Into my third “cancer year” and worm sessions with the nasendoscope are now every 3 months as treatment finished June 2007. Readers who have missed my fascination with this intriguing bit of kit, see  http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/2007/09/the-positive-side-of-cancer-part-9-which-nostril-sir/ but today it’s the right nostril for a change and no (local) anaesthetic. Session is quite short and gentle, the long worm is slowly extracted, put in a tray for cleaning, so it can do its duty again inside someone else’s head. While the new doctor is writing up the notes, I mention my magnum opus http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/2009/05/financial-planning-for-people-with-cancer/ which colleagues of his have appreciated. Explaining that the idea of this blog is to enable terminally ill people make the most of what time they have, he replies that they deal in averages and that treatment is basically aimed at the 50 per cent who are likely to live > the 12 months example I mentioned. He thens adds that life expectancy can sometimes be like, How long is a piece of string? often, you never really know…..and some people cope better with this issue than others.

The classically-minded here might recall The Three Fates from the Greek Myths who respectively, spun (Clotho) measured (Lachesis) and finally, cut (Atropos) the thread of life for all of us – including the Gods apparently  http://july.fixedreference.org/en/20040724/wikipedia/Moirae

Winning is a subject that generates hundreds of books each year, 72,998 entries in a quick look on  www.Amazon.com but staying ahead of the pack year after year in the Stock Market is very rarely achieved – making life very interesting for IFAs, for example. Easy way to start a bun fight among IFAs or fund managers, is to talk about active and passive investing. Active management can be called stock picking (and selling) with its top down (sector driven) or bottom up (attractive individual shares in any sector) approaches. Passive management is about buying and holding shares to keep to the market/sector average and if the managers do that, they pat themselves on the back – as it is quite diffcult in the long term. Fraudster Bernard Madoff’s apparent consistent positive returns in his hedge funds when everyone else was losing money, were the final giveaway that something was wrong.

One of the few managers who has done this and been a winner or at least stayed in the very first few, is Anthony Bolton former manager of Fidelity Special Situations Fund. Anthony retired a couple of years ago and the fund was split into two. His successor for the half that carries on the same name name has some interesting views on what shares to invest in http://www.citywire.co.uk/adviser/fund-and-fund-manager-performance/-/unit-trusts/uk-all-companies/fund-factsheet.aspx?FundID=7016&CitywireClassSchemeID=1&CitywireClassID=9

Successful funds can be the victim of their own success. Better performance means more money flows in. If you are following a particular active strategy e.g. UK Smaller Companies then there is a limit to the number of buying opportunities – only a limited number of shares will meet your criteria and be attractively priced. There are also limits (say, 5% of the issued shares) of how much a fund can hold of any one company. With more and more money coming in which you have to invest sometime, you can end up buying a bit of nearly everything meaning the fund has some good stocks, some average and some duds, resulting in average or bland performance. So if you end up with bland performance after all this effort, why bother choosing individual stocks in the first place?? explaining perhaps why passive investing is becoming more popular.

Investing in a collective fund is less risky than buying individual shares (unless maybe you have £250,000 +) but is not without risk and the above fund’s objectives are stated in the bottom RH corner of the above-mentioned web page. To clarify, this isn’t a widows and orphans investment. It is an equity-based fund that takes a punt (albeit an educated one) with undervalued i.e. they have been through a bad patch shares but if you have high hopes, are happy with the risk, don’t want to risk paying Capital Gains Tax if you make a big profit when you sell out, it can be bought via a Stock & Share ISA. Here the annual allowance is currently £7,200 but from 6 October 2009, it is £10,200 IF you were born before 6th April 1960. A few bravehearts tried to get the Government to simplify this nonsense and just have a straight increase, but no joy. Partly explains why the UK now has > 10,000 pages of tax legislation while the supposedly regulation-mad Germans survive with under one fifth as many pages.

Market research by insurance and investment companies is usually interesting and gives an opportunity to find out how other IFAs are doing. Meetings are held in a room with a one-way mirror at one end, everything is taped, albeit within strict market research guidelines and top brass from the client company sometimes attend – hiding behind said mirror. Six of us are asked about our views on a whole range of things, mainly due to rebranding resulting from one company being taken over. Seems incongruous to have one good insurance company name for investment bonds and another for pensions when all part of the same group, but sad to lose a perfectly good name. Can we see any “green shoots” of recovery? No, though we are all busy.

Two final points of consensus – firstly, we hope the well-known insurer keeps up its service standards. These are often sacrificed to save costs meaning the cost of sorting out mistakes is basically passed onto the broker – partly explaining why more of us are asking for fees these days for routine work. Secondly, the Government’s continual change, change, change in pensions – where Pension Simplification has become an oxymoron, makes people even more disillusioned about pensions and saving for retirement.

Finally, and perhaps to prove you can’t believe everything you hear, this week  I meet two very busy estate agents. One is busy with lettings and sales while the other mentioned last week, has recruited two people for his landscaping work.

Government has a new thought on long-term care – a £20,000 one-off tax payable at 65. This is the flip side of the NHS and the vast improvement in medical knowledge which has increased life expectancy which continues to increase at the rate of one year, every decade or so. Prudential say that the average pension fund of their customers is around £45,000 at 65. That figure is a year or two old, so probably £35,000 currently and with an annuity rate of say, 6 per cent, that would generate an annual income of £2,100. Take £20,000 out of £35,000 and well, it’s < half that. Income Support please? None of the choices is going to be popular to solve the issue of an increasing elderly population supported and kept in good health by a smaller working one – immigration of  younger working people may help here but disturbs another hornet’s nest – let’s not go there.

