Life After Life: Kate Atkinson

This wonderful novel was recommended to me by a friend so, as well as enjoying the story, I enjoyed imagining why she had so loved it. Because it is inventive and about so many things. I am late to this novel: it is already serialised on BBC2. But, in case you missed it, its narrative device is the many lives and stories of Ursula Todd. Whilst she is always born on 11 February 1910 at Fox Corner somewhere in south Bucks, she leads many different lives and has thus to die on many occasions.: Life after Life.

At the heart of the novel is the idea of progress towards a goal: her life is teleological. Her first few lives are about getting out of the womb alive since, during birth, the umbilical cord gets trapped around her neck, and, because of the heavy snow outside, neither Dr Fellowes, nor Mrs Haddock, the midwife, is able, in Ursula’s early incarnations, to attend the birth. Ursula is, however, finally born alive and begins further lives after lives. A life that ends too soon, drowning, for example, on a Cornish beach, precedes a life where a hobby painter from Birmingham, seeing her distress, rescues her from the sea.

And, Ursula begins to learn from her mistakes, In one very dismal life, she is raped by, Howard, one of her brother’s friends, becomes pregnant and has a backstreet abortion that engenders feeling of shame and failure that blight her life leading her into an abusive relationship with the dreadful Derek Oliphant who, after she flees him, tracks her down and bludgeons her to death, in front of her brother Teddy, in her aunt Izzie’s house, with her aunt’s heavy onyx ashtray. In a subsequent life, she sees off Howard and thus avoids Oliphant and that particularly brutal death.

What does her life progress to? While her early lives are about saving herself, learning to avoid the hazards that have seen off earlier versions of her, her later lives become about saving others, such as pushing their servant down the stairs so she doesn’t go to London for Armistice celebrations because in an earlier life she had caught Spanish Flu, brought it back to Fox Corner and caused the death of beloved family members. 

After learning how to save herself and then her loved ones from adversity, she progresses to trying to prevent World War II by killing Hitler before he comes to power. In this, she is partly trying to save her beloved younger brother Teddy who dies over Germany piloting a Halifax bomber, and whose death prompts her mother’s suicide. She is, mostly though, trying to spare England, and Europe, from the suffering of war. The longest and most compelling life is the one Ursula leads as an air raid warden, bearing witness to the appalling death, suffering and destruction of the Blitz. 

As the Author’s Notes confirm, if the book is about anything, it is about World War II and England’s place in it. Kate Atkinson grew up in the aftermath of the war born to a father whose own mother had, on the eve of war, persuaded him to leave the Merchant Navy and return to the mines. Growing up in the austere aftermath of war, she is divided about how she feels about it. One the one hand, she felt that the war years had been England at its best and so felt cheated to have missed it. On the other hand, she was grateful to have avoided war’s horror and wondered about “What if?” it might have been avoided.

What were my reflections? On the question of sex (as in identity, not the activity), I felt that male violence looms large. It obviously looms largest in war. But the life where she is raped by Howard and ends up with Oliphant is particularly bleak. The description of the rape is not too harrowing. Poor innocent Ursula doesn’t really know what is happening and is detached. But what follows becomes darker and darker culminating in the painful twist that she is brutally murdered just when you think she has escaped. And, earlier in her life, there is the paedophile who sexually assaults and then murders poor Nancy Shawcross. The treatment of this male violence was descriptive not judgmental. It was a thing that Ursula had to navigate and, where she could, pre-empt. 

With this, I thought the treatment of male and female characters was different. For me, besides Ursula, the two richest characters are her mother, Sylvie, and paternal aunt, Izzie. Both have attractive and unattractive traits. By contrast, the men tended to be good or bad. Her father Hugh is a saint, as too are her brothers Teddy and Jimmy. Her older brother, Maurice, by contrast, is simply dreadful along with the appalling Derek Oliphant. I felt I noticed most clearly the differing depth of the male and female characters when Ursula is staying at Hitler’s Berghof, Eva Braun gets more attention from the author, is more richly described and has more depth than Hitler, of whom the portrayal is rather flat, and what is portrayed is a boring windbag.

On the question of reincarnation, I was struck, rather against my will, by the video game dimension of Ursula’s repeated incarnations, and incarnations where she brings with her some of the learning of earlier lives. Ursula is the avatar in a multi-level video game. Every time she dies, she is respawned wiser. Each time she respawns she knows what she needs to do to get to the next level. As the novel nears the end, she knows clearly what she has to do. She has to get to Germany so that she can befriend Eva Braun, while she is still a shopgirl, so she is Eva’s friend when Hitler falls in love with her, allowing her to become part of his circle so that, with her father’s old service issue revolver, she can kill Hitler before he comes to power and destroys Europe.

