Now the recriminations begin. Northern Rock and every other deposit-taking institution it appears, has had its deposits guaranteed by the Government. Remember this occasion, as you have had a politician standing up, saying something and actually delivering it in four days. Private sector pensioners whose occupational schemes collapsed have had slightly different treatment and are up in arms about it.

While the deposits side of things is now underwritten, the liability falls on the taxpayer and as another writer put it, taxpayers’ money is effectively supporting Northern Rock’s share price – quite an achievement for a Labour government. This does not seem to be doing much good as the price seems generally downwards. If you want to check for yourself, please go to the second paragraph in my second NRock blog http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=100 Figures for the value of NRock’s business have been quoted at: 340p, 290p, 200p plus in a recent offer by LloydsTSB (with conditions) and practically zero. The latter would probably apply if: a hedge fund gets its teeth into the carcass (ends up as whale oil), if it goes in adminstration (ends up as whale steaks) or is supported by a “Lifeboat” similar to the one offered in the seventies during the secondary banking crisis (ends up on life support). It is the fifth largest UK mortgage lender and still profitable apparently.

The movements in the share price are basically a feeding frenzy which could be taken from a wildlife film showing the bloody business of whaling where sharks are biting chunks off a wounded beast. The still-breathing carcass of NRock lies harpooned and joined by a stout line to the Good Ship UK. The man at the end of the harpoon is the Chancellor of the Exchequer who has the happy job of reeling it in and trying to do some useful with it. The man who originally aimed the harpoon at the unfortunate whale is my dear friend Gordon who has been promoted to Captain.

The root of the shambles goes back to 1997 when our then-Chancellor transferred the business of regulating the 500 or so banks that operate in the UK from the UK’s Central Bank, once affectionately known as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street and otherwise called the Bank of England, to another regulator. The logic seemed to be that 3 brains were better than one but as Grandma will tell you, too many cooks spoil the broth. In the crucial four days when people were queueing up at NRock branches, the rescue package shuttled backwards and forwards between the FSA (the financial services regulator), Bank of England (our central bank) and HM Treasury (the Government’s money department) and the Chancellor’s fine words came too late on the Monday to give the beast any hope of survival as a business. Somehow, I cannot imagine many of my clients being impressed if I recommend a NRock mortgage to them – they still have their good points like high LTVs, flexible products etc, but if no one likes you anymore……………

Very simply, the job of being a central bank, functions of which include being lender of last resort for banks that get into trouble and regulating the 500 or so UK and foreign banks that operate in the UK is not the same job as regulating the sale of financial products. This fuction which covers pensions, investments and life insurance and regulating financial advisers is a completely different business. The switch was a bit like switching the functions of a dentist to your local doctor and made about as much sense.

London has by no means the biggest financial markets in the world but is still the world’s leading international capital market. Stemming from the early days of empire, it has always been outward looking but it was a economic backwater for a long while. In Queen Elizabeth 1′s time for example, Antwerp was Europe’s leading financial centre and Sir Thomas Gresham, Ambassador to the Netherlands founded the Royal Exchange in London based on what he saw there. As we Brits have a reputation for being honest and repaying our loans, he was able to obtain money and at fine rates too, for QE1′s hard-pressed government when other monarchs in Europe who didn’t bother repaying their debts, found themselves a bit short where credit was concerned. Back in the 21st Century, centres like Dubai have the stated ambition to be the leading financial centre in the world.

During all the dithering, pictures of us calm Brits queueing up like idiots to grab our money, have gone around the world. I have heard of phone calls from Africa for example, to relatives here asking them if they have lost their money. So just one month after the tenth anniversary of Princess Diana’s death when the public emotion at her funeral reminded the world that we had feelings too, we end up looking like a bunch of lemmings.

Monday afternoon finds me on one of the top floors of the brand new UCH building on Euston Road for my appointment with the Voice Therapist. Going through my state of voice (much better now) and state of health (getting better but energy levels way below par) not forgetting the gunge that still comes out of my throat (clear now rather than the disgusting hues of a few weeks ago) takes about 20 minutes. The tumour has thankfully disappeared and I am not taking painkillers anymore. All this gives the therapist a pretty good personal view of it and I am told that my voice is a bit breathy sometimes, my vocal folds (cords) are showing signs of oedemus (swelling) and that this has affected my Adduction Quotient - two more words for my Scrabble dictionary. Full recovery will take 6 – 12 months from the time the RT finished and as only two months have passed since then, I have a long haul ahead.

After doing some vowel (Ooooooh, Eeeeeeeee) and consonant (Ssssss) tests for as long as I can exhale, I am asked about my fluid intake. I confess that this is under the 1 and half to 2 litres a day I am supposed to have but am told this is often the case. I remedy this when I get home, ordering the equivalent of half a bathtub of various mineral waters which are delivered two days later by Tesco. The cheerful driver hauls it all up the stairs in one trip and is obviously very fit. Living on the third floor of my block of flats without a lift keeps me fit too and I must confess to a certain amusement sometimes listening to visitors puffing and wheezing their way up the stairs, especially when they have told me about the wonderful new fitness studio that they have joined.

