Day 27: Procedure

Today was a difficult day at work but also highlighted the absurdities that “protective” laws can lead to.  I had to go to London to fire 2 employees. 

The first one was let go under a redundancy programme (in short the company is not doing well and so we have to reduce certain positions), the legal process requires the company to go through a number of consultation meetings before actually making the person redundant.  This was the second meeting and after asking her if she agreed to have a “without prejudice” conversation we were able to rapidly agree on an amicable parting of ways. Her only question was: Why did you not offer me this at our first meeting 2 weeks ago?

The second was more dramatic.  A consultant got himself into dire financial straights complicated by a difficult family situation.  The emotional and financial stress led him to using the company credit card for his personal expenses to the point where he had a debt of close to £10,000 on top of all his other debts to banks and credit firms.  The company warned him and tried to give him some time to pay off the credit card but his predicament was not resolvable in the short term. So the company decided to call him into a disciplinary hearing (which I had to do since I am Managing Director of Europe). The problem is that as the facts were clear and recognised there was no other possibility than to find him guilty of gross misconduct which meant that he would be fired with immediate effect and with no compensation.  During the meeting he did not dispute the facts he just asked if he could have some time (6 weeks) to finish the project he was working on and hopefully find another job. However, because the problem was a gross misconduct and procedures are quite inflexible we had no latitude to give him more time (even though it would have been in our project’s best interest). The worst thing is that he would have been much better off if he had resigned a week ago, which he could have been told to do unofficially but nobody knew enough or cared enough to do so.  So the “machine” of rules and procedures which are there to protect people end up crushing this particular individual.

How do you protect individuals and at the same time allow for the fact that every case is different ? I can imagine that issues like this and worse come up everyday in judicial courts. Maybe laws should be indicative rather than absolute?  And most importantly sentencing should only be limited in its severity not in its humanity. 

Day 26: Home Sweet Home

Now I know the answer to my question from Day 21.  The best part of being a tourist is coming home to you own house and bed.  However good was your holiday, whatever the sights you saw, meals you ate, buildings you visited or beaches you basked on ... there is nothing that rivals that pleasure of coming home after an eventful trip (something always goes wrong at some point) and sitting down to your own desk (to write your blog) before going to sleep in your own bed (with an exactly right mattress).  Even if you spent the day on a Roman beach in 29° heat and you come home to a cold, dark and wet Parisian night, you still have a special feeling when you open the door to your home.

Lunch on a Roman Beach:

• Cozze griliate
• Fritura mista
• Vino bianco di Lazio
• Espresso
• Ferrarelle

Day 25: Rules

Having seen all the key sites of Rome, today we decided to go further afield.  We went to visit Hadrian's Villa which is about 40 mins east of Rome.  It's quite an amazing site as the remains are still impressive and as an added bonus there are relatively few tourists.  Having seen the ruins I thought it would be interesting to read Marguerite Yourcenar's  Les Mémoires d'Hadrien which was on sale at the tourist shop.  This goes against 2 firm rules that I have: 

1. never buying anything in a gift shop
2. only buy books on kindle

Having broken both of these firm rules in one go I wonder if that is bad (breaking your own rules) or good (showing flexibility).  On balance I'll go with positive.  I think it is probably dangerous for any rule to be absolute (except taking cold showers).  This is probably why I will not be following through with yesterday's religious conversion.  Most (if not all) Religions tend to include unbreakable rules which bear no exceptions, this can easily lead to intransigence and intolerance of any other way.  Ultimately it is always good to try a different way of doing things at least once. Isn't that the essence of humanity ?  Contrary to animals, we do not have to be ruled by atavism or the genetic coding which has trained us to be a certain way, we can do things a different way.  Then we can choose which is the best approach for the next time.

Thus, having tested a different approach I can safely say that I will not become a regular gift shop spender and that I will be returning to my Kindle policy (If only because I have no shelf space left).

Day 24: Conversion?

Today we visited St Peter's Cathedral.  First we climbed 552 steps to the top.  It's funny how with all these monuments the first instinct is always to climb to the top, even though its actually the worst place to see the building itself from.  Then we proceeded to visit the church itself.     As I was walking around the different areas of what is after all one of the great religious centres of the world my phone rang and I saw it was an unknown German number.  As it happens this was a key person (let's call him Pierre) in a large french multinational.  We have been talking to them for a few weeks with the expectation that at some point in the future we might be able to sell them a project, we felt we were still in the early stages of our discussions.  Pierre, told me that things were now progressing quickly and he needed  a price that same day for a Phase 1 project as they were going to make a decision in a few days.  I have to say I was completely surprised by this "miraculous" outcome.  If this is what happens when I go to St Peter's maybe I should consider moving my office to the Vatican (or I could go to Notre Dame and see what happens there).  It's a good thing my non-faith is extremely firm, or I might soon be confessing my sins and going to mass every Sunday.  It's extraordinary how the human mind is programmed to try to "explain" events rather than accept them as random and arbitrary.  Many founding human concepts (Religion, Science, Justice, Fairness, Truth, Love) are based on the idea that there is a cause and effect. Natural or Supernatural humans want to feel there is a reason why things happen.  Accepting the total randomness of things is not an acceptable choice.