On the topic of war in Europe, Atkinson does show empathy for German suffering, whether deserved or not. In one life, Ursula finds herself in Berlin as the war is ending, the widow of a German, with a young German daughter, awaiting the awful fate of the arrival of the Red Army. It is the only life that ends in suicide. Ursula takes her own life and that of her child in order to spare themselves what the Russians will bring.

All this said, I found it a hopeful story. It is about design, purpose and progress. While there is hardship and suffering, it is not nihilistic. I was left wondering what was Ursula’s best life and the author lets us know that we have not reached the end of Ursula’s story. In the penultimate chapter, during a VE celebration, Ursula, by chance in a pub in London, meets her beloved Teddy who, it turns out, did not die when his plane was hit. But there had still been a war. So had she managed to kill Hitler. And then the final chapter takes us back to 11 February 1910 when, presumably, Ursula is born again.

Is there a broader message? I was left reminded that, in life, you cannot move forward without leaving something behind. To be changed and transformed is not to be the person that you were before. Death and rebirth, albeit more metaphorical than actual, happens through our lives.

Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait; Victor Sebestyen

I drew three linked conclusions from this. First, despite being an intimate portrait, I found little redeeming about him. In fact, I started believing him a bad man and ended believing him a very bad man. Second, the Revolution felt pretty accidental. In particular, I had not really thought through how unsuitable, in some ways, was Russia for communist revolution. Nor had I grasped how close run was the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917. Third, but for Lenin, we might have dodged the dreadful historical accident of the Russian Revolution. I confess to being a relative novice in the history of the Russian Revolution and, of course, one book does not change that.

So, let me start with Lenin the man. The biography was not a Tom Bower hatchet job. His biographer did find some good characteristics but, rather like Hitler’s affection for animals, they felt pretty thin. Lenin was broadly kind to the women in his life: his mother, his sisters, his wife (generally) and his mistress. Lenin did not, however, feel like a new man. His women seemed to have doted on him so his kindness towards them looks even less consolation for his general awfulness.

Akin to his general kindness to his womenfolk was that Lenin was not personally cruel. Nor did he have physical courage. In fact, he disarmingly admits to a relative physical cowardice. He was not at all a physical man, a man of action: rather a man of words and ideas. There was no sadism in his instructions to his subordinates. I was not sure this helped much. The calm dispassion of his abuse of human lives was rather frightening.

Lenin was also prodigiously hard-working, committed and selfless in pursuit of his cause. In the abstract, these are all great virtues: the bases of great art, the building of civilisations or the creation of great businesses. Tragically, his extraordinary self-discipline and energy were consecrated to the Revolution and the destruction that led and followed.

So, let us list the bad things. He was an egomaniac and an extraordinarily difficult man. His will to dominate left those around him to choose either subordination or alienation. He did not seek peers: only followers or enemies. His language was extreme and violent in everything he said. One of his gambits to dominate others was to out threaten them, out intimidate them.

And, of course, he followed through. His language was intemperate and he put it into practice. His development of the idea of Terror and its execution of it make him an appalling man. As noted, he exterminated opponents and recalcitrant social groups with calm and deliberate efficacy. There was no heated “who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” Instead, there were clear, written instructions to subordinates to kill in large numbers. Finally, Lenin’s greatest wickedness was to leave the stage to Stalin.

Turning to the history of the period, I had not grasped how unsuitable was Russia for the Marxist revolution of the proletariat. Russia was not a really an industrialised nation. There were not that many proles. It was a largely agrarian community and Lenin had to adapt a revolution in which the main actors, Marx thought, would have been the urban poor, to a revolution that gave a role to the rural poor. It was almost as if Lenin’s disappointment with the rural hand he had been dealt was repayed by the ferocity with which he and Stalin treated the countryside.

At the micro level, the narrative of the days of the October Revolution, that brought the Bolsheviks to power, is a story of weakness and incompetence on all sides. It could have gone the other way. A man of Lenin’s purposefulness and discipline on the side of the Provisional Government, and who knows. Kerensky was not that man.