While listening to my voice is important, we need to see what the technical data shows so I need to do another test recording. With the microphone in one hand and the script in the other, I feel like a comic on stage and launch into the story of Arthur the Rat. This charming story has been thoughtfully laminated onto one sheet of A4 and tells the heart-warming tale of this little creature who cannot make up his mind. It all takes me back to when my daughters were small and I would tuck them into bed after their evening baths and I would read them Winnie the Pooh http://www.winniethepooh.co.uk/author.html sometimes getting completely carried away and reading for ages after they were fast asleep.

Hush, hush, whisper who dares…………….Christopher Robin is saying his prayers

The results of my oratory appear on screen at the touch of a button in a spiky pie-graph that could be the design for an art deco wall clock done by the famous glass artist René Lalique on bad hair day. My normal voice tones are in a small green circle in the centre but the abnormal ones are displayed from the one-o-clock round to the eight-o-clock position in a bright red spiky pattern with the points being various three-letter parameters which mean nothing to me. A follow-up appointment is arranged two weeks later where I will receive some voice exercises and have the joy of the worm up my nose again.

Sleep patterns improve slowly and I have the rare luxury of 5 or 6 hours sleep at a stretch for a couple of nights. At night, I can hear the barn owls in Highgate Wood which I do not mind but there are some noisy geese there too which sorely tempt me to apply for a shotgun licence as they often fly over just after dawn.

A colleague who handles group and corporate business asks me to handle an individual client meeting where the benefits from the too-small pension fund are needed now. The fund is above the triviality limit but the likely annuity income will be nowhere near enough to live on even with enhanced rates which ought to be available because of the health history. Our discussion covers annuities, equity release and buy-to-let and the latter looks to be the only option.

I pop into the office the next day but before I have even sat down a colleague remarks that I look tired and an hour at my desktop PC tells me I am not achieving much. I leave, intending to go home and back to bed but the sunshine at Highgate tempts me again into Highgate Wood and I manage a find a seat at the café there http://www.visitlondon.com/attractions/detail/149405 and without seeing anyone’s pet boa constrictors like last time.

Friday finds me in Birmingham with two colleagues at a Financial Planning seminar led by two giants in the IFA community Paul Etheridge who founded the Institute of Financial Planning http://www.financialplanning.org.uk/ and Paul Armson. The latter suggested the development of a second version of the well known Prestwood Financial Planning suite and many IFAs are starting to use it. Previous visits to Birmingham had always resulted in my driving past the National Motocycle Museum so on Friday between speeches, I take the opportunity to look at the immaculate machines now looking more like works of art than the mundane travelling machines http://www.nationalmotorcyclemuseum.co.uk/ that came out of the factory.

Associates of the IFP have a very practical qualification and the designation CertFP which is not be confused with the more academic CFP or Chartered Financial Planner of the Chartered Insurance Institute. On Friday, I meet fellow ecademist and IFA Christopher Wicks http://www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=167081 who has both qualifications and is very busy with Powers of Attorney where a new regime which comes into force 1st October 2007. http://nma.citywire.co.uk/News/NewsArticle.aspx?VersionID=96287&re=1740&ea=164467 The new documents run to 25 pages and take about half day to arrange with higher fees as a result.

My blogs about Northern Rock and the effect on the share price result in a phone call from the BBC Business and Economics Unit wondering if I know any Northern Rock shareholders who would be willing to appear on Breakfast Radio?? On Friday, the share price closed around 200p with more people “taking profits” if they have been smart and quick, or maybe waking up and “cutting losses” like rats deserting a sinking ship.

Ironically, investment managers I have spoken to this week suggest that the profit figures for NR for this year could be quite good – the figure of £500 million has been mentioned. But just as things appear to quieten down, I am reminded how illogical we can still be when I talk to two mortgage clients who ask me about moving away from Northern Rock. I explain again that the borrowers are the one class of people who are not affected by any run on deposits. The mortgage still has to be paid and a new owner of Northern Rock cannot change the terms of a mortgage offer. The only changes Northern Rock may make are those written into the offer itself. Inspite of this, one client is moving his mortgage even though there is a penalty involved.

Northern Rock’s weakness has always been its admin which I have found to be dreadful to the extent that I avoid putting business with it – if it can be justified. They have some good products and will sometimes do higher LTVs than other lenders – one of their USPs. My reason for avoiding them is to save clients nerves as well as mine, as buying a new property is a very stressful time (especially for First Time Buyers) and if everything takes too long, the clients will lose the property or the offer anyway – especially when the market is strong like it has been recently. It is amusing to read that NR are “cost conscious” or “have a low cost base” as it is easy to see where the money has not been spent and sadly proves the old saying that “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys” or maybe “monkey admin or management”. So often people seem to forget that lower price does not mean better value.

