There’s been so much happening in London that I must take a break from Kyrgyzstan. I was doing the drying up in the kitchen and for the first time spotted Eddie Redmayne.
Either he has changed a lot since he was nine or he started showing his trademark self-deprecation early in this self-portrait. He is in the bottom row, fourth from the right.
It has been warm in London recently reminding me of that great scorcher in 1976 when I elected to work in the air conditioned comfort of Czarnikow’s office in Mark Lane. It also reminds me of childhood summers when junket and stewed fruit were a staple. Raspberries, strawberries, black currants, gooseberries, nectarines and peaches (from the kitchen garden) put in appearances with cream from the dairy. At supper there was jellied consommé.
To some extent nothing has changed. I was treated to jellied crab consommé for lunch earlier this week at a club. But in another way everything has changed. At school there was salad with tinned Russian salad, tinned beetroot and hard boiled eggs. The equivalent today is couscous, grilled haloumi, Greek salad, tuna and cannelloni bean salad, tomato basil and mozzarella, smoothies and slushies. And the coolest thing in London is the shady avenues of plane trees.
The heat in the political kitchen is high too. Unfortunately if you listen to the wireless or television the interviewees are mostly UK politicians and it is easy to be swayed by the best performer and to be distracted from the facts. Yesterday Keir Starmer (Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the EU) and Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) were on TV. Starmer presents Labour’s muddled position on Brexit as well as he can but Gove, with just as tricky a brief, is a better performer.
My take on where we are is that the EU will not accept the Brexit plan that is proposed by the UK. At that point Mrs May will resign and the course of history will be decided by the leader chosen to succeed her. I expect European stock markets to reflect the likely damage to economic growth and prosperity and I imagine US markets will suffer from Trump’s misguided trade policies. Unfortunately emerging markets will not be immune to this downturn.
There must be some long faces at Sotheby’s; their Old Masters sale last week raised a total of just £4.6 million. Old Masters as a genre are cheap but that is ridiculous. Things went better on Thursday at Christie’s where their equivalent totted up £31 million. On the other hand I did enjoy the Sotheby’s party.
(I read this figure on the Sotheby’s website. It has now been corrected to £42.6 million.)
By now you are probably feeling angry or depressed about my downbeat political and economic prognostications and it’s Monday morning – so why not feel good instead?