Having said that maybe I should try a visit to the Wailing wall and Mecca this year in order to cement my position as an outstanding Consulting Managing Director.

I finally lost a round of the Hunger Game this evening!  All for an extra Bruschetta with  Tomatoes, Garlic and Olives ... It was worth it!

Day 23: Hunger Game

One of the points of travelling with your children is to educate and expand their experiences.  To this end Fianna has organised (with great foresight) visits of key sites (Coliseum, Vatican, St Peter's).  Today we "enjoyed" the Vatican.  After being herded around a series of rooms and corridors for an hour and half we were finally squeezed into the Sistine Chapel, where we shared an ecstatic 10 mins with 100 other tourists and got a crick in the neck in the process.  The whole experience was unforgettable (NB: Fianna reads this blog).

For my part I have decided to educate the Boys on the more prosaic aspects of travelling i.e. the cost of feeding four people (of which two teenage boys) in restaurants every day.  To this end borrowing from the great Domesco© game (invented by my father) we have been playing the Hunger Game© the principles are as follows:  Whenever we have a meal at a restaurant we calculate who's meal was the most expensive and who's was the least.  The winner is the least expensive meal and the loser is the most expensive meal.  At the next meal the previous loser must ensure that his or her meal is the least expensive and the previous winner gets a spending bonus of the difference between the loser and the winners meals.  The learning opportunities are numerous (aside from providing an instant topic of conversation every time we sit down to a meal):

• Cost consciousness: attention to all items in the menu (drinks, starters, desserts, wine, ...)
• Advocacy: try to convince others to have desserts or wine
• Value for money: how big will this dish be for this cost?
• Sharing:  offering to share a dish to reduce your costs
• Mathematics: calculation of the different shares of the meals
• Strategy: thinking ahead of which meals you want to win or lose and by how much
• Health: eating and drinking less (water is excluded)
• Competitive spirit: who will win or lose

I am happy to report that of the three meals we have had so far I have not lost yet.  Fianna, Theo and Eliot have each lost once. (In addition my wallet is definitely winning).  

I know you are all keen to add this game to your future travel experiences and soon you will be able to thanks to the Smartphone App that Theo will be releasing in the near future.

Day 22: Roma

Beautiful sunny day in Rome.  Our hosts have a stunning old apartment 5 mins from the Coliseum with 5m ceilings and a 40m2 terrace.  At least we are living with Romans even if we are tourists.  Our first day included visits of the Forum and the Coliseum, and as I was walking through them I was wondering why they were ruins.  After all, these monuments were in one of the biggest and richest cities in the world.  You would expect that if something was destroyed by an event (fire, invasion, earthquake) the city government would not just leave it to decay but would rebuild either a similar or newer building on the same site (as happened in NY after the Twin Towers were destroyed).  Thanks to some quick research by Theo (involving  a smartphone and Google) it seems that the main reason is economic.  After losing its empire (somewhere between 500 and 900 AD) Rome's population went from 250,000 (which was huge at the time) down to 120,000.  That meant that the Roman government no longer had the funds to maintain its non essential buildings and slowly let them fall into disrepair and ruin.

I was wondering if there could be any equivalent phenomenon in our times (for any future web historians I am writing this in 2018 AD).  And I guess the best parallel would be what happened to Detroit. In the 1950s Detroit was the capital of the Automotive Empire, over the next 50 years it lost its place to barbarian hordes (Japanese and German mainly).  This led to a population decline from 1.5 million to 750,000 which has meant that whole areas of the city and its suburbs have fallen into disuse and ruin. 

I'm not convinced that Detroit's boarded up house will attract as many tourists as the Coliseum does, but who knows...

Lunch (restaurant):

• Bruschetta
• Spaghetti a la putenesca
• Gelato banana cinamon e pera
• Vino bianco

Dinner (home made):

• Crostatina di spinaci 
• Linguine al pesto
• Straccetti di manzo
• Fior di lato gelato
• San pelegrino

Day 21: Tourist

Two days  of fasting in a row.  That's it for this week. I can enjoy (from a culinary point of view) my time in the Eternal City.  Yes, I'm off to Rome this evening, with Fianna and the boys, for  5 days.  Of course I have been there many times including a few years ago at the same friend's quite stunning apartment with a big roof terrace close to the Coliseum.  I am looking forward to it and yet at the same time I wonder why.  If you look at it dispassionately surely there are better and more cost effective ways to achieve the same results?  So here are some alternative suggestions:

1. Experience a different culture - Just take the metro to the 13th Arrondissement (Equivalent to China Town for London or New York readers)
2. Try different foods - There is a very good pizza place just around the corner from my house
3. Disconnect from work - Stay home and switch off your smartphone and computer
4. Exposure to a different language - Take a Velib to the Eiffel Tower and try talking in French to anyone there
5. Photos of amazing monuments - Take a selfie and use Instagram to change your background to St Peter's
6. Reconnect with friends - Use Skype (with the camera on!)
7. New and exciting shopping -  You can find everything on Amazon
8. Visit museums - Surely you haven't finished visiting the Louvres
9. Escape from the daily grind - Get a Netflix subscription

