Filled with memories

Holidays are on!  First stop is a reunion this weekend with colleagues from the school in Hong Kong where my wife was teaching when I met her in the mid-nineties.  Despite the rather dismissive tone of this earlier post about the whole reunion thing, as the weekend draws nearer I’m actually getting a bit giddy thinking about it.

I won’t be blogging, but this blog will still be updating.  I’ve decided to cobble together a variety of photos and video clips that wouldn’t fit anywhere and have post-dated them to appear every day or so in a light’s-on-nobody’s-home-but-the-zombie kind of way.

So if you leave a comment yet see no reply, you know why.

Today’s photo: A gift we received shortly before leaving Hong Kong.

Memories of Hong Kong on a trip to London

One of the things I used to love about living in Hong Kong took place only about 100 or so metres above it.

Back in the day, the city’s airport used to be a short taxi ride from downtown. The largest planes in the sky would fly west over the waters of Victoria Harbour, turn a half-circle to head east, then descend low through the teeming warren of streets of the Kowloon Peninsula, nearly scraping the six-storey buildings as they screamed past.

On the final approach, after the landing gear had been lowered, the plane would make a quick slicing arc to the right as it passed a beacon, before finally landing on a strip of landfill in the bay. Though there had been fatal accidents over the years, it was a tribute to piloting skills and maybe a bit of sheer dumb luck that in all the time Kai Tak airport was in operation, not one plane landed on top of all those people living just across the road from the start of the runway.

I was sitting in a window seat my first flight into Hong Kong in January, 1994. I’d been told about the landing, that I was in for something spectactular, but I never expected to see what I did. Through the evening darkness, I looked out the window at the buildings slipping past and suddenly in a flash appeared a figure seated at a kitchen table, the glowing blue light from a television set reflected off a pair of glasses like two flickering orbs. It was there and gone in an instant. By the time I tried to see something similar on the next apartment, we were past them and on the way down. I used to love that ride, and on every flight in hoped the winds were right so that would be the approach we’d take.

Why did I think of this on the way into London?

Because once past the motorway wasteland and into the outskirts, sitting on the bus from Stansted airport on the way to Golders Green tube stop I became fascinated with the scenes laid before my window as we drove by. I saw the silhouette of a man wearing a turban, a bedroom plastered with magazine posters, a dining room with an old-fashioned chandelier, a man getting up off the sofa, a shadow creep across a ceiling, curtains ranging from bedsheets to lace.

Whether it was some form of drive-by voyeurism or mere curiosity, I found myself compelled to keep looking, craning my neck to get the shortest of glimpses, somehow trying to peer beyond the mundane to discover something special, discern from that glimpse what sort of life they must live.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Buy, sell or hold in a market stacked against you

Own shares? Wish you didn’t?

There’s something unseemly about talking about money. These days people are more likely to spread details of their sex lives around the globe than talk honestly about how they feel about personal investing, savings or money itself. But like sex, some seem to need it more than others, it’s hard for most to get by without it, and a little more from time to time never hurt.

But with all the news about a panic interest-rate cut following stock market dives around the world on fears of a U.S. recession, because Joe Average American can’t pay his mortgage, because unscrupulous bankers lent money they never had to people who didn’t read the fine print on mortgages whose payments were set to explode months later and doom them to default, mortgages which were then bundled together and sold to suckers investors half-way around the world who also never bothered to read the fine print and didn’t know what they were buying into anyway…

…when you factor in sky-high oil prices coupled with a possible collapse of the shrinking U.S. dollar, it helps to step back, cut through the crap and gain a little perspective on what’s only the latest in a long line of financial crises born of greed and swindle.

One of the things I used to do as a way to make a living was cram myself into a van along with a driver, soundman, cameraman and technician, spin through the green hillsides of the Hong Kong New Territories, past stinky tofu and joss stick hawkers and through a long, dirty tunnel into Asia’s Manhattan to interview stock brokers and company analysts on daily matters financial.

Then I’d go back through the tunnel to the bureau, cut the best two quotes, lay a bunch of wallpaper footage of stock market traders talking on the phone, people buying things, and of course lots of money – people counting out money, bits of change falling out of pockets… well, not quite that bad….

…but anyway I’d put together a little package, gussy it up with little tidbits of what was happening in the markets around Asia and the world, add a few items of business news, go get slapped on so much make-up I’d put a corpse to shame, plunk myself in front of the camera and then try to look and sound like I knew what I was talking about. Sometimes, I even succeeded. It was a great job, paid the rent and then some on a Hong Kong shoebox apartment, and I even got to learn a thing or two.

Like for instance:

• Nothing personal if that’s your line of work, but they’re all full of shit. Next time you see Gordon Gotbucks up there on CNBC Squawkbox blabbering on about where the Hang Seng is going to trend for the next fortnight or next year, throw a brick at it. Can ol’ Gordo predict the next September 11? The 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan? A civil war in China? These things have and will move markets up or down, but the thing is, nobody can predict the news.
• All they want is your money. Because at the end of the day, whether you’re buying, selling or watching it melt before your eyes, you will always pay a fee to whoever is doing the buying and selling. With online trading the fees have been cut to a fraction of what they used to be, but there are more playing the game. It always will be the oil that greases the skids and keeps them fat and happy on their yachts. Sure, you will always be given the line that stocks outperform over the long term, but I have yet to see an investment fund brochure that didn’t have a caveat at the bottom in fine print: past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
• The game is stacked against you. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I do know there are honest people in the business, but the fact of the matter is that insider trading is what makes the markets go ’round. I had colleagues ask me to give them hot stock tips. When I said I didn’t have any, they didn’t believe me. What? Aren’t you getting any inside dope from them? One of those colleagues, btw, is now anchoring on a well-known financial news channel.
• If you’re reading this on a computer, you’re already rich, you’re just trained to think you’re not. The finance industry has a vested interest in making sure you know that someone else has more money than you do, you should envy him for it, and adjust your portfolio accordingly. Step back. If your pile is small, count your blessings. If it’s large, look where you could spread it around to do some good. Just remember to keep receipts to deduct those donations at tax time.

Oh, and a precious few tips gleaned from some of the sharks:

1. Never catch a falling knife. Translation: never buy shares in a company whose share price is falling.

2. Sell everything when you start to hear cab drivers and fitness instructors giving investment advice.

3. Buy the hell out of the market when there’s blood on the streets.

Only three? Hell, two of them contradict each other. Seriously, I know very little about this. I was only a business reporter for four years. That’s where the cynicism comes from, I guess.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::