Batteries are the pain of modern life as well as making modern life work. Without the battery many of the functions we take for granted in the rich world would not be possible so we should embrace them. What we shouldn’t do is get upset when a new piece of electrical equipment turns up and the battery needs charging. We shouldn’t but then again we are human so… CAN’T THIS THING CHARGE ANY FASTER? to misquote Lady Gaga.
So autumn is really truly upon us. Today we expect things to be golden in the autumn but it wasn’t always the case as many of the ‘autumnal’ trees and shrubs have been imported from around the world. Damn foreigners coming over here and making our autumns just that little bit more interesting. Two of the images here were captured by by iPhone and two were captured by my Canon G1x…I’m not sure you can tell the difference…something to think about.
As British Summer Time is replaced by GMT so the nights draw in and another project starts to come to an end. The final photography sessions for Playground of the Midlands has taken place and now I have to start the mind numbing process of pulling the book together. I have decided that I will write an essay about my life long connection with the Charnwood area which might take some time as inspiration is in short supply at the moment.
Once this has been completing I’m going to start to lay out the 2016 yearbook. I did this last year and it worked out quite well giving me plenty of time to choose what images I wanted to include and still publish the book around late spring 2017. Such is life.
The realisation that you can only move forward through time rather than backwards and when you do try to relive things from the past never really works has given me certain amount of clarity. Move on don’t keep doing the same thing in the hope that you might find something new. So I shall.
Because I’m that sort of person I watch the late night political programme This Week – I really shouldn’t but is an insomniac to do? In truth the programme is just a little past its best and something new should be found to replace it. That being said it does give the pompous and arrogant their chance to expose themselves to live TV. Last night it was the turn of Baron Jones of Birmingham and he didn’t fail. To follow his argument we should let ‘Businessmen’ get on with things and not ask where the millions of public money that has been given to them has gone to ‘until the right time’. Actually I am not sure whether he actually said ‘the right time’ but in his world it would seem that the ‘Men’ at the top all know what they are doing and they shouldn’t have to answer to the people’s representatives. He then really dug a very deep hole for himself when he said that this was one the faults with ‘democracy’. At this even Michael Portillo fell very silent, the silence that the bar room boar just can’t pick up and so he continued to suggest that the ‘Men’ knew best about business.
The irony of all this was that Lord Jones was banging on about the latest economic figures which suggest that things weren’t as bad as the Remain side said they would be so we should all just shut up and not point out all the inconsistencies with Brexit. Rejoice the ‘Men’ at the top know what they are doing and we little people should be happy with that. He dismissed any problems with Brexit as ‘bumps in the road’. Yes the Men could make secret deals with Nissen which shouldn’t be questioned and this was a very good thing. I just wonder what he will be saying in two years time when things may not be so rosy as we try and get ourselves out of the mess we have gotten into.
I hope and pray that there isn’t a big mess and that my fears are wide of the mark, after all this is wealth prospects of the whole nation we are talking about, but I don’t think that there is anything wrong in ensuring the ‘Men’ try to work this whole thing out are going in the right direction for Britain rather than Nissen. Only time will tell rather than one quarters of economic estimates.
Always check your equipment the night before has been a mantra that I have lived by for many years. I haven’t always achieved this and have paid the price from time to time. So last night I checked the battery life indicator on my camera – Fully Charged. This morning before breakfast I did the same – same result. So the battery must have been fully charged I assumed and went out to capture some images. Sod’s law is a fine thing until it intervenes which is exactly what happened this morning because as soon as I had captured the first image the battery indicator started to flash indicating the battery was about empty. Fortunately the battery indicator would seem to be as unreliable at showing an empty battery as full and I was able to continue to use the camera all day with just a few minor adjustments to help preserve the battery as much as possible. Batteries huh – I’m sure Eadweard Muybridge never had this problems when he took some of the first images of Yosemite Park years before the much more famous Ansel Adams.