I suspect that not everyone is persuaded by my alternatives and probably that is a good thing.  After all isn't the essence of tourism about interacting with strangers and the more we do so the more we accept our differences and our diversity.  (I trust that you have worked out by now that in addition to the themes of Food, Saving the Environment and Social Justice the purpose of this Blog is to establish World Peace - 344 Days left)  

Day 20: Bla Bla Car

Thanks to one of the French national pastimes (see my blog from yesterday) I had my first Bla Bla Car experience today.  Bla Bla Car is a cross between Uber and hitchhiking.  It can only be used for long trips and the cost is equivalent to a share of the actual petrol and tolls that were paid on the trip.  The owner/driver of the car does not get any remuneration he or she is just sharing the cost.  Thus a 350km trip from Paris to Rennes cost me 30€. 

Bla Bla Car is a great democratisation tool.  Suddenly everybody  (most people anyway) can afford to have a Chauffeur Driven ride.  It is no longer a privilege of the rich!  I was driven to Rennes in a Black Mercedes just like any plutocrat would expect. It is true that instead of a chauffeur in uniform and cap my driver was a tattooed Mongolian with his 8.5 month pregnant wife as a co-pilot.  Also I was sharing the back seat with a Chinese woman.  But these are mere quibbles.  The fact remains that we now all have access to what use to be reserved for the few.

And here we see technology at its best.  Instead of removing human contact, Bla Bla Car crams 3 or 4 strangers in a fast moving metal box, leaving them nothing else to do but talk and generally exchange views.  What can be more conducive to building a common humanity?  I can imagine a joke along the lines of : a Jew, a Hindu, a Muslim and an Evangelist get into a Bla Bla Car.  On arrival at their destination ... they all 4 get out.  (If you didn't laugh its probably that you didn't read it with the right tone)

Fasting Day Today.

Advance warning, for my numerous readers trying to get points by fasting on the same days as me, I will also be fasting tomorrow instead of Wednesday.

Day 19: Strike

Although this blog is written in English it is published in France. For my international audience to realise what that means, today is a strike day.  The blog will be limited to "Service Minimum".

Breakfast:

• Baguettes avec confitures de cassis et de figues

Lunch:

• Salade verte

Dinner: (Pique -nique avenue de Breteuil)

• Baguette aux courges
• Lapin au chorizo
• Taboulé
• Tarte aux épinards
• Quiche lorraine
• Jambon Quintoa
• Tomate cerise
• Tarte aux pommes
• Vin blanc Viognier
• Badoit

Normal blogging operations resume on Monday

Day 18: Selfies

It was an unseasonably hot day today over 28° C in April. It felt like the middle of summer  (we need more converts to the ECS*). As Fianna was engaged in self improvement activities all day I decided to make my shelving problems worse by buy myself some new BDs.  As the nearest BD store is about 3 kms away and it was such a beautiful day I thought I would also test the new Velibs which are much too slowly being installed in Paris.  The experience was a disaster.  It took me 45 mins to be able to activate my card and then I had to go to 7 different stations to finally find a Velib that worked.  To be fair the bike is actually much better than the old one, but that is all the more frustrating if its practically impossible to get hold of one.  I think this fiasco may come back to haunt the Anne Hidalgo the (present Mayor of Paris).

Having walked home, read my new BDs and squeezed them into the appropriate shelves I was ready to go for an afternoon walk with Fianna, who was now available.  We strolled down to the Place the la Concorde where Fianna treated me to a Passion Fruit Sorbet (not a fasting today as you can see) and then went into the Tuileries Gardens to sit on the public chairs and watch the ducks around the fountains.  As this is Paris, aside from the ducks there were also quite a few tourists milling around.

What is the key activity of a tourist in Paris ? I'll give you one guess...Taking photos. Correct (all those who got it right get an extra half point in the competition).  The sad thing is that taking photos in the 21st century has come to mean something completely different.  Before smartphones, when people went on holiday, they took photos of a variety of things that they wanted to remember such as  monuments, views, sunsets, local market stalls, mountains, oceans, buildings, statues etc.  Now, as demonstrated by all these tourists, photos are always of yourself with (if you are lucky) vaguely discernible in the background a famous landmark.  Photos are now taken not for remembering or for sharing your experience with your friends of colleagues.  Photos are now excuses to do self portraits (selfies) which will then be posted to facebook or instagram with a label underneath showing where it was taken.  What is the point ? Why do you need to go to Paris, Venice, New York or the Great Pyramid to take a picture of yourself posing ?  What do people do with all these identical pictures of themselves obscuring beautiful things? I feel like asking them "Do you realise your head is completely blocking the Pyramid/Coliseum/Eiffel Tower".  Maybe they don't know that Smartphones have a camera on both sides. I suggest that from now on, when you see someone taking a selfie please go up to them and show them that they can point the Phone away from themselves and towards the actual view thye want to photograph thus ensuring that it will occupy the full picture. (2 points for every selfie that you manage to avert).


