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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