In one of life’s amusing little coincidences, I notice a quote again from a Get Well card which combines some of the agenda of my Friday meeting with the turmoil that our fifth largest mortgage lender has just suffered.

Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s this day to day living that wears you out! Thank you, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) for the quote and thank you Sharanjit for the card.

So the dust settles. The Chancellor’s fine words seem to have done the trick with queues far less than at the start of the week and the share price is back to around 300p. No one has lost money apart from Early Withdrawal Penalties where people panicked and took out their money anyway and of course, those penalties are windfall profits for Northern Rock. The reputation of Northern Rock will probably never recover. We put our money in banks because we trust them and feel safer with it there than under the mattress. But if the trust has gone, the damage to a lending institution can be mortal and there is plenty of competition.

The effect can be seen in the share price at the link below which will take you to the Financial Times Stock Market page. In the Choose a Country box select UK from the drop-down menu and in the box next to it, type NRK or Northern Rock and press the GO button http://mwprices.ft.com/custom/ft2-com/html-quotechartnews.asp The screen will show the most recent stock market movements at minute intervals over 1 day. Then play around with the Time Frame box underneath this and see what the graph looks like over different periods – have some fun here. In summary, the share price has lost 3/4 of its value in the past year and there is a new level at which the share price is hovering of about 300p.

But how much money did the Government actually guarantee and what extra amount did they actually provide? Well, if I say that this is a beautiful example of Government spin, perhaps you could guess? The answer here is zilch. Protection for deposits is covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) where the limits for different kinds of business are: http://www.fscs.org.uk/consumer/key_facts/limitations_of_the_scheme/compensation_limits/

But who pays for this? Answer: mainly Financial Advisers, and in2 Consulting is in the category Brokers not holding client monies (A13): £42.0m which is the largest category. Not a penny comes from the Government.

Any money from the Bank of England to Northern Rock is lent out at a high rate but that is Northern Rock’s problem. This provides liquidity for Northern Rock so people can withdraw their savings and put it somewhere else. Getting a mortgage offer takes 8 – 12 weeks in my experience so in the meantime, this money that is now with other banks and building societies is lent back into the Money Market where the Bank of England borrowed it from in the first place. http://www.fscs.org.uk/industry/funding/Levy_Information/Levy_Amounts/

The FSCS is a “compensation scheme of last resort” separate from the function of a central bank to be a lender of last resort to banks that get into trouble for whatever reason.

And where did this all really start? The word PANIC comes from the ancient Greek god Pan who was half man and half goat. Besides playing his pan pipes while trying to seduce nymphs or whatever, his unseen presence could cause humans to act completely irrationally and for this emotion to spread very quickly. It seems his spirit is still with us.

The continuing queues at branches of the UK’s fifth largest mortgage lender show how human, worried and ill-informed we can be in this age where we are drowned in information. Even people who have not panicked may be wondering if their deposits or even their mortgages are still safe. My answer here is a definite yes and will show the three choices available to anyone involved with Northern Rock.

In situations like this, some people’s memories seem very short so let us start at the beginning. Northern Rock was formed in 1965 by the merger of Northern Counties Permanent Counties Building Society and The Rock Building Society. It converted to a bank in October 1997 and existing members received their “free shares”.

Getting a mortgage before all this happened was very difficult as the Building Societies operated a cosy little cartel and Abbey National were the first one to break away. Couples wanting to buy their first home would save for years for a deposit and would eventually pluck up courage to ask for an appointment with the local building society manager. He still had some real lending authority in those days, and the couple concerned would dress up in their Sunday best and turn up right on time after the wife visited the hairdressers. If this sounds qaint, well that is exactly what it was like and the stories of couples practically begging for a mortgage were not unusual. One problem for the building societies was that their funds for mortgage lending came from people who saved with them, and the rule of thumb was that it took six savers to fund one mortgage so they could be very picky if they wanted to. The Building Societies Act 1986 and subsequent legislation allowed building societies access to the Money Markets which eased things and a whole rash of building societies converted to banks.

The question now is, is my money safe? There are three different answers here depending on whether you are a depositor with savings there, a borrower with a mortgage from them or a shareholder.

If you are a depositor, your money is protected by the Financial Sevices Compensation Scheme which provides 100 per cent protection on the first £2,000 savings and ninety per cent protection on the next £33,000 (£29,720) with more details on the link here http://www.fscs.org.uk/consumer/key_facts/limitations_of_the_scheme/compensation_limits/ So if you have £35,000 the maximum cover you have is £31,700 and amounts above £35,000 are not covered.

At this point, it worth looking at the two most recent bank failures in the UK. Barings got into terminal trouble in 1995 when Nick Leeson, a futures trader in their Singapore office got things spectacularly wrong to the tune of about £1,500 million. Breaking the bank’s own strict rules about relations between the settlements department and the dealing room, combined with a lack of understanding on the part of the senior management in London as to what their whizz-kid trader was doing, meant that the extent of the losses was discovered too late to save the bank.