Which brings us back to the figure of Lenin. He was pivotal. So slightly unsatisfying was how little we know of what motivated Lenin to become a revolutionary. He seemed a dry and disciplined student with little interest in politics. His elder brother Alexander was executed for an attempt on the life of the Tsar. He became a revolutionary. Was Alexander that pivotal? It is a warped fraternal love that destroys a nation for vengeance. I ended up with the view that Lenin was a man in search of a cause and Alexander’s execution provided it.

The question with which I am left is whether it was all destined, this Revolution thing. This is, of course, “what if” history – fun but pretty pointless. Moreover, I remember Conrad Russell saying that when something big happens in history, we look for big causes and that can be a mistake; there need be no correlation. I am probably guilty of not wanting to believe it was an awful accident.

And when I stand back and survey the big four revolutions (English Civil War, French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions), there is a common pattern. Russia looks less accidental. First come foreign wars. They are always ruinously expensive and, if accompanied by defeat, rob the state of authority. Second, with financial and moral bankruptcy, you lose control of the apparatus of the state, particularly the armed forces. Then, third, well-intentioned moderates try to run the state. Finally, fourth, a radical, motivated and violent minority seizes control of the state and the armed forces.

That Sweet Enemy: Britain and France, The History of a Love-Hate Relationship; Robert and Isabelle Tombs

The rivalry of Britain and France since the late seventeenth century, starting as war and continuing as divergent views of the world, defines not just their relations with each other but, through a combination of depth and longevity, has affected the rest of the world more than the rivalry of any two other nations.

Isabelle and Robert Tombs are historians married to one another. Isabelle is French and mostly a historian of England. Roger is English and mostly a historian of France. As well as writing compellingly about how England and France viewed each other through their intertwined history, they add occasional debates where Isabelle articulates the French view of a period in history and Robert the converse. (Robert later wrote the absolutely superlative The English and Their History https://theobliqueview.com/2015/11/03/the-english-and-their-history-the-first-thirteen-centuries-by-robert-tombs.)

One of the joys of the book is the way it shows how one country’s national myth looks from the other side. For example, We are all currently delighting in Dunkirk, that defining moment (in perception and probably reality) in modern, perhaps all, British history when the island people snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by living to fight another day, giving refuge to those fleeing Europe to continue the battle against the forces of darkness and finally saving the world.

To France, Dunkirk was the moment the British deserted in the face of the enemy to leave France on its own against Germany. France’s plan had been to create a redoubt in Northern France, supplied from the sea, which would force the main German advance to divert north, away from Paris, allowing France to re-gather itself, as it had been able to do in 1914. Sure, the redoubt may have been liquidated but fighting the Germans was costly. Instead, the British, as they had threatened to do at similar vulnerable moments in late 1914 and early 1918, left. Who was it, do we think, who really held the perimeter at Dunkirk to allow Empire troops to embark? “England will fight to the last Frenchman”.

The flight from Dunkirk convinced France, Vichy and in due course Gaullist, that the only solution to the German problem was a deal with Germany. A strategy of containment was fundamentally flawed because it depended on an alliance with Britain that was unreliable. De Gaulle believed the differing destinies of Britain and France was all geography; France was a cape at the end of Europe, Britain an island. Perhaps, but the Tombs offer another view.

Their story starts in 1689. Our Glorious Revolution was, to the rest of Europe, when the Dutch successfully invaded Britain in order to prevent it becoming more fully part of Louis XIV’s sphere of influence. Britain under Charles II had been pro-France, fighting wars with the Dutch but had been a little semi-detached from the continental struggle. James II’s Catholicism and consequent policy threatened to move Britain into a fuller alliance with France to the detriment of its enemies. William of Orange struck first.

At that moment, Britain was a modest part of a broader alliance. France was, on all measures, the dominant force in Europe – population, land mass and wealth. Moreover, France, at that moment, was as much of an overseas power as Britain. It had a presence in the all-important Caribbean, as well as North America, North Africa and Asia. In 1689, you would not have concluded that Britain would become the dominant European and global power. So what happened?

Their narrative is that from 1689 to 1815, Britain benefitted from a self-reinforcing cycle where victory and the accumulation of overseas territories and assets allowed it finance ever greater sea power allowing it to accumulate yet more overseas wealth and so on. France started the period with vibrant Atlantic and Channel ports supporting merchant shipping and naval power. As, however, Britain naval power grew and suffocated French naval activity, the ports withered and economic emphasis moved to the east.