*ECS: Environmental Cold Showers (see Day 2 blog) 

Day 17: Communication

Vegetarian Day (for my mother) :

    Bread and cheese (mimolette and bleu) for lunch

    Risotto aux carottes & à la crème avec salade verte  for dinner

    1 square of 90% Chocolate to finish off.


I recently blogged about the danger of dehumanisation in day to day interactions.  I have to say that I am confirmed in my concern when I see how its affecting me professionally.  As a consulting company that spends most of its time at client sites we are a very dislocated organisation.  Most of our communication is through conference calls (skype usually) but with the camera off .  Again in the name of efficiency and cost reduction we are dehumanising ourselves to the pint we are all just voices. We have too many calls (its much easier to set up a call than to have a meeting) and when we are on calls most of us are probably switching off or doing something else most of the time.  The professional skype etiquette is to turn off your camera and put yourself on mute when you are not speaking.  So if there are 15 to 20 of us on a call which is often the case I would say that a lot of us are tuning out most of the time.  The worst is when the call leader, often the company President, after having gone through a 15 minute harangue on how things need to change then asks if there are any comment or questions.... And there is a long, long, very long silence.  No one has anything to say and for some reason silence on a conference call feels even more uncomfortable than in a meeting also it tends to last much longer.

So my advice to professional communication in the Internet age:

1. Have physical meetings at least 2x a month
2. Limit your telephone conversations to 2 people (you + 1)
3. If you must have a conference call require everyone to switch on their cameras
4. If you have a conference call with too many people to have cameras ... Don't do it!

Day 16: Shelf Space

It's a catastrophe in the making... I'm running out of space on the shelves that house my BD (graphic novels for non french speakers) collection.  When I finally finished organising them (around 1,500 albums) I thought I had a few years of me before the shelving was full but it seems I underestimated my Monthly BD Purchasing Rate (MBDPR). We like acronyms in the consulting world.  So what are my options? 

1. Reduce my MBDPR (that's going to be difficult  and any way I would have to go down to zero which is not an option)
2. Add an extra shelf above the sofa (That would give me room for another 60, the only downside being that my guest might occasionally get knocked out if getting up too abruptly from the sofa)
3. Get rid of the ones I don't re-read or don't really like. (That would feel like a betrayal, as if I was disowning my former self)
4. Buy another apartment in the building to put my BD (I don't consider that to be a financially viable option at present)
5. Distribute my BD to my children as an early inheritance (They don't have permanent accommodation yet and, anyway, I don't believe in inheritance.  More on this subject in a future blog)
6. Sneak some of them onto other shelving that we have in the flat (I've actually started doing that discreetly, unbeknown to Fianna, oups I forgot she reads this blog)
7. Replace individual albums by complete sets which take up less space (I have actually started implementing that solution, but it seems costly and wasteful to buy albums I already have in a different format and what do I do with the old ones? Actually come to think of it I have a big family with plenty of birthdays so a solution comes to mind...)

Solution 7 seems ideal.  So, dear readers, if you have any preferences now's the time to put in your requests.  You will be receiving, rectangular A4 sized packages for all future Birthdays, Xmases, Bar/Bat mitzvahs, Communions, Easters, Anniversaries, Dinner parties, Weddings, Birth announcements and Graduations.

Another fasting day. Only 98 more to go.

Day 15: Germany

I spent the day in Germany today so I'll spare you my list of meals. (I moved my 2nd fasting day to tomorrow as I had lunch with a client today). 

I spent most of the day in a salami factory,  the most fascinating thing is watching the robots which pick and place salami at different stages of the process at incredible speed (400 salamis are picked and placed in their packaging per minute!)

After this meeting which was close to Nuremberg I drove to Frankfurt where I have another client meeting tomorrow morning.  It was a 2 and half hour drive through the countryside.  The reason I mention this is that I was stunned by the number of solar panels and wind farms that I noticed.  In some villages up to a third of house had solar panels on their roofs and there was an impressive number of fields which had become solar instead of agricultural lands.  On the one hand I applaud this embrace of renewable energy (mainly due to the German Government's decision to stop all nuclear energy by 2021) on the other hand I have to say that it makes for quite ugly country-side and villages.

In parallel to our technical efforts in efficient solar panels I think we need to start working on the aesthetics.  We need solar panels that look like roof tiles, bricks, or sunflowers (for fields).

Day 14: Business Travel

Although I am lucky enough to be able to spend quite a bit of time working from home I occasionally have to get out of Paris to see clients. Thus today:

• Taxify (Uber competitor without the nasty culture) to the Station
• TGV to Rennes
• Taxi to the client site
• Taxi back to the station
• TGV back to Paris
• Electric scooter from the station to home (to pick up my glasses which I had forgotten)
• Taxify to Roissy Airport
• Find out my 9PM flight to Munich has been cancelled (my contribution to the fight for better pay of Air France flight attendants)
• Book a new flight to Nuremberg for the next morning (hopefully this one will leave)
• Taxi back home
• Book Taxi for next morning 6:30AM 

On my trip back my Taxi driver was a friendly Moroccan woman.  My general attitude to taxis has been that the sooner they are replaced by self driving cars the better.  But I have to say that when you come across warm, friendly drivers it makes you think that maybe by eliminating all these simple day to day human interactions we might be losing something.  It's easy to imagine that in the world of tomorrow (not that far away) our human contact will be limited to our family, friends and colleagues.  No more taxi drivers, waiters, shop assistants, doctors (absolutely), flight attendants (hurrah), bus drivers, train conductors (double hurrah), museum guides, garage attendants, etc..  at least the delivery agents will probably be still there.