Barings which had been previously been bailed out by the Bank of England in 1890 when some of their investments in Argentina went pear-shaped, was sold to the Dutch Post Office Savings Bank ING for the princely sum of £1. Their investment arm Barings Asset Management is still going strong. No depositors lost any money.

Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was closed down by the Bank of England in the UK in 1991 and the creditors sued them for US$ 1,000 million. The liquidators sued the auditors too but there was something funny about the bank from when it first opened in London. Investigations showed it was involved in Money Laundering and financing terrorism and there depositors did lose money.

Neither of the above are relevant to Northern Rock especially the latter.

If you are a borrower with a Northern Rock mortgage, you have already had your money and you still have an obligation to pay the interest and fulfill the other terms of your mortgage like keeping your property maintained and insured for example. Northern Rock has always had a large and innovative product range with some very attractive rates but sadly, awful adminstration. But some of these initially cheap products have very long tie-ins (up to 9 years) so moving from Northern Rock to another within this period could be very expensive in terms of Early Repayment Penalties and this would be a windfall profit for them.

Northern Rock have a “first charge by way of Legal Mortgage” over your property so they are not really worried here and neither would any other company worry that took them over.

If you are a shareholder, then you will have lost a lot of money or rather value in the last few days. The shares opened at 400p this Monday morning and closed at 282p. The lowest during the day was 256p so a lot of vultures are circling. No protection for you. In a properly diversified portfolio, any losses on selling holdings of Northern Rock will make little difference overall – that is why fund managers spread their investments.

More information on previous banking and market scandals and crashes here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6958091.stm

So what are your choices as a depositor?

1) Do nothing – always an option. Your money is protected up to £35,000 as above.

2) Find another bank or building society to look after your cash. The depositor protection will be exactly the same as if you left it at Northern Rock. If you are worried about the limited protection over amounts of say, £35,000 then you will have to spread it around a bit. Easy to do on-line and not that different by post as even with an on-line account, there are postal formalities. You may lose out on the rate of interest, as most deposit accepting institutons offer better rates for larger amounts.

If you have locked up your money with Northern Rock for a term deposit of say, 3 months and you want your money now then you will lose 3 months interest or whatever the term is. This is a windfall profit for Northern Rock.

3) Invest it. How much do you need to keep in cash? For any surplus money you will not need for a while, there are low-risk investments around which yield about 7 per cent per annum where the return has practically no correlation to movements in the Stock Market.

The sort of client we see for this tends to have: just sold their business or property, have a large amount of tax-free cash from their pension, inherited some money, has a lump of money they do not know what to do with, has a mish-mash of different pension/insurance policies and other investments which gives them a headache. But they want a better return than cash without the ups and downs of the Stock Market.

The three choices then – Do nothing, Switch or Invest – but please don’t panic.

If you still have any concerns here, please click on the CONTACT box top right.

POST SCRIPT: the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s announcement means the Bank of England will lend NR as much as they need but at a penal rate so all depositors can have their money out, if they want. This would still leave the bank with a huge mortgage book. The ones who have lost out are shareholders.

The crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market has been a topic in broadsheet City and Business Diaries for over a year now with the question being asked “Will there be a property market correction or crash here?” The concensus seems to be No (probably) although some sort of correction is expected as the combination of higher interest rates on the one hand and Gordon Brown’s stealth taxes on the other hand squeeze living standards and real income. Other indications that a house price boom is over, is when prices in the provinces start to catch up London and the South East and demand for rental properties increases as buying becomes increasingly unaffordable, both of which are happening now.

In property, bond and stock markets markets, whenever there is a shake-out, correction or whatever some pundit calls it, there is usually a “flight to quality” meaning that good stuff will sell easily and generally hold or even increase its value whereas more marginal properties will take ages to sell and probably only at a reduced price. If this means “negative equity” again, then people tend to stay put themselves and put off having children.

Against this, interest rates would have to rise by about two per cent before mortgage costs equal the same proportion of earnings as in the late 1980s and there is a shortage of properties in some areas, hence the (probably). I hope that this Government’s lunatic obsession with Home Information Packs or HIPs is not the last straw that breaks the camel’s back here. Their £600 + cost is the last thing a couple needs saving up to get on the housing ladder or move home with a growing family http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=42

In all this cheerful speculation, I find a new word or acronym – NINJA lending in The Daily Telegraph City Diary. Everyone knows YUPPIES (Young Upwardly-mobile Professionals) and there are also DINKYs (Double Income No Kids Yet) but lending to NINJAs (No Income, No Job or Assets) seems positively bizarre to an old banker turned IFA like yours truly. Researching this acronym on Google, I discover a most amusing blog by Barbara Ehrenreich http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/smashing-capitalism_b_61144.html With its eye-catching title of Smashing Capitalism, it is almost like being a student again. Her latest blog is similarly amusing http://www.huffingtonpost.com/_63455.html Freshpersons, Welcome to Debt. And if you want to know what on earth an Upanishad is, well you will have to Google that for yourself.

