie moguls were expected to behave and nobody told him that the rules had changed.

A few City folk fell into the same error. Do you remember the retired Cazenove executive who used to come up for lunch with his old colleagues in M&A and then get in a bit of insider trading before bedtime? Corporate governance and in particular the Takeover Panel are something the City of London can now be proud of. I cannot say the same of some other jurisdictions.

https://youtu.be/T5Xl0Qry-hA