Cocktails and Records

I know that Oscar Wilde once made some comment along the lines of ‘The most frightening sentence in the world is the one that begins with “I had a really interesting dream last night”‘, but forgive me because I’m going to indulge myself…

I had spent a good hour or two last night combing the internet for some background information on various local candidates and wasn’t getting anywhere. Incomplete CVs, unexplained party politics and general spin prevailed. I went to bed disgruntled and my sub-conscious quickly took over: it was now Thursday morning and time to vote.

So I rolled up at the local polling station only to discover that all of our usual candidates had been mysteriously de-selected, disqualified or disgraced.

‘Don’t worry’ said the chipper election official to the growing crowd of disgruntled voters, ‘Rod Stewart has volunteered to be your MP instead.’

Murmurs ran through the crowd. We turned to each other and shrugged. Why not? Perhaps he’d get The Faces together again for a jam at the local pub? None of the other parties could do that.

Sadly I woke up before I could find out whether The Faces did play the Standard. And it was with a certain degree of resignation that I dragged myself off to the polling booth this morning to vote for the usual suspects.

Happy Election Day everyone.

I like a good statistic, I do, so I was delighted when a kind friend forwarded me a UBS report entitled Prices and Earnings: A Comparison of Purchasing Power Around the Globe 2009.

This report is not the fluffy ‘you can buy a decent martini after 10pm’ malarky from Monocle’s best cities ever article that I recently wrote about. No, it is the hard stuff you need to look at before you really open that second office in Sofia or decide whether you should take that transfer to Oslo.

So here for my fellow fact fans, are my selected highlights:

1. If you want cold, hard cash move to Switzerland. Employees in Zurich and Geneva have the highest net earnings in the world. Mind you, they also have the highest living expenses as well so it all evens out in the end I suppose.
2. You could proabably already guess that tax is high in Scandanavia, but did you know that it’s equally high in Ljubljana? In Slovenia you pay 39% of your gross income in tax, compared to 22% in London, 23% in Sydney, 26% in Paris and 28% in New York.
3. If you prefer a nice slacker job with minimal hours, then go to Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen and Nicosia where employees only work around 1,600 hours per year, compared to the 1,747 you would work in Sydney, 1,762 in London, 1,928 in LA, 2,295 in Hong Kong or 2,373 in Cairo.
4. For the good folk at UBS who put this report together, a ‘complete ladies’ outfit consists of  a suit, blazer, summer dress, pantyhose and a pair of shoes and a men’s wardrobe comprises a suit, blazer, shirt, jeans, socks and shoes. If you want to get these items cheap, then you need to move to Kuala Lumpur, Manilla or Johannesburg. Don’t go to Tokyo or Vienna.
5. If you don’t want to pay your PA much,  Manila is the place for you. Instead of the average $US 38,000 you’d have to shell out in Western Europe, you only need to pay them $US 2,400 in the Philippines. Similarly, if you want a cook, you’ll get one cheap in Jakarta ($US 4,300) or Lima ($US 7,500).
6. An average wage earner in Zurich or New York can afford to buy an iPod nano after only nine hours work, and in London, 11 hours. Workers in Mumbai, however, need roughly the equivalent of a month’s salary.
7. More importantly, the working time required to buy 1kg of rice is 8 in London, 9 in Zurich,  11 in LA, 38 in Manilla, 49 in Nairobi, 58 in Delhi and 65 in Budapest.

Verdict:  Perhaps we should all go and visit Oxfam’s website.

There is a lot of negativity around at the moment. The media, blogs, politicians, people in everyday conversations – we’ve all been beating ourselves up about the economic crisis, global warming, the death of Jade Goody, bad mannered children, fat people, knife crime, housing slumps, binge drinking, the sectarian versus the secular, the end of civilisation as we know it. If you think too much about it, you feel like throwing yourself off a cliff, or at the very least going and watching a few hours of I love Lucy repeats.

I often wonder if things are really that bad. Human life has always been miserable, there has long been a divide between rich and poor, the people in power have always abused it, lazy and selfish people are not a new phenomenon. There was no golden age. Yes, industrialisation and late capitalism have changed our society, but has human nature itself really changed? Probably not.

What has definitely changed us though is communication. We have access to more information than we could ever possibly want and that I for one, could ever possibly process. It might well be this information saturation that is making us so much unhappier than we think we were in the past. The more instant information channels that there are, the more black and white the world grows – there is no room for nuance on quick and easy current affairs programmes, news sites that are designed to maximise comments and eyeballs, and 24 hour rolling news. Sometimes I suspect that it is this that feeds our seemingly innate desire for black and white, for wrong and right, for easy solutions.

We have just been warned about expected protests across the City next week where I work (see here). I’ve spent the morning re-arranging our planned events. And quite frankly, it all scares me.

There is a difference between pathetic shouting at the TV about Germaine Greer working for the man and wanting to ‘burn a banker’. The global economy is in crisis (again – we have been here before) but deliberately targeting someone because they’re wearing a suit jacket isn’t going to ease the situation. It’s just a black and white animal response that in the end is going to make us even more depressed about the state of our society and what we’ve become.

What might have helped would have been us all taking an interest in the economy and its current excesses five years ago. But the times were good then, weren’t they, and we couldn’t be bothered.

In the continuing exciting tale of my adventures in ye olde London town, today I found myself at a rather posh luncheon (note that’s luncheon, not lunch, thank you very much) at the Guildhall in the City of London.

We ate in the Crypt which was lovely and positively oozing history. The Guildhall’s East Crypt is apparently one of the oldest and largest of its kind in England, dating back to Edward the Confessor in 1042. Like the Tudor Queen’s House at the Tower of London, it is one of the few places in the old city to have survived both the Great Fire and World War II.

Appropriately, the company was similarly ancient. My colleague and I were surrounded by the kind of people who, delightful as they were with their tales of second homes in France, long-lost favourite Latin Masters and ‘fondness for buying boats’, will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

However, I am pleased to say that some of our nearest diners did actually inspire me. Before a speech from the Lord Mayor we were instructed to toast the Queen (reverential looks, raising of glasses and courteous sips), The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall (markedly less enthusiastic clinking of glasses and supping) and ‘the Other Members of the Royal Family’ (outright snorting and smirking, necking down of fine wine).

So there might be hope for the City after all.

This morning a new magazine arrived in the work post. On a black background its cover depicted a clenched hand with a defiantly upright middle finger. The words next to it read ‘No surrender: Standing up to the NGOs’.*

This delightful offering comes from a magazine called Communicate which is clearly targeting the corporate PR market. God knows how it arrived on my desk.

The feature story inside advises people (probably like that delightful spokesperson from Tesco I mentioned earlier in the week) how to deal with tiresome Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and their annoying criticism of your company’s record on the environment, human rights, child labour etc. In the article we’re lucky enough to get an insight into the lives of the poor PR team at E.ON (owners of the infamous Kingsnorth power station in Kent) who have to deal with crazy people such as the RSPB, the Women’s Institute, Oxfam, Tearfund, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund and their concerns about global warming.

The writer advises that companies in this position should try talking (gasp!) to NGOs about their concerns, suggesting that it is better to engage with your critics then to ignore them. He also points out that it is often better for senior management to do this because surprisingly it seems, NGOs ‘understand corporate hierarchy and won’t be fobbed off by a PR department’.

Good to see that Communications magazine is really helping to bridge the gap between corporates and NGOs with that ever so subtle cover then.

* Sadly, try as I might I can’t find an image of the cover – it has to be seen to be believed.