They remind us that there were many moments right into the Napoleonic period when France threatened to invade England and where it might have had a reasonable chance of success. Had it been successful, the story would have reversed. France would have continued along the path of maritime power. Even without a successful invasion, the paths taken by Britain and France were not straight. Britain’s defeat in 1783 at the hands of the French, nominally the Americans, led British politicians to believe their imperial days were over. They were back to where they had been pre-1689. But what finally emerged was that France became the dominant force by land and Britain the dominant force by sea.

That said, the Tombs do recognise there is more to it than accident. There were cultural differences. One of abiding differences was in relative formality and elegance. The British were relatively informal in their dress, manners, relations between classes, use of language, structure of literature and so on. The French were more formal and more elegant. They cover too the interplay between the two nations in social, economic and political ideas. There was much sharing. Britain was politically avant garde until the Revolution. Thereafter it seemed relatively reactionary. But some stuff does not travel. As the Tombs point out, the French have never bought into Adam Smith. An abiding French metaphor was that Britain was Carthage and France Rome.

Wrapping things up, the Tombs point to the profound gap between a top down and bottom up view; principle versus pragmatism. The British ask why you would stick with a plan when it evidently is not working. Why stick with a social model that creates perpetual unemployment? The French ask why you would sign up to plan with which you disagree. What did the British think “Ever closer Union” actually meant?

The irony, of course, is that, if Britain and France started in 1689 as divergent entities, by the twenty first century, no two countries are quite as similar as Britain and France on so many metrics. But in that time, despite our growing similarities, our sense of how the world does and should work has not converged. And because Britain and France remain influential powers, it affects others. If Britain and France are a couple in restaurant (John Bull and Marianne), when they argue, it is not with muted voices and sullen silence but with loud voices, gesticulations and calls to other diners to take sides. You cannot help noticing.

So De Gaulle was Right?

De Gaulle’s vetoes of UK membership of the European Economic Community in 1963 and 1967 look prescient in light of the June referendum. He seems to have been right that British membership would have been a mistake for the European Community. But, perhaps it was his vetoes that made the UK’s eventual departure inevitable. By making us join in the 1970s when we felt especially weak, rather than the 1960s, we ended up with a poor deal that we have forever after regretted.

This is one of the many points so ably made by Robert Tombs in his outstanding “The English and Their History” (https://theobliqueview.com/2015/11/03/the-english-and-their-history-the-first-thirteen-centuries-by-robert-tombs/). The UK’s relationship with the EU has been poisoned by the poor deal struck on entry in 1973 when Britain was at the nadir of its declinism. Indeed, if you had to pick a year between 1945 and 2016 when the UK was at its lowest ebb, when would you choose? 1973 looks a pretty strong candidate.

Let’s imagine, by contrast, that the UK had joined 10 years’ earlier in 1963. Sure, we had suffered a great loss of national confidence at Suez, but, so too the French, who had been in the fight. And they had had the disaster at Dien Bien Phu as well as defeat in Algeria. The UK was, in 1963, still a global economic and military power. De Gaulle’s “L’Angleterre, ce n’est plus grande chose” was not really true, otherwise he would not so have minded us joining.

Instead, by 1973, we had announced the withdrawal from East of Suez, endured a devaluation and seen industrial relations worsen. From the vantage point of 1973, the preceding 18 years since Suez had been of accelerating decline. So we struck a deal in desperation and it was a pretty poor deal particularly on budget contribution, the CAP and governance.

Margaret Thatcher then had to use her considerable skills and power to re-negotiate our relationship with EC to try to get the deal we should have had in 1973 with collateral damage to the national perception of the EC. Indeed, imagine that the UK had not joined in 1973 and it had been left to Margaret Thatcher to negotiate joining the EC ten years’ later in the imperious aftermath of the Falklands campaign, with an ironclad relationship with the US and landslide election victory. Would we have got a better deal than in 1973? I rather suspect so.

The fundamental weaknesses of the 1973 deal only became apparent in the years that followed as our perception of ourselves recovered. What had seemed attractive in 1973, and which attracted 67% to 33% support in the 1975 referendum, looked less and less so as the recovery of 1980s restored national self-confidence. The original sin of 1973 deal damned all that followed.

Sapiens: Yuval Noah Harari

Sapiens is an excellent read just full of insight, and stuff for reflection and debate. His basic question is why are we where and what we are now? Or, how did homo sapiens come to dominate the planet in the fashion in which we did? He covers so much ground from an account of human evolution, an anthropological survey of early humans through to the scientific revolution and the question of what’s it all about: this life, the universe and everything.

