Goose, John Sergeant, Barack Obama, Hackney Council and the International Banking Crisis

PARSLEY’S COMMLOCK Retail News : Whole Frozen Goose at Lidl, £19.99, Duck £5.99 Apologies to vegetarians for this, but whilst turkey or chicken are traditional for Christmas in the UK, Germans prefer goose. As a result, German supermarket Lidl is offering it right now. A few Christmas’s ago my Mum made goose. It was absolutely enormous and required periodic removal from the oven it barely fitted in, to be basted. The Lidl ones are a slightly more practical size. Goose has a more delicate taste than chicken. Duck is a much smaller bird but still associated with luxury and still having a special taste. Lidl also have other birds normally only found in posh restaurants, but the one and only time I had quail it tasted exactly like chicken, so didn’t seem to be worth the bother. Media News : John Sergeant leaves Strictly Come Dancing When I worked in News John Sergeant was famous for a rather barbed insult against Robin Oakley who once got stuck for words (“It’s a mistake we’ve all nearly made”). He followed this up with his rather unfunny news satire show on ITV. His career in the TV spotlight this week exploded, rivalling the over-reaction to the Brand/Russell debacle. Nevertheless it’s very nice to know that public voting confounded expert judges. When judging is only by experts there is no room for anything different or new. Instead quality is homogenised into one particular view of it. Kate Bush would never have won Pop Idol with ‘Wuthering Heights’. Well, not unless she could do a cover of it singing it soulfully, with a slow synthi-beat backing. Political News : Barack Obama elected president Meant to say this before, but kept running out of space: Does Barack Obama’s victory mean that race is no longer an issue? Well unfortunately the fact that we’re all emotional about it basically says it still is an issue. Worse still, just as Thatcher was no feminist and Blair was all mouth and no trousers (except for his war), Obama is well placed for us to say what a disappointment the first black President was. Still, here’s wishing him the best of British luck. Council News : Hackney Council auto-threatens legal action but doesn’t refund over-payment I was fascinated to find that Hackney Council had decided not to refund me more than two hundred pounds that they owed because they wanted me to ask first to make sure that they had the right address for me. It was good that they were so careful to avoid making a mistake. Unfortunately the fact that they had twice threatened me with legal action without any such checking rather gave away what their priorities were. Economics News : Accountants, salesmen and an international banking crisis Despite my youthful predisposition to despise salespeople I ended up working with them in my first job. Some of them were heroes actually. Some of them were ‘characters’. After establishing our American company in the UK they were succeeded by a more cerebral generation. One guy in marketing realised that by re-jigging the data in our reporting he could make everyone look more successful without actually changing anything. He was regarded as a hero by the organisation. Meanwhile ‘cost control’ was the order of the day, and senior posts in the company were taken by ‘accountant’-types. These guys said that everything that cost you money but didn’t obviously make any was bad. So if you wanted to do work for anything, you had to show how it was a step towards earning money. I sometimes wondered if these people could justify themselves going to the toilet. Usually you had to lie or misrepresent an opportunity for the accountants to go with it. What choice did you have? If you said we might not sell something they would say that you were fired. Since my economics teacher told me that they had stopped teaching economics history as part of the ‘A’ level examination, it seemed increasingly likely that we would be getting a chance to repeat the mistakes of the past. There was some logic that anyone who could find an accounting ‘trick’ to make companies look good (a.k.a. increased lending) without actually changing anything was going to be a hero in the banking world. Equally, when the accountants took a look it seemed reasonable to expect that they would suggest that we stop doing anything that couldn’t explicitly be shown to be producing plenty of money. So they’d withdraw overdrafts from companies that needed them. My other economics teacher lived through the 30’s recession. He said they just tried to stay in their jobs, and be grateful. It beats unemployment. parsley@gardenrecords.com [www.gardenrecords.com]