Hiding below this smug exterior is a turmoil

A turmoil indeed and one I have no control over. It has launched a control over me for years and it now manifests more often than ever before.

Many people watch couples bicker over things from cash to driving and my latest pet bickering took on a new stage on the camino when I had an uncontrollable desire to tell the bus driver how to drive his coach.

It all starts with me and Jackie bickering over which route to take, avoiding traffic lights, going down favourite roads, fuel efficiency, more left turns than right. Its usually "Sat Nag" saying to me why are you going this way or me saying to Jackie, "I thought you would've gone this way", compounded by me saying y"ou can change gear now" as the engine grates on my ears like a snorer on the camino.

I took it to new levels as we left Carrion de Los Condes and my bus driver refused to move out of 3rd gear until he was doing about 70. It didn't help that we were driving through so many small towns or that I was sitting at the front of the bus. My frustration boiled even further when I realised my limited Spanish couldn't say, "you can change gear now, there's not a roundabout in sight."

I resorted to headphones as my inner turmoil had me re-writing Marxist theory on the evolution of the environmentally unfriendly bus driver, the sequel to Zen and the art.....I mean how many gallons of fuel do you consume at that rate.

I was in my spiral and its not a good place to be, yet again helpless to control the disorder and chaos in the world, "Rome is Burning, and so is this driver", I mumbled. I comforted my distressed self that I was about to fly Ryanair out of Santander and perhaps this was me feeling that my colossal burning of fossil fuels was being tipped over the scales by our driver. Not for the first time the wee colonial was trying to say, I need all your resources so sorry pal you cant have those grapes as I need the whole truck load.

I dont know the reason why but I do know its real. This belligerence is an aspect of my autistic self. I cant control that impulse to impose my perceived order on the world and I have to try a bit harder to understand it in my head as its not going away. Its actually got worse in the last few years or perhaps I see it more now.

I remember when I first felt vertigo walking into Santiago in 2007, then again walking into Portomarin in 2011. Now I'm used to it, I think of falling out of a plane and my legs go to jelly. I can watch a movie and suddenly feel myself going. On the plane back I had a window seat, disastrous stuff. I tried the soduko with the Archers, a combo that is like Avocado and Ice Cream. Sadly it didn't work and I started feeling sick. This tightening of every sinew while you mutter words like relax is not a comfortable place to be. You picture happier or sadder images, anything to move the narrative along, evetually you start singing the penny drops as the mushroom rises. A nice apocalyptic image, like a shushie blanket and it stops.

Foolishly, as with dodgy teeth, you check its away and start asking hows my stomach now and is my panic away, ARGGH!, why did you do that , just as the two year old behind me starts up.....

I famously did my 247 times table while getting a vasectomy. Its in these pages somewhere and aptly demonstrates we're in control of our good and bad states of mental contentment but we dont all have the tools all the time to get there.

As I sat in the car yesterday thinking, "just dont say it, just dont say it, just dont say it, just dont say it," I felt pain, anguish, and relief, when I hadn't said a word, until I got out of the car.....

You wouldn't let it lie......

The banana hat will make it

Fat Al had to come off the camino but the great news is the banana hat will make it!

A very gracious Australian has agreed to get it to Santiago by the end of the month.

Buen Camino

Al

I dont have a selfie with the banana hat but these old tit for tats will suffice!