Staying with the theme of sub-prime lending, Lehman Brothers, the American investment bank anounced that they were shutting down South Pacific Mortgage Lending (SPML) a leading UK sub-prime mortgage lender only weeks after having had motivational meetings with staff. These acquired the soubriquet “town hall” meetings for senior staff and “brown paper bag” meetings for junior staff. Staff departures probably accounted for part of the reason to shut SPML down but whether they just panicked, we will not know – at least for while – as the staff haven’t got their “severence bonuses”(?) yet. Eighteen months ago they were doing £100 million business a month but this had fallen off drastically recently.

The net margins on prime lending are not huge, being about 0.2 per cent p.a. on average while the same figure for sub-prime lending is over 1 per cent. Whereas prime variable rates have increased by about one per cent recently, some sub-prime lenders have increased their margins by over 2 per cent. In theory, the interest rate or rather the margin over the cost of funds is meant to reflect the lending risk. But when prime borrowers with good jobs and clean credit records are struggling with a one per cent increase, how on earth are people who are not such a good risk going to manage with more than double the increase? The huge increase in sub-prime rates will only create the problem it was supposed to cover and seems a case of lenders running for cover. It is a classic example of the cure being worse than the disease but according to Barbara above, this type of lending was meant to end in tears anyway.

Within a few days, a stampede seems to develop with Rooftop, Advantage, Future Mortgages and The Mortgage Works anouncing that the higher LTV products are being withdrawn all within in a couple of days. Sometimes this is with immediate effect and sometimes with two weeks left to get “fully packaged” application in. Fully packaged here means the properly completed and signed application, every single bit of information that the lender might require e.g. bank statement, Money Laundering information. In response to complaints about service standards sometime ago when the market was booming, the Woolwich pointed out that 10 per cent of their applications needed to be returned because a signature was missing. A mistake here by the borrowers could mean that their application will be done under new stricter and more expensive criteria – if at all.

Victoria Mortgages a leading sub-prime packager puts itself into Adminstration but to cheer me up, I get an e-mail telling me that “prices in Bucharest are rising by the day”. The only sensible news seems to be from TMB owned by HBOS (Bank of Scotland Group) who announce that they will step in to help Victoria with their application packaging. TMB are a leading lender in the self-certification market and shows that the Scots don’t carry the epiphet “canny” without reason.

If you have any concerns here, please click on Contact at the top right of this page.

By way of a change, let me say a little about investments. It is easy to overlook some rather basic lessons when thinking about putting your money into the Stock Market which is where the best returns usually are:

* the safest way to invest in equity funds or stock markets is to invest regularly say, every month. This means you can forget about choosing a good time to invest. The ups and downs in the market (what pundits call the volatility) actually work in your favour through something called pound cost averaging.

* if you are going to invest a lump-sum in something like an ISA, do it at the start of the tax year rather than at the end as the longer you are invested, the more likely you are to beat investing in cash or fixed interest securities. The Barclays Capital Gilt Equity study reinforces this every year.

* Couples that do not use their income and capital allowances, are basically throwing money away. My heart sinks when I come across couples where the income, dividends and interest is in all the earner’s name and the partner’s allowances are not being used. This is especially silly when the earner is a Higher Rate Income Tax payer and the other partner has no income because they are bringing up their children.

* the easiest way to spread investment risk is to have your portfolio in different asset classes and geographical areas. Starting with a decent managed fund is the simplest way here, diversfying into different areas over time. Quite a lot of people seem to make a step in this direction by picking up a leaflet from their bank or building society (the so-called bancassurers) while standing in a queue at their branch. On average though, bancassurers’ funds and products tend to have above-average charges and below-average performance.

* if you thinking of investing for income now, it might be a good idea to choose a fixed-interest or fixed return investment as inflation looks set to fall as the steep energy price inceases work their way out of the annual inflation figures. If you invest in a fixed return investment now, you are basically locking in when inflation and the returns offered are high. The Governor of the Bank of England MPC has also said this week that interest rates may be at their peak. If you choose an index-liked investment, the return will fall as inflation falls. Check the exit terms though as getting out of fixed investments early, can be very costly.

To finish on a youthful, light and musical note, Joe Boyd the author of one of my holiday reads White Bicycles will be on a BBC Radio 3 programme 40 years on 1st and 8th October at 10:15pm. If your memories of the pop music in the 1960s are a bit hazy, this should bring some of them back, especially if you went to The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in North London. Names he was involved with include: Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, The Move, Fairport Convention and Incredible String Band. The broadcast will also be available via the internet and the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/ has a very useful facility of letting you listen on-line to radio programmes you may have missed, up to one month later.