Be that as it may I'm sure that we may not lose more then we realise if we give in to the relentless logic of the economic argument that machines are cheaper and more efficient than people.

Day 13: Entrepreneur

Today was a Fasting day: Water, coffee, coffee, badoit, looking wistfully at the left over paté from yesterday, more water and evening tea.

It was a busy and slightly stressful day (due to work) so I think I may have forgotten to take enough water (or possibly I should have looked longer at the paté).

As I mentioned earlier I have sold my petrol Scooter and so I'm now looking into an electric replacements and it's disappointing.  At the moment my changes are between the extortionately expensive BMW and some quite cheap Chinese scooters which seem a bit flimsy. 

There is clearly a gap in the market.  I was reading that there are over 150,000 scooters and motorcycles zipping around Paris every day. It must be the most scooterised city in the world (outside China and India).  So where is the Tesla of the Electric Scooter market?   

As some of you I nearly took up a position as Executive Director of a European electric scooter company.  And I have to say I'm still a little sorry that it didn't work out. Having been a consultant for practically all of my career I liked the idea of actually producing a physical object (especially something that I actually like to use and that makes me feel good).

In order to maintain your high level of interest and to give you chance to participate, I am making this blog interactive.  Those of you who feel I should remain in my consulting role vote SAFE those of you who feel I should become a scooter entrepreneur vote EXCITING.

Once all votes are in I will decide how to count them and what the results mean.  Any attempt to influence the vote or dissuade people from voting will be blamed on foreign agents and citizens of nowhere.

Day 12: Nutella

On Friday I had a "go" (this is a client signing a project)  after an Analysis (pre-project work) which I have been doing for 7 weeks. This means that I had a totally relaxed weekend (with no presentations to prepare)  for the first time in 4 weeks. I enjoyed it.  Aside from the Football match yesterday I spent Sunday relaxing in the morning (after my cold shower, just in case you forgot), then went for a walk in the Marais and a light lunch Chez Marianne before spending the afternoon making pleasant conversation at home with my friend M. from LA.  The day then finished with a very good meal in an Israeli restaurant and a hunt for real Parisian Chocolate Mousse which we finally located in a little brasserie next to Opéra.  Fianna and I shared a crème brulée and to my grave disappointment X (who shall remain nameless to spare her reputation) had a crèpe with Nutella.  No more on this subject, its just a good thing I'm not one of these French food snobs!

Its Sunday night so I'm allowing myself a semi-blog instead of a full one.

Day 11: Football

Thanks to our American friends from LA which I talked about earlier we went to see a football match today.  The match was Paris FC against Stade Reims (these are second division clubs).  I bet 20€ on Paris FC to score the first goal and win the match... The final score was 3-0 for Stade Reims, obviously sports betting is not one of my skills.  I have to say that I'm quite pleased with the result, betting can be an addictive and ruinous  habit, so it's better to lose on the rare times you do bet thus ensuring you do not get hooked.

I can't say the match itself  that good, and actually it interesting to see how big a difference there is between the first and second divisions. These are still professional players and they are playing just one level below the best players in the world and yet the difference in level of play is massive.

As Reims rapidly took the lead and my likelihood of winning my bet became increasingly low, I lost interest in the game and instead observed my surroundings.  We were in quite big stadium (20,000 seats) Which was over 3/4 empty.  We were in the Paris fans area which occupied probably less than a quarter of the stadium on the other side opposite there was a small group of Reims fans, a few hundred at most.

As soon as the match started, a group of Paris Fans not far way from us took up a drum beat and chanting, which they kept up throughout the match.  They were standing in tee shirts or even bare chested (although it was not the warmest of days) and punctuated their songs and chants with raised fists or salutes.  There was no sense of menace or violence but I did reflect that it was strange to see these predominantly white fans cheering a team of predominantly black players using gestures which could have easily been part of a fascist rally.

As I mentioned earlier there was no danger in any way in spite of the clearly partisan booing and cheering.  But even that gave way to general cheering for the goals.  Surprisingly the Paris fans cheered just as much as the Reims group for the goals even though these were all going past their goal keeper.

An interesting and pleasant afternoon was had by all, however I am not expecting this to become a regular saturday event.

Day 10: Scooter

Today: Joues de lottes à la crème et au Viognier accompagnées de tagliatelle

I finally sold my last ever petrol scooter today.  I think I can safely say that 13th April 2018 will be the last day that I ever owned a vehicle with an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE).  From now on an vehicle I own will be powered by muscle or electricity.  Actually I can't wait for ICEs to be completely banned.  Can you imagine what a difference it would make to our lives?