Estella day 5 - 1967

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Estella, the railways and 1967 The Basque railway closed in 1967, butchers everywhere in Europe it seems thought buses were the way forward. All that's left is the station, which now doubles as a bus station, and the Greenway to Vitoria. I remember getting politicians in during my Stocktrade days. I encountered 2 in as many days. I asked Alistair Darling to come in and see our operation while he was still in opposition and a few days later I would give Angela Knight's script writers a lambasting at the inauguration of CREST. I tried to explain to Me Darling that we had been christened the Socialist republic of Stocktrade by our sister firms and it was a name we liked in the city. We reduced the cost for employees to sell their shares from over a £100 to £15 and we got them a better deal. The price like in any market depended on whether you wanted to try to harder. The whole concept of using a stockbroker was exactly that they would earn their money by getting you a price but too many regarded it as a closed shop control of access to the market. They regarded their tarriffs as access controls that prevented (aka protected) the public from sharp practice. It was of course very sharp practice and while the doyen of deregulation is held in high esteem it was also the death knell for many established brokers as the pound shops or execution only brokers entered the fray.  We wanted to target the workers who had been getting shafted by charlatans ripping them off. We were very lucky that we understood that someone working in a bottling plant would want their shares sold at the best price for the lowest commission. We were lucky because those companies had management who agreed, not all did and many  preserved the status quo. Working as staff is something we did together, and this is why I wanted to speak to Mr Darling and also Ms Knight. We thought that workers should own their company and if they couldn't own it all, we wanted to increase their ownership. This wasn't for everyone and certainly not for Me Darling who was quite candid that version of Marxism wasn't part of new labour citing Maxwell's pension collapse. I argued a modest amount of eggs in basket education shouldn't prevent it. I was a tad disappointed as I never got to explain how SAYE and matching shares diluted companies in favour of their employees, whilst often representing less than 0.1% of the equity. What it did mean however was someone working in a bottling plant would get £12,000 after 5 years saving and if the shares underperformance meant they were valueless then it was effectively just an interest only saving scheme.  There was a real jarring moment about that meeting especially as we were in a fast growing period that saw our staff rise five fold from 50 to 250 over the subsequent 3 years. It was the only assistance we ever asked for and it was hitting that this party of the people were against it while seemingly proclaiming to be into Thatcher's version wider share ownership. My interpretation was that they couldn't understand that workers couldn't buy privatisations but they could save £30 a month towards an SAYE. If the government gave that SAYE greater security and privileges there genuinely would've been so e wealth trickle down, to this day I feel I let my generation down by not pushing harder for this. Later that week at the Mansion house in London I attended the inauguration of CREST with industry peers as well as listening to keynote speeches from Eddie George who was excellent and Treasury Minister Angela Knight, whose  script writers were well off message. The UK had far too many bungling mistakes made public by Barings, but far more prevalent than many would believe. If as many kegs went missing as share certificates and dividends breweries would be out of business, and we all know how much some brewery workers drank. Counterparty Risk was a major headache for financial firms and the industry needed to move to real time settlement. CREST replaced the old system of paper handling through to talisman an electronic system run by the London stock exchange. Stock and cash would move as seamlessly as a bus ticket does now with a tap of a card. It put London back ahead in the global security industry and was fantastic news for our large financial institutions. Our place in the world markets was assured and whilst initially we would not deal and settle immediately the infrastructure was there to do just that. What it wasn't good for was the private investor, the very people the scriptwriters concentrated on. I spoke to Ms Knight afterwards and explained her speech was well delivered but her scriptwriters needed sacked. They were miles off the brief. She was somewhat astonished, asked my name and firm. I replied including my offer to discuss broadening SAYE which I said was superb and offered greater opportunity for widening share ownership which I knew was no longer a Marxist theory but a conservative one! Oh how we laugh as we look back. The rich most certainly got richer under Tony Blair and the gap between rich and poor grew after the Marxist Major and never looked back. The film the Big Short for me is the best black comedy ofall time and it is 100% in line with my experience. I'd like to have seen a 24 hour including Alan Greenspan's exuberance. If anything I feel the cutting room floor probably had so many stories left untold. All the time these people have skimmed 1-5% along the way. We've sat by and let it happen and now the poor have kicked back will we have brexit. I think not - I still believe we will join the Euro in 2022 and get welcomed back with tail between legs.  Markets have changed a lot since 1967 just like the railways! Attachments area

Los Arcos day 6 - powering up!

It's not immediately obvious but this wonderful piece of work used to get created down the road in Edinburgh.

I was lucky enough to walk with Jimmy who used to design and build them until the firm was taken over by Siemens and the work moved to Germany.

To see so many wee sub station things on the Camino makes you chuckle. We had award winning firms in these industries and somehow we managed to lose the patents and the manufacturing, oh and the jobs. Not least James's!

I worked in the service industry, and frankly we served very little purpose than our own. Our financial services employ over a million now although that will shrink significantly soon. It all depends what you call financial services but quite simply the industry exists to serve itself. If the monkey with the darts taught us anything it's that financial markets are fairly random, unpredictable and rarely as accurate as the underlying companies strengths or weaknesses would suggest. The industry itself has finally got rid of the army of analysts who looked at these companies and rarely had q common view, cue the darts!

Meantime we have so many people employed to count things up and provide advice, ultimately leading to a product that could be sold in a corner shop. We gave the government a national insurance contribution during our working life and entrusted them to invest it wisely. Ha ha. The monkey with the darts wins again.

Those unfamiliar with said monkey it relates to the Dow Jones index in New York and how the top fund managers used to take on a money who threw darts at the underlying constituents. Yes, you guessed, the monkey often beat wall street's best.

So to cut to the chase, to come clean, our generation that spawned a couple of good groups, that had a lot of fun with music and politicised a generation, (where would CND be without "the penny drops as the mushroom rises" by life support), what have we achieved as the bell rings for retirement.

Hmmm. I'm not sure we've done anything but allow the clock to be turned back on our watch. We've passed the off comment, written the odd letter, tweeted the tweet tweet and done fuck all compared to the generation before.

We've even taken ourselves out of Europe although on that one I stand by my 2022 prediction that we will be in Europe and we will adopt the Euro as our currency.

Having a separate currency only leads to instability as small companies rarely hedge their overseas transactions.

We used to design and sell these all around the world, wake up we can't just tell the world we gave them the Beatles or the Stones, the Only Ones or Oasis, Orange Juice or Marmalade, the Monochrome Set or Magazine, Aztec Camera or Adam Ant, we need to do more.

So I'm off on Camino in Spain and getting pissed. I think we need to take our national drinks and develop more.

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