Seven weeks after the RT finished http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=87 I am back at UCH for a CT scan, Ultrasound and Laryngoscopy. The CT scan is done again at the “polo mint” machine. I take my shirt off and lie down on the bed which is raised to the level of the hole and am asked if I have any metallic objects, as these can be deadly with the strong magnetic fields around machines like this. Smoothly I slide into the big mint until my neck is at the innermost edge of the opening and I see whirling bits spinning round. A little amber light comes and a recording of a lady’s voice tells to me take a small breath and……hold it. The bed slides out and I am told to breathe normally. This is repeated and after checking with a huddle of people in a tiny room next door, the operator tells me the images are OK.

I am guided round the corner to Ultrasound where I take off my shirt off again. The doctor puts the gel onto the sensor first one side then the other. The readings are all there from my previous scan and I am spared needles in my lymph nodes. I ask if he can see anything but am told that as the larynx in men is heavily calcified, he cannot see inside – that will have to be done with the laryngoscope. Things look OK and after worrying about missing my appointments, I find myself with an hour to spare before my final one.

This is in an older building nearby and two doctors from my team are busy with the general clinic. My weight is unchanged and I am given a small sticky tab with the figure on, to give to the doctor who sees me 10 minutes later. This is another doctor I have only met briefly at the start of my treatment and he asks me if I would mind if he shows a new colleague how an examination of the larynx is done. First, I am given the local anaesthetic by spray “which nostril was it?” and told to inhale. Thoughts of any jokes about Bill Clinton swiftly disappear as the awful bitterness of the anaesthetic hits the back of my throat. I have to spit out some phlegm a couple of times.

Standing in front of me, the doctor picks up the wormlike implement and in we go again to my left nostril. As the colleague has not done this procedure before, she and I are given a roller-coaster guided tour of the inside of my head with live commentary. “Right, here we go….that’s the septum there on the left….then we go in a couple of inches….past the bottom of the Eustacian tubes…..along the floor of the nasal passages….and I can go two ways here…up or down into the dark space….Now we want to go down into the dark bit, so if I hold it up….and….we are going down…there’s the Uvula – the dangly bit.” Other bits of my throat get mentioned but no tonsils since I had them out at the tender age of 5 – and “yes, here we are at the back of the tongue and….I am not in the epiglottis….” It is both fascinating and surreal, like taking your driving test while watching the film Fantastic Voyage http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060397/

When we reach the larynx, I try to keep as steady as possible as I can feel the worm inside my voicebox which makes swallowing uncomfortable. My throat is still tender and my voice is still hoarse. A couple of times I want to retch but I know it is important for the doctor to have a proper look and I manage to avoid bringing up my late breakfast. On the third retching fit, the worm is thankfully removed and I am told that the tumour is no longer visible. My progress seems good but my stamina is still down and they seem slightly surprised when I say I am working 3 or 4 half days a week. My next appointment is made for November and I meet the voice therapist again who says he will contact me to arrange an appointment.

My next appointment is at The Institute of Directors in Pall Mall with the friend I mentioned in my earlier blog Insurance for Business http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=91. He wants a seven-figure sum to make a media purchase and makes a very good pitch. The principle of my friend paying an upfront fee to get any concrete help from the people I introduce him to, has already been agreed in advance, so the meeting goes well. However, they cannot proceed without a business plan. At this point, I mention that expertise to write business plans is widely available and it turns out that he could get a mutual friend to do it anyway.

Meeting over, we take a short walk down Pall Mall to the Reform Club, a place I have always wanted to see. Like the Travellers’ Club next door and the Carlton Club round the corner in St James’s, there is no plaque to tell you that you are there. There is a number but that is all. The logic here of course is that if you are the right sort of person, then you will naturally know where it is and of course, it helps keep out the riff raff as Basil Fawlty might say. Standards of dress have to be maintained of course, which in our case means that gentlemen must wear ties. Before I can point out neither of us have bothered with this, my friend informs me that the club thoughtfully have a supply of them which forgetful members and guests can borrow, for their visit.

The Reform Club has many politicians and writers as members and during the year there will always be a few articles in the Press where journalist x casually slips in that he has had lunch with politician z at this famous institution. Few members are there today, so I do not see any politicians I recognise and no huddles of people exchanging gossip and rumour – next time maybe.

Looking across Carlton Gardens from the first floor of the club I recognise one of my old offices from my banking days – my first proper job. Then I worked for Lloyds Bank International before getting promoted and sent up to the City Office then in Queen Victoria Street. One thing I never forgot there, was seeing snow in London on the first day of June. It only lasted minutes, the sun shone two hours later but it snowed in June in the days before global warming became an everyday topic of conversation.

The day finishes with dinner with my daughter and her Italian fiancé at Al Parco (2, Highgate West Hill, N6 6JS near Parliament Hill Fields) with its lovely thin crust pizzas.

They are eating out as she is representing her college at a consultation the next day called Building Bridges about integrating refugees into the workforce organised in parallel to similar initiatives from the Mayor of London. Her original job was teaching medical English. It has not just been a case of showing them what to say, more how to say it, as there have been some very interesting cultural differences. From only teaching refugees, her role has now been expanded to cover all types of health professionals that wish to work in the UK.