• No more pollution in our cities
• No more constant noise as we just hear an occasional woosh
• More leisurely travel time (On long trips you stop more often on to charge your electric car)
• Healthier eating habits as you stop for a 1 hr meal to charge your car instead of eating a sandwich on the road.
• No need to master the stick shift (electric vehicles do not have gears)
• Less gas stations as you can charge your vehicle at home or on small discrete public chargers
• 20% of global warming is due to ICEs.  So between that and the cold showers we would be well on our way to achieving the COP21 pollution reduction targets

Now I need to to think about which electric scooter I will buy.  Isn't that an ideal situation, I get to buy myself something new and save the planet at the same time! Guilt free buying.  Its a bit like eating after a fasting day.

So if any of you still have a facebook account (which would be surprising by now) lets get the NICE (No Internal Combustion Engines)  movement up and running with an aim of a total ban on all petrol based vehicles by 2022.

Day 9: My Job

We had some American friends over from Los Angeles this evening, that's how far Americans will come to sample a home made dinner:

  Curry d'empereur aux carottes au lait de coco accompagné de riz

  Variétés de fromages avec baguette aux courges

I'm a management consultant, what does that mean is the first question that people ask me when I tell them what I do.  Thinking about it, I realise that the first thing it means is that for the foreseeable future I am safe from being replaced by an AI system.  I believe that the more understandable and clear your job is the easier it is to replace it by a machine. That goes from the taxi driver who will be replaced by the self-driving car to the doctor who will never be as objective or have as much knowledge as an AI system.

But a management consultant, what on earth do they do?  Ask you for your watch to tell you the time, as the old joke goes.  Actually that is quite true, that's exactly what we do.  The real value of a consultant is not the expert knowledge and sophisticated models that he or she may have acquired over time, it is the capacity to ask the simple question : why do you do what you do? And 1 in 10 times the answer may be "I don't know" or "because we have always done it that way" and that's when your work starts.

Effectively the management consultant is the Leon Trotsky of the business world. We are there to question the way things are being done and propose doing things differently, in other words we are proponents of the Permanent Revolution. Ultimately a consultant can always find something to change, because there is never an end state.  As a consultant, we are there to make sure change happens and possibly it might make things better (or possibly not).

You can see how this is an ideal job for me, if I have a choice between doing things the usual way or a different way I'll always choose the second.

Viva la revolucione

Day 8: Your (?) Teenager

By coincidence both my Dad (in his Blog) and my Wife (in an e-mail) brought to my attention the issue of teenage control.  Most people agree that children under 7 need to be relatively closely monitored and controlled by their parents if only for their own safety. Conversely most people (except for Jewish mothers) agree that adults over 27 do not need (to put it mildly) supervision from their parents.

So the question becomes at what point during that 20 year gap should we switch our relationship with our children from control freak to nonchalant interest:

• Mathematically that would come to 17 (27+7 / 2)  
• Legally between 16 and 21 depending on the country and the subject
• Religiously would indicate 12-13 depending on the religion
• Physically between 15 and 19 according to your gender
• Educationally between 16 and 26 depending on your appetite for diplomas
• Financially never too soon!

Actually the more you try to maintain that control the more you are indicating to your child that either you do no believe in their abilities or that you do not trust them.  That message will probably result in one of two outcomes:

1. Your teenager will rebel against the arbitrary totalitarian authority (Star Wars Approach)
2. Your teenager will remain dependent and incapable (Forrest Gump Approach)

Neither of these 2 films (both of them good by the way) should be your target for your child.

A better choice of model film would be Starbucks or Boyhood.  But I'm open to other suggestions.

Long day today it's 23:50 so if I want to publish on the right day I need to cut short here.  More on this subject in a future post.  

This was a fasting day by the way.  So no food, no ingredients just calorie free liquids 

Day 7: Competition

Today's supper: Osso Bucco with Wild Mushrooms in Garlic and Tomato sauce

I would like to congratulate Julian Farod on having correctly identified the western quote.  All the more impressive as I happen to know he is not of the western generation (other than vicariously through his Dad). He gets 5 bonus points in the great blogging competition.

Ah yes, you thought you were just passing an idle moment by reading this blog, I'm sorry but in this highly competitive dog eat dog world all activities need to be productive.

So how does one get points (apart from bonuses):

  2 points:  Posting a comment

  1 point:    Read the blog everyday for 1 week (You will be tested on your knowledge of the
                  week's posts)

  1 point:    If you refer to my blog on facebook (just before closing your account)
                  + 5 bonus points for actually closing your account

  1 point:   Taking a 5 minute cold shower (You need to record yourself swearing and screaming
                 during the shower to validate your point)

  2 points: Fasting on the same day as me

  1 point:   Giving me a blogging subject which I then use

  1 point:   Subscribing to my blog

  1 point:   Being the first person to read my blog in a new country (I get geographical statistics but
                  you need to claim your country)

  2 points:  Referring to my blog in your blog (other wise known as stereo-blogging)

  1/2 point: Sending me an encouraging e-mail   

All point scoring and judging is carried out by me in totally arbitrary fashion.  Any complaints and appeals will be thoroughly investigated before being ignored.