His answer to this latter question is that, whatever it is, it is all in our heads. And, for me, this is his first big point. His basic thesis is that homo sapiens came to dominate, not just other early human species, but also all other species, because we have the most developed ability to create narratives, eventually including cosmic narratives, that hold together larger groups of individuals than any other species.

We were not stronger, quicker or even necessarily quicker thinking than other species, we just co-operated better with each other in larger numbers than the rest. And the root of this co-operation was an extraordinary ability to accept, believe, be motivated by things we had made up in our heads. This includes kingship, religion, empire, money, joint stock companies and all. None of these things start off in the real world. No, they start in our heads and then we create things in the real world based on what we’ve chosen to believe at that moment in time.

What I consider his second big point is the idea that possessing a successful genetic code does not necessarily, or even at all, make for a happier life. He illustrates this most graphically with farmed animals. The cow gene has been a roaring success. It hitched itself to the dominant homo sapiens gene and is now one of the top five most numerous animal species.

If the aim of a gene is to self-perpetuate, then the cow gene has made itself very robust. It is so numerous, so geographically widespread and so intertwined with the dominant human gene that it has far outgrown its fragile origins as one of many competing large animal genes. What gene is more likely to die out first – the tiger or the cow? But, despite its genetic robustness, the life of individual cows is ghastly. They do not live their natural lives: they are reared in factory conditions, separated from their mothers and have short lives. Which animal has a better life – the tiger or the cow?

He extends this to humans in his analysis of the agricultural revolution when thousands of years ago we went from hunter-gatherers to farmers. Whilst we became far more numerous and therefore our genes more likely to survive, he asserts that individual lives worsened. We were designed to be hunter-gatherers, both in body and social spirit, and were less happy after agriculture than before.

Amusingly and parenthetically, he couches the agricultural revolution as the moment when the human gene was captured by the wheat gene. The wheat gene was a fragile grass existing in the fertile crescent at risk of climate change or some such. So, it hitched itself to the human gene, became omnipresent and therefore robust, and literally shackled the human race to the plough where it has thereafter unhappily laboured.

His third big point is his account of how and why we went from the world of c.1500 to the world of today. What made the Europeans from c.1500 different to other cultures was their embrace of ignorance; their willingness to admit that that they did not know. Religions, cultures and Empires up to that point had had answers to everything. There was nothing that was not known. These omniscient narratives were effective, see earlier point one, in uniting large groups in common purposes. But the Europeans turned this on its head. They embraced the idea of the unknown, which drove their historically unusual and, in all senses, voracious explorations of the world, geographical and scientific.

The outcome of a few centuries of breakneck discovery and innovation is that homo sapiens stands at an unusual juncture. For example, the greatest risk to our species is ourselves whether you consider the power of nuclear weapons or the risk of environmental degradation. Or, that we are at the transition from evolution of the species by natural selection to evolution by intelligent design. Some amongst us will soon be able to choose to be amortal and enjoy superior powers: Wolverine without the adamantium.

All this leads to his fourth big point, the question of what’s it all been for. He considers and dismisses the supernatural and secular religions. These are our creations with no objective veracity. (Although if I had to bracket him, I sense a liberal humanist.) We have not pursued a consistent guiding purpose. Instead, we have dreamt up guiding purposes to do or justify the next thing that came our way. We have accumulated immense power, made immense achievements. He does concede that, in recent decades, the happiness of the individual, the only sensible criterion of success, has become more our guide even if we have not yet agreed what constitutes happiness. We have eliminated or reduced some objective bads. But he does not posit that we are necessarily going to keep doing so well.

Anyway, homo sapiens is nearing its end as we move to intelligent design. He says at the start of the book that he reckons that, after a run of seventy or so millennia, homo sapiens has, at best, got perhaps a thousand years left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

wonder what’s it all been for and

2% and 20%: Really?

Where are hedge fund fees headed? As a (careful and selective) investor in hedge funds, I frequently find myself grappling with how to justify their fees. And the answer is most times, I cannot. Indeed, we routinely screen out 2% and 20% funds. What is a fair level? My feeling is that 1% and 10% does not sound like a bad answer. But it sounds unrealistic.