Regarding the wedding which will be in Italy, I am told that part of my speech will have to be in Italian as few of my future son-in-law’s family speak English. But Italian weddings do not have bridesmaids or father of the bride speeches either it seems, so it will be an interesting mix of cultures. Although we all attended church regularly when the girls were young, attending Italian church weddings of various cousins recently seems to have put them both off having a church ceremony altogether. It is customary for the priest to deliver a talk to the couple after the vows have been exchanged, but in Italy these seem to last around 40 minutes and are very traditional. With my daughter, the last straw seems to have been a comment along the lines of “the silent woman is the perfect one” which even made me smile, and is a reminder that Italian priests do not marry.

It seems I pay for all the above activity next day as I have no energy and spend most of the day in bed in a series unrefreshing naps. My energy levels only perk up in the evening after I make myself a salad with a dressing of flaxseed oil and balsamic vinegar sprinkled with nuts and buffered Vitamin C – thanks again Dilys.

During the week, I view on-line the two programmes by Richard Dawkins The Enemies of Reason about alternative medicine shown on Chanel 4 a couple of weeks ago. http://www.richarddawkins.net/article,1556,Enemies-of-Reason,Google-Links I find myself in a bit of a dilemma here. On the one hand, my life has been saved by conventional medicine and very high technology while on the other hand my own father’s life after his cancer and RT, was extended by 16 years when conventional medicine offered a rather brutal surgical solution which offered only a 50:50 chance of success. When my father said that he preferred to examine the complementary medicine route, his own GP agreed saying he had nothing to lose.

I like the programmes but find Richard Dawkin’s attitude rather dismissive and the people featured who practised complimentary medicine do not put their case very well. I get the disctict feeling that his main gripe is the lack of testing in non-mainstream medicine rather than whether it worked or not. If this alternative medicine switches on a self-healing mechanism, then what is the problem?

No mention for example, was made of the late Harry Edwards who became a world-famous spiritual healer with thousands of documented cases where he cured people conventional medicine could not help. His work carries on http://www.sanctuary-burrowslea.org.uk/ and Patrick Holford the nutritionist, would have made a good adversary too www.patrickholford.com Each programme is about 47 minutes long and of course, one never knows what was edited out.

August Bank Holiday Monday finds me at what might be called my spiritual home, Lasham Gliding Club. I have not flown since 2003 and my recent visits there have left me too tired to fly. It is approaching lunch time so after beef and rice, I walk the half mile from the club house to the launch point, keeping an eye out for the many machines landing and being launched by aerotow and winch.

At the launch point, CFI Gordon is busy directing the winch launch queue off the grass and the aerotow launch queue off the mile-long main runway. This involves a handheld radio for aerotow launches and light signals from the launch point bus for winch launches. I write my name on the flying list for a check flight and refamiliarise myself with the operations of the launch point. Between launches, we catch up on my missed time at Lasham http://www.lasham.org.uk/ The year so far has been pretty awful weather-wise and the Regional Gliding Championships were a wash-out with 7 consecutive no-flying days and only two days when any task was set. The National Gliding Championhips also held at Lasham were the opposite, with 8 consecutive good flying days, being timed just right.

I mention that I sold my 19 metre Slingbsy Kestrel but want my next glider to be a two-seater so I can take friends flying too. Interestingly, he mentions that quite a few gilder pilots feel the same way and that there are a lot of two-seater gliding syndicates at Lasham. Some of the better-performance ones suffer no performance penalty for having two seats rather than one.

While we are talking, gliders land and a buggy or a pick up goes to haul them back to the launch point. A lady who has been driving the pick up that retrieves the winch cables from the winch lorry at the other end of the runway wants to have lunch, so I take over from her. She briefs me on the subtleties involved as it is a long time since I did this. No power steering on the old pick up but as the second cable is used and the glider zooms up into the sky, I bomb off down the runway to the winch to get the two cables, and drive back to the launch point at about 20 mph. There are lulls in activity as the lift is obviously working and flights get longer.

Gordon goes off for lunch and the launch point is now run by a lady I saw earlier parking her glider. Things get a bit busier with plenty of radio calls to the launch point: one, from the club house informing us that people have arrived for air-experience flights (thank you for telling us) two, someone has landed out and needs an aerotow retrieve (we are short of tug-pilots at the moment so he will have to wait) three, can a twin-engined plane overfly us on his landing as he is visiting the aircraft maintenance facility at the other side of the airfield (yes, but we are a bit busy) and he passes over us at about 100 feet five minutes later landing well down the runway; four, various motor gliders and light planes call us wanting to take off on the grass or the main runway (yes, OK go now or wait a minute or two until a particular launch has finished). In many ways, a typical day at the launch point.