Not too long ago I thought that Fall was yet another Americanism that has entered the English english. However, if Wiki is to be believed on this matter the term Fall is actually an English term and the word Autumn is actually French. Anyway whichever way you cut it Autumn has finally fallen…even if the temperature isn’t autumnal in the slightest.
“It’s not Romania or Estonia who are leaving. It’s a big contributor so we have a lot of unanswered questions – and no good answers.” – Indrek Tarand
This would be music to the ears of all those Brexiters who think that Britain leaving the EU is going to be plain sailing. My previous post on Brexit gives some numbers behind this thought (I was going to write delusion but I am trying to be as evenhanded as I can – given that I think Brexit is a bad move for Britain). Another argument that is often put out there is that the German car industry won’t allow the German government and therefore the EU to be too punitive when negotiating some form of settlement with Britain. The figures do seem to back this up as the German trade surplus with Britain is the second largest (€50.9 billion) which is a lot of money to put at risk and equates to somewhere in the region of 750,000 jobs – which is a lot. However, when you move away from the headlines and start to think a little about German products that sell in the UK they are hardly ever products that are price sensitive – the car industry is a case in point. Nobody considers buying a Mercedes car because of the cut price. Instead it is bought because it can be seen as the epitome of German engineering excellence (whether that is justified or not is another matter). This is the same with BMW, VW Audi etc. So if German cars are bought for their quality rather than their price then perhaps an extra £1000 per car might not be such a big problem. ( I have no idea what any tariff might be as the final cost of a car has little relationship to the import cost. Also it should be remembered that the cost of a new car is probably more affected by currency swings than tariffs and as we have just lost 20% of the value of the pound thanks to Brexit then this is likely to be a bigger handbrake than any tariff.) This may explain why the German car industry is lying low at the moment on the issue of Brexit. It might also be that they don’t have the clout that the Brexiters claim. Whatever the case to assume that there will be any pressure to be applied here might be misplaced.
This, however, may not be the case when it comes to wine.
Currently Britain is the second largest wine import market in the world with around 14% of the world imports..
The largest importers of wine to the UK is France and Italy which control over 60% of the market.
This means that any change in the import duties placed on imports of wine into the UK could have an adverse effect on their sales as unlike German manufacturing they are not competing on quality but rather price. This, of course, is an oversimplified view taken by someone who only buys a bottle of wine occasionally but it does highlight a problem that both France and Italy have. Whilst you can only buy Champagne from France you can buy a chardonnay from many countries, especially Australia and New Zealand who have already said that they are more than happy to enter into trade talks with the UK and would hope for import duties to be reduced on their products at the expense of wines coming from the EU.
Of course the French could export their wine to other countries in the EU. However there is one very big snag with that.The UK is by far the largest importer of wine importer by value in the EU and so trying to find new markets for this wine could prove difficult. The reason why this is perhaps far more important than the German car makers is that whilst the Germans are far more prudent in showing their displeasure with their Government the French agriculture industry doesn’t suffer from such reluctance and you can bet that once the true cost of Brexit starts to hit the French farmers then they are going to ensure that their government ameliorates this disadvantage during any negotiations.
This is where the now almost certainly defunct CETA agreement might start to play a part. The UK government wants to sign CETA with the Canadians and I am sure that Liam Fox will already have been round to the Canadian High Commissioner to reassure him of this. If this the case then perhaps it can form the basis of trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand. If this were to happen then suddenly whole new trade block might start to form, perhaps we might call it a Commonwealth of like minded nations. Now imagine what might happen if you could get India to join such a Commonwealth how much more powerful it would become?
Of course this is a flight of fantasy at the moment, something that the Leave campaign should know all about, but it does reinforce the Estonian MEP’s quote at the start. The EU need Britain and Britain needs the EU and provided we both enter into the negotiations with this reality at the forefront there is so much common ground that we should be able to find a deal that even the Wallonians might agree to…