The winner will be announced on 3rd of April 2019.

The live ranking table is here: Blog competition

In order to get you all into the spirit of the competition here is a 3 point (easy) bonus question:

Who and in which book said "My dear, I don't give a damn"

Day 6: facebook

Today was a fasting day: Water, Coffee, Water, Coffee, Tea, Diet Coke (sorry), Water, Rooibos, Tomato Juice, More water!

Some people (they know who they are) have accused me of hypocrisy under the dubious pretext that I have been less than flattering about facebook and social media generally and yet here I am writing a blog.  I'm afraid I have to respectfully (only because children may be reading this) disagree.

Let us do an objective comparison of the 2 mediums:

1. Posting:  Posting to facebook is ridiculously easy. You see something on the internet, you take a photo, someone sends you a video, you see something somewhere else on facebook, you see its someone's birthday and hey presto a facebook has been created.  A scientific study (carried out by Cambridge Analytica) of all facebook posts in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Papua New Guinea showed that 97.3% of Facebook items required less than 2 mins of brain activity to be posted. Compare that to a blog entry which requires extensive work.  You need to find a subject, do some research, polish your writing, decide on the appropriate length, hook your audience form the start and ensure they stay with you to the end. One is a bag of sweets (candy for non-english speakers) and the other is a three course meal.
2. Reading: facebook is all about instant gratification, no focus is needed, your feed constantly bombards you with notifications and reminders of the fascinating activities of your "friends".  And it changes all the time there is always something "new" on facebook, ideal for our a time where government policy is communicated by tweet!  On the other hand a blog is static it changes at best once a day sometimes less, you have to go to it, its an effort to find it and then it requires actual reading, possibly even thinking depending on the subject of the day.
3. Validation: facebook thrives on neediness.  You must have lots of friends to ensure that your activity is "liked" and conversely that there is sufficient activity in your feed to keep you interested. If you blog you have little feedback other than a (too) rare comment, there is no "liking" involved. Same thing for the reader you may occasionally share a post with a friend but that is on a one to one basis with no real feedback mechanism on how it was received.  One medium is the equivalent of going to the mall with your friends and the other is curling up at home with a good book in front of the fire. 

I trust that this has clarified any misconceptions.  Dear readers you may safely keep reading in the knowledge that your attention and data will not be sold to dodgy politicans and you will not be targeted by russian trolls.

Cpociba

Day 5: Homeless

Today I go up later than I like to on a Sunday.  I woke up at 7:30 but then fell back to sleep around 9 until 10 am!  I finally arose to a beautiful sunny day in Paris.  As I was drying myself after my cold shower (see this is the subliminal messaging I was talking about in my first blog) I was looking at the empty offices of the building on the other side of the street.

Those of you who have known me for a long time may remember that 15 years ago I helped a homeless woman get off the street and back into employment merely by providing her with shelter in the quite small attic room which we had in our building at the time.  (Don't worry this is not a self congratulatory piece about what a wonderful person I am).  I remember that she told me that just having a warm private space for the night without having to fear being robbed or molested, made all the difference to her state of mind and capacity to find work.

After some quick research, there are at least 5,000 homeless people in Paris. At the same time there is 18 million m2 of office space which by definition is empty every night and on weekends (see the link to my first paragraph?).  That's 3,600 m2 per homeless person even if 1% of that space was made available to homeless people at night and on the weekends that would be a generous 36m2 per person.  Having a roof over your head, access to a toilet and running water makes a huge difference to your physical state, to your hygiene and to your sense of belonging to humanity.  Is this such a crazy idea, I don't think so. Are there some practical difficulties, probably but none of them are insurmountable. Surely in the present environment where capitalism and business are seen as contributing to injustice in society this would be an ideal (and useful) PR exercise.  I suggest setting up the Bureau du Coeur (non French readers can look up Resto du Coeur an effort to bring surplus restaurant food to the homeless).

No menu today, however here is what we bought in our local "food stree" (the list is in french as we are talking about food):

Poissonnerie:

• Fillets de turbot
• Tarama maison
• Pave de saumon sauvage

Boucher:

• Osso buco
• Paté de lapin maison
• Saucisson aux truffes
• Chorizo piquant
• Jambon "kintao"

Fromager:

• Figou (chevre avec une figue à l l'interieur)
• Roquefort
• Tome de chevre au orties
• Gouda au truffes
• Mimolette
• Brie au poivre
• Crottin fermier
• Ravioles (fresh from the river - private joke for my children)

I think Fianna bought some vegetables and salad but I have no room left!

Day 4: Western

I had a nice WhatsApp conversation with my daughter S-sh- (I'm using code to protect her privacy).  She is in Colombia studying shamanic use of fire (probably a slight simplification).

I was then going to do my whole blog about her, but decided to keep that for the 12 of June (hopefully I'll still be blogging).