Did you know, however, that in the early days of hedge funds, the General Partner paid itself 20% of profits full stop. That’s right, no management fee, just a share of profits. And the General Partner was often a significant Limited Partner as well. So, the General Partner’s payoff was simple. In a profitable year, he took 20% of profits. In an unprofitable year, he lost money as Limited Partner. That sounds aligned.

I discovered this reading Carol J Loomis’s January 1970 article in Fortune magazine, “Hard Times Come to the Hedge Funds”. She was reflecting on the impact on the nascent hedge fund industry of its poor performance in 1969. She described the shock felt by investors who had thought that hedge funds hedged.

As well as talking about the impact on investors, she also described the impact on General Partners who had made no money. Some of them had started talking about paying themselves a salary as well as taking the 20% profit share in order to deal with years when the profit share was zero. Now, to a twenty-first century investor paying 2% and 20%, a salary and 20% sounds a better deal.

Indeed, the idea of paying the reasonable costs of a hedge fund manager and then letting them take a profit share sounds the best bet. But having looked at projects that were based on passing through cost, I know how tricky it becomes. As an investor, you become embroiled in questions of what is and what is not a reasonable cost. Better to keep it simple and go for a modest and sensible 1% management fee. In exchange for this, however, the performance share should be closer to 10%.

Will we get there? It is certainly possible. Is it probable? Well, I don’t think it is improbable.

Going back to Loomis’s article, she notes that Warren Buffett was closing his Buffett Partnership despite having had a profitable 1969. She says that he had “a strong feeling that his time and wealth (he is a millionaire many times over) should now be directed toward other goals than simply the making of more money.” Despite being close to Buffett, she got this wrong or was, at least, premature.

The Slateman Full Triathlon

Short Version

1k Swim: 23:51

51k Bike: 2:07:37

11k Run: 1:13:32

Total: 3:49:57

Long Version

I rarely write race reports but this is the longest event I have done in my dilettante triathlon career so thought I would share. Summary: very cold swim, poor bike and good run.

Last year, I bought an entry to the Slateman sprint race from a team-mate who had originally signed up for the Savage (combined sprint on Saturday and full distance on Sunday). Last year, I drove there and back, totalling about 12 hours in the car and all for less than 2 hours of racing. I promised myself I would not do that again. It did not form part of my plans for 2016. Until, that is, a weekday afternoon when it both became clear that I was unlikely to be able to make Crystal Palace and, almost simultaneously, I got a promotional email from Always Aim High Events. So, a little whimsically and spontaneously, I signed up for the full distance (1k+51k+11k) and booked the train.

I arrived on Saturday evening in actually sunny Llanberis just in time to register. Big supper, a couple of glasses of red wine and it was time for bed. As always, I slept badly before the race and was reading my book between 0300 and 0400. It is the same every time. Coffee, no coffee, alcohol, no alcohol, and other things: all make no difference.

The weather forecasts in the run-up were rather a tease. One day, sunny, next day, rain and so on. It reminded me of that good rule of thumb for the west of our wonderful country, “if you can see the mountains, it is going to rain soon. If you can’t see the mountains, it’s raining already”. And, on Sunday morning, you could not see the mountains. In fact, what started as light rain on the short spin to transition became a monsoon. Everyone and everything was soaked. Towels leached peat blotches, shoes were either left upside down to stop them filling with water or they housed puddles, folks’ plastic transition boxes became mini-paddling pools. It was probably the rain that led one competitor to attach the wrong shoes to their pedals: so right shoe on left pedal and t’other way around; as the commentator gleefully announced.

A little unfortunately, mine was the last swim wave at 1015 (something to do with 50+) but we had to be out of transition by 0915: an hour, therefore, in the freezing rain. My hands and feet developed a blue tinge but there were other competitors who were just blue, no tinge. And, it had the funny effect, once my swim wave started, that I could not close my fingers. I actually swam rather well for me but the whole time, it was with open fingers, which meant slower and even colder. Anyway, out of the water, long run up to transition and off on to the bike taking a few seconds to put on a TriLondon winter cycling jacket for which I was later much grateful.

The ride was beautiful. It started with a long steady climb southeast-ish out of Llanberis up to Pen-Y-Pass at the end of which I could again feel my feet. The route then swooped anti-clockwise, flirting with the outskirts of Bangor before largely descending back into Llanberis. Quite, quite beautiful particularly after an hour or so when you could see the mountains again. I was reminded, although I had not really forgotten, that I am not a good cyclist. Part is all the stuff you would expect like technique, training, strength etc. But another part is just focus. I rather drift off. To really test myself, I should be keeping my heart rate above 150, easy to do on the climbs, but, on the flat bits, it wanders down to 140ish and I’m noticing the rather spectacular stream crashing down from on high. I’m having a great time in one sense but not in the other. I actually rather crave the focus of the climbs; suits me better.