My name is still on the flying list, but there are no spare instructors and I don’t know who has flown and who has not, so I have no idea how long I will have to wait – not that I am in any hurry today. Then I notice an ASK-21, a modern glassfibre two-seater on the launch point. The instructor there is taking a gentleman in a wheelchair for a flight. I walk over and ask him if he will need the glider after this as I need a check flight and am told I can have the glider when he lands – I will just have to find an instructor.

Two hours later, the ASK-21 lands and three of us carefully lift the gentleman out of the front cockpit of the glider and back into his wheelchair. The new launch point controller finds me an instructor 5 minutes later and we line 3 gliders up on the runway for aerotow launches. “What I have done previously?” I am asked – my answer is over 300 hours and I used to have my own Kestrel but have not flown for 3 years or so.

We put on our parachutes and climb in and I run through the checks: Controls (free and clear), Ballast (we are within the limits), Instruments (altimeter set to zero height – the small adjustment I make tells me that the barometetric pressure is dropping as per the weather forecast), Straps (done up and tight), Trim (central), Canopy (locked and tight) and (air) Brakes (lever forward and locked). There is no retractable undercarriage to worry about as the landing wheel is fixed.

But I know there is another pre-take off item and cannot remember it so I have to ask. It is Eventualities. For example, what would I do if the tug engine failed on takeoff? At very low height, land straight ahead on the airfield; if a bit higher, straight ahead in the next farmer’s field; if higher still, do a turn and land across the main runway. Which way would I turn? Round to the left so I would be landing into wind in this case. “OK, you have control” he says.

The tug arrives and a helper brings the tow cable over with the two metal rings on the end. It is attached to the glider nosehook and given a good pull to make sure it is secure. The helper walks over to the wing tip and picks it up so the wings are now level. The launch point controller gives the “take up slack” command and the tug inches forward. When the rope is taut the “all out” command is given and we are moving. The guy holding the wing tip lets go at running speed but I am able to keep the wings level. We gather speed down the runway but no sign of the glider lifting off as we are a bit heavy with two guys weighing 100 kilos (plus in my case) and we are both wearing parachutes – standard kit for gliding but very rare for general aviation. A voice from the back suggests some more back pressure on the stick and we float off the runway just before the tug. There is a crosswind from the right and I correct for this.

We pass the turbulence near some trees at the NW border of the airfield and climb at an average rate of about 5 knots. The tug turns gently and I have no problem keeping in position behind it – just above the turbulence from propeller. About 5 miles NW of the airfield we reach 3,000 feet and I pull the yellow release knob doing a climbing turn to the left while the tug dives off to the right. There is still lift about and after retrimming the glider to fly at just under 50 knots, I try and centre in some lift. However, I am rusty and my flying is clumsy and uncoordinated and I fail to gain any height. I am warned 3 times about looking out before I turn, especially under the upper wing, and eventually this important lesson sinks in. “Try smaller movements on the stick” a voice says, explaining that this will need less correction with the rudder pedals. Surprise, surprise, this works very well and my flying is smoother and more comfortable – all with less effort. It is also much more efficient as large control surface movements create drag. This might not be a problem in a plane with an engine, but is important in gliders where any height lost has to be climbed back somehow which takes time. Competition glider pilots get thermalling down to a fine art if they want to compete effectively, and will exit a thermal if the rate of climb achieved is too low.

For a while, I can enjoy the height and the view. Having released several miles upwind, we are inevitably drifting back to Lasham. More than 30 miles away in the distance, I can see the Solent as well as the English Channel but it is too hazy to see any of the larger ships which would normally be visible on a clear day.

I mention the idea of stalls and spins – exercises I like to do occasionally on my own to keep my flying skills sharp. I try a stall by bringing the stick back gradually so the nose is quite high. However, the glider just mushes and rocks up and down. The ASK-21 is a difficult glider to stall anyway and we are heavy so the centre of gravity is well forward making the glider quite stable. I try the same thing again but give it a bootful of rudder as the nose nods up and the wing drops and I recover and straighten up. A voice from the back asks “was that a spin?” “No,” I answer, “more like a spiral dive” as the wing did not tuck into a spin as I wanted. Correct answer. We are now at 1,500 feet and I do some wingovers or chandelles and the last one is quite decent with the yaw string on the canopy staying centred, meaning I am not slipping or skidding in my turn.

We are now near the NW corner of the airfield at about 1,000 feet which is adequate height for an older ASK-13 training glider but way more than is needed for a glassfibre ASK-21. Doing aerobatics this low would not be wise, so I do a long wide circuit trimming the airspeed gradually to an increased speed of 55 knots. But at the top of the final leg, the airspeed has increased to over 60 knots so I gently pull back on the stick and the speed reduces as the nose comes up. Now that I have the correct approach speed again, I can use the airbrakes and land on the grass next to the aerotow launch point. We have been airborne for 35 minutes with about 15 minutes of that gained from staying in thermals.

As we bring the glider back to the launch point, I am that I am OK to fly solo. This is a very pleasant surprise as I had imagined it would take several check flights to achieve this, so an hour later I have my first solo flight for years. It is a lovely feeling to get my wings back.