I went to see a new western tonight "Hostiles".  One of these modern slow western where the implacable ennemies (a soldier and an indian chief) ending up understanding each other.  The slowness and the photography of their long trek from New Mexico to Montana is what makes the film.  It's nice to see that my favourite movie genre hasn't quite become part of history yet. Surely, it should be clear to all that westerns have it all:

• stunning photography: they are set in amazing empty landscapes; 
• hightened tension: it's always life and death;
• great music: who can beat Ennio Morriccone 
• ethical dilemas: who is the goody and who is the baddy; 
• philosophical questions: nature versus civilisation; 
• great dialogue:  "I saw three of these dusters a short time ago. They were waiting for a train. Inside the dusters there were three men. Inside the men there were three bullets."  (Bonus points to the first one who can tell me the film)
• romance: ok I'll admit they fall a bit short there.

For those of you who are not yet aficionados, but are keen to fill this aching gap in your lives here is my top ten westerns of all time. Some people may disagree just like some people may vote for Brexit, take hot showers or eat chocolate that is less than 95% ...errare humanun est.

1. Once upon a time in the west - Sergio Leone - 1968
2. Unforgiven - Clint Eastwood - 1992
3. My name is nobody - Tonino Valerii - 1973
4. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - George Roy Hill -1969
5. The magnificent seven - John Sturges - 1960
6. High Noon - Fred Zinnemann - 1952
7. The wild bunch - Sam Peckinpah - 1969
8. The man who shot Liberty Valance - John Ford - 1962
9. Django unchained - Quentin Tarantino - 2012
10. The good, the bad and the ugly - Segio Leone - 1966

Day 3: Long Life

Today's menus:

Breakfast: Coffee

Lunch: Badoit

Dinner: Tea

Yes that's right, today was a starving day.  In addition to the obvious benefit of losing weight, it seems that a scientific study has shown that if white mice are put on an alternative day fasting diet they live 30% longer than control mice (which I assume are fed everyday as opposed to no days).  So my initial life plan was to live to 100 but now I can add 30 years to that target (for those of you who might be inclined to point out that I'm not a white mouse, I say stop quibbling).

So this will bring me to 2092 (that's right you can now work out how old I am).  So overall is this a good thing or a bad thing ?

On the positive side 

1. I get to spend an extra 30 years with my wife (you can see I know she reads this blog)
2. I get to eat the 13,765 meals I will have skipped by doing this silly diet 
3. Thanks to global warming my Paris apartment will have a sea view
4. I get to read my PG Wodehouse book collection another 15 times
5. I will witness the UK rejoining the EU after they realise Brexit was a mistake

On the negative side, sorry I mean less positive (nothing is negative these days) 

1. I will be taking an extra 10,950 cold showers (see my blog from yesterday)
2. Lack of resources will have resulted in meat being banned, which means that my 13,765 meals will consist of rice and beans
3. Due to everyone (including my friend Roger) taking cold showers my Paris apartment will not have a sea view
4. I will run out of space for my bandes déssinées collection
5. I will witness the UK leaving the EU a second time after they realise their return was a mistake

Have a good weekend

Day 2: Environmental Cold Showers

Today was an eating day. Hooray! 

Breakfast: Coffee and toast with blackcurrant jam

Lunch: Rabbit paté (from my favourite butcher) and cheese

Dinner: Daddy's rice dish (secret recipe) and green salad

Definetely worth fasting for!

On a different subject, some of you may know that for the last couple of months I have been taking 5 minute cold showers every morning.   Relax, I am not going to go into a lengthy lecture about  how healthy it is for your body and mind to embrace CST (cold shower therapy).

But this morning I woke up around 5:34 am and made a quick calculation:

1) A 5 min hot shower uses around 35 litres of water at 40° C.

2) It takes 1.2 kwh of energy to heat 35 litres water from 13° to 40°

3) So if you take a hot shower everyday you are using 400kwh per year

4) Thus, if 1 billion people stopped taking hot showers we would save the equivalent energy (and global warming effect) of 100 million cars (thats the equivalent of all the cars in Germany, France and Spain)

No pressure but if you switched your morning shower from hot to cold you would be saving our planet and ensuring that I can still go skiing for the next 30 years. 

All of you who are still on facebook (shame on you) I urge you to spread the word:

No hot showers in 2019

Day 1: Fasting & Blogging

Today I decided to go on a radical diet again.  2 days fasting a week for at least 1 year. That should allow me to reduce my weight by 26Kg thus getting back the Adonis-like figure I had 26 years ago (some poetic licence is allowed in the Blogosphere).

In addition to fasting I will also be blogging every day (not just on the fasting days).  I expect a predominant theme will be food, however, I may allow myself an occasional digression onto other subjects such as: the weather, brexit, sport, health, work, children, parents, litterature, cinema, art (that would be surprising) and love.  On the other hand, I can safely say that I will not be writing about my dreams or nightmares (no criticism of other blogs intended ;-).

As I expect to rapidly get to facebook levels of readership I shall be predominantly using English (sorry for my North American readers, but  you will have to use google translate for any difficult words).

Privacy warning: If you follow this blog your data will be collected and sold to the highest bidder.  Also I reserve the right to use subliminal messaging to influence you in favour of the abolition of nation-states, organised religion, wars, land-mines, inheritance and social-media.