There were some game supporters on the last section into transition giving everyone that welcome feeling that you count. Dismounted calmly, pressed all the buttons on the garmins and jogged to my stand, changed and was off. Although the rain had stopped and the sun was shining, I was drenched, with my skin having the curious slipperiness that made my Newtons feel like flip-flops rather than snug running shoes. I stopped after two hundred metres to check they were on. They were.

My little promise made to myself at the outset was that I would run the whole course and not walk at any point. And I did. In fact, I had rather a good run. There was a flat 3km or so from transition and then we started climbing and climbing and climbing up the side of the slate hill. It had all the scree and false crests that you would expect but I made sure I ran throughout. I passed loads of people walking who were all very encouraging. When we did finally reach the crest, it was then an uppy downy few kilometres where most people seemed to be walking the ups and running the downs. I kept passing people on the ups and also tried to run hard on the downs. On this leg, I was having a great time in both senses. My least favourite bit was the final descent. My descending is better than it was but I haven’t really mastered it. I kept pushing, however, and overtook a few others. It was a proud outcome that no one overtook me on the run.

So, what were my targets? It was a whimsical choice and I rather saw it as a training race. My talented team-mate did it last year in just under three hours, I think. So, I started feeling that sub-four hours was a must and close to three and a half hours would be pretty damn good. I ended halfway between the two. There were some minutes lost to that webbed hand swimming but it was really all about the bike. That said, I saved the best till last on the run and who knows perhaps those I was overtaking on the run had given their all on the bike.

Thoughts on the event? It was well-run with the exception of the early closure of transition leaving us in the cold. It is a sparsely populated area but lots of people made the effort to support from random places on the route. Stunning countryside. For Olympic distance people, it has that bit more: a good training race. It is, though, a long way. Train is definitely better than driving.

A Culture of Their Own

A vote for Brexit is a vote to have a something of our own. So, interestingly, said a (British) friend to me last week as we discussed the referendum, with him somewhat sympathetic to the out cause. He went on that the challenge for the British was that we no longer had anything that was special about us; that was just ours. We did not, for example, even have our own language – a language that we had that no one else did. A vote to be independent was a vote to have something that was ours and not shared.

This thought echoed during the past weekend spent in Copenhagen. Everyone with whom my wife and I had to deal spoke fantastic English; the hotel receptionist, the taxi driver, the waiter, the woman to whom I apologised after having inadvertently knocked while passing on a narrow pavement: “No problem”. The most trailered forthcoming programme on Danish TV was, as far as we could see, live coverage of the forthcoming FA Cup Final. On another continent, my little boy has, at his school in Bangkok, the chance to train with the Chelsea football academy.

Alongside our language and Association Football (and most other global sports), so much of our culture is shared. Shakespeare is the only global playwright. Our popular music is everywhere. You hear Adele on all continents. London is now clearly only geographically British. You could add the Royal Family to this. They are ours in some sense but only so far. The Queen sees herself as head of the Commonwealth. And they are global celebrities in a way that is not true of other royal families.

And this took my friend and I to the temperamental heart of the referendum debate. It is about how we feel and what we want to be. It is a question of identity. There is not a bigoted bone in my friend’s body (he happily grew up on the continent) but he likes the idea of a world comprised of distinct identities living together. My dream would seem to be of a more singular global identity; a global identity, I would add, comfortably containing lots of our DNA.

Where my friend and I agreed was that the long-term economics is a sideshow. We are going to be a lucky, rich and productive economy whether we choose to stay or go. I would argue that there are significant and needless short-term costs and risks associated with departure. His retort is that there may be, or may not be, but, regardless, it won’t make a difference in the long run and, anyway, is a modest price to pay.

The Silk Roads: Peter Frankopan

The Silk Roads was two books in one. One book was a fascinating re-writing of world history to anchor it at the centre of the world, essentially Persia and surrounding countries. The other was a diatribe against Western policy in the region during the twentieth century, and a bit beforehand. Besides finding the second part a little simplistic, I was more frustrated by the dissonance. I started with history and ended with a political polemic.

Starting with part one, Frankopan anchors history in the centre of the world by describing how it was at the epicentre of the great trade routes of history. He narrates the trades in silk, furs, horses, slaves, gold, silver, oil and wheat that have for millenia criss-crossed the centre of the world. It was also the route by which ideas, religions and technologies spread from East to West and vice versa.

Frankopan explains Britain’s involvement in the Entente Cordiale in the context of its struggle with Russia for the centre of the world. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, an expanding Russia was threatening British interests along the length of its southern Asian border from the Near East, through Persia and India, to China. Britain was faced with either entering a continental confrontation with Russia or allying with it. Choosing the latter path secured the Empire in Asia but lured Britain into the Franco-Russian confrontation with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

And it is the Great War that is something of the junction in the story where we go from history to polemic. The West’s involvement in the region, particularly Persia and, more recently, Iraq / Afghanistan is support for his contention that this is the centre of the world. But it is no longer narrated primarily to illustrate this. Instead, it is an attack, from the vantage point of the internationalist left, on Western policy. He wishes for the West to be held to account and craves that it be superseded. It might be right but the moralising was dissonant.

Staying with the present, Frankopan’s book resonates with the recent Chinese policy announcement of developing a silk road belt. But the Chinese also announced the creation of a maritime silk road, on which Frankopan touched less. It would intriguing to know, historically, where the balance lay between the maritime and road trades. An uninformed assumption would be that they inversely correlated. When the land route was dangerous and difficult, trade would revert to the sea and vice versa.

Finally, the book appeared before the Q4 2014 sell-off in oil and energy. Less than a couple of years on, we cannot know whether this is epochal or passing. In the former camp are those who say that US oil independence frees them from future intervention in the Gulf. I have always been a bit sceptical of this. After all, if oil prices do rise again, then regardless of US self-sufficiency, the US economy would be affected. Regardless, other, particularly Asian, powers are not self-sufficient so will presumably have to intervene.

The UK Will Never Leave

Whilst, personally, I sincerely hope not, what would happen if the UK voted in June to leave the EU? My best guess is that we would stay in. Instinct tells me that, in the event of an out vote, we would take the Danish path, or the Irish path, and keeping asking the question until we got the right answer, which would be to stay, albeit on different terms.

The day after the out vote, financial markets would weaken. Sterling and sterling assets would fall sharply for fear of the uncertainty ahead. The Euro would weaken too. The poor Swiss franc would again see inflows, so too the USD and perhaps the Yen. Gold goes up. It is possible, given the febrile state of markets at the moment, that it would trigger a global risk sell-off and engender the global recession that we all fear. Regardless, we would start to hear announcements of assets, businesses, people and investment leaving the UK.

David Cameron would surely have to go, as too George Osbourne. The leadership election would be about what to do about Europe. A new leader, perhaps drawn from Theresa May, Sajid Javid and Boris Johnson, would start their first day as PM with briefings from ministers, civil service department heads and legal advisers laying out the extraordinary complexity of leaving the EU and the time it would take to negotiate. It would tarnish everything between their arrival and the next election date in 2020. Don’t forget the damage done to the Tories by Black Wednesday.

Around the UK, Scotland, and possibly Wales, would bemoan English voters having forced them into a constitutional change for which they had not voted. Calls for independence would return and in loud voice.

In the meantime, fellow European leaders would digest the consequences of having lost the game of chicken. There would be the immediate financial market consequences. There would the impending awfulness of the divorce negotiations. There would the loss of the UK; its economic weight, its budget contributions, its largest in the Union defence budget, the link to the Anglo-Saxon world, London etc. And, most profoundly, it would burst the dream, represent the high water mark of expansion and provide ammunition for other leavers. They would want the problem to go away.

And don’t think the Americans have any interest in this. Of all the things to be dealt with in the world – China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia etc – and the Brits have to go and light a fire in our own tent. What were they thinking? The White House will publicly support whatever the British people decide but advise caution and careful reflection, and, in private, lobby and manoeuvre for a compromise.

So, I think the new Prime Minister stands up and tells the British people that he/she has heard them, “je vous ai compris”, and their message that they do not want to belong the EU on the current terms, and that he/she intends to set off forthwith to Brussels to negotiate a deal that the British people can accept. European leaders with sombre faces meet him/her professing to do what it takes in order to keep the Union together.

By 2017, the UK will be part of the Union with its own special name for its membership status, some new powers and a lot of bad feeling.