Interesting item on long-term care in BBC Radio 4 MoneyBox http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ln09d/Money_Box_18_07_2009/ featuring Solicitors for the Elderly http://www.solicitorsfortheelderly.com/public/index.php Government likes an insured solution (sub-text – someone else will pay for it) but with only one provider in the market currently, interesting to see what bright ideas pop up – see http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/2009/06/health-or-wealth/

If you have a house and are thinking equity release might be a solution, the amount of income you get is based on annuity rates which are not high at the moment (the flip side of one half per cent Base Rate) and the rates for anyone under 70 are not generous – and with house values falling, unlikely to improve. My last equity release case was years ago where a solicitor referred a lady in her 70s to me. A 20 minute telephone conversation established that she was spending all her income and had used up all her savings. Two children and a few grandchildren explained this but a new central heating boiler was needed and with two previous hip replacements having failed, she was unable to have any more. Apart from the extra income needed, some sort of capital reserve or emergency fund was essential. It also seemed perverse to have a fund for house maintenance but nothing for her own health, so we agreed on £10,000 for each eventuality. Fortunately the house was large and unencumbered so plenty of reserve if future income needed. The recent falls in house prices will not have been a problem as only the minimum equity was used.

Just after my Afghan/Vietnam rant last week, an interesting counter-argument “Jingoism in Reverse”  from Charles Moore http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/5852723/Jingoism-in-reverse-how-the-media-are-beating-the-defeatist-drum-in-Afghanistan.html

BRX Bond Street has a lot of visitors and Mike Jennings of procurement specialists www.avenue-uk.com is back after a long while, having completed a 5 month stint at a global bank. With his extensive operational and procurement background, Mike is brought in to establish a Project Office to facilitate a wide ranging procurement project.  The savings are to be a mix of Supply side savings (reducing cost of purchase) and Demand side savings (reducing usage).  The programme will save up to £200 million and has already banked about half of that i.e. new contracts signed.  But after five months and with much work yet to be done, the bank’s senior staff decide that they need to be seen to save money on Consultant costs (across the bank) and so Mike ends up transferring the work he was doing to 5 of the Banks staff to add to their already full time workload.

Do Cost Consultants work in the long term?  If they are paid a one-off fee based on how much they save, then probably not.  Avenue’s own experience of clearing up the aftermath of Cost consultant work is that around 80% of work based on shared savings is either reversed or significantly changed over a three year period.

Same BRX meeting another guest is the Rector of St George’s Hannover Square http://www.stgeorgeshanoversquare.org/ where Handel regularly worshipped and “Morning Calm” is listed as the first regular weekly service of the day.

Seems like the UK may have its own Ponzi story with METRO (the free tube mag) and then Daily Telegraph running the story of an alleged £80 million missing from Business Consulting International http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5872975/Ponzi-suspect-arrested-outside-Knightsbridge-office..html Their site is still running at time of writing  http://www.businessconsulting-intl.com/ and if you think the name sounds good, http://www.businessconsultinginternational.com domain is still available.

But for a change i.e. with Europe having the initiative, Barclays lend US$ 3 billion to small/medium business lender CIT Group in the US  http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/cit-is-near-deal-for-3-billion-loan-to-avert-bankruptcy/?dlbk&emc=dlbk not to be confused with Citibank where it has hired some of their top M&A staff.

For different angle on money, Shawshank Redemption comes to London http://www.theshawshankredemption.co.uk/?gclid=CIOMo_fD5psCFU0A4wodeVWp5Q The film version of Stephen King’s original story Rita Hayworth* and the Shawshank Redemption is on many people’s lists of favourite films, but this is the first time it has been done on stage.

At in2 Consulting, platforms and wraps are topic of the month. These enable all one’s policies to be held, managed, bought and sold via one web-based account. Clients can check their values etc on-line compared to telephoning and asking, how much is my portfolio worth? None of the ones around is perfect and changes from one to another have to be done manually – a real pain. Some platforms have a database of 1,700 funds while others may have 5,000. There is also the issue of rebalancing portfolios. Changing stock market/fund prices can change a cautious portfolio to a more risky one or a real dog in performance terms. Big insurance companies are wading in, have plenty of money to spend and some are looking good. Regulator says we cannot just select one because it suited us a couple of years ago, so we are having a beauty parade. More features mean more costs, whether it is a monthly fee or an annual manangement charge.

Interesting times.

* WW2 screen icon http://images.google.com/images?q=rita+hayworth&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3RNFA_enGB281GB282&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=20lmSpWRGYW5jAfJz_WUAQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4

Charles Dickens and today’s pensions may seem strange bedfellows but the link is there. The Poor Laws of the 1830s forced parish councils to set up workhouses for the poor designed to offer a lower standard of living than available outside. Dickens hated these as detailed in Oliver Twist and later in 1901, Seebohm Rowntree of the Quaker confectionery family published a report outlining the difference between primary poverty and its secondary variant. Previously poverty was believed to be the fault of poorer people i.e. they were lazy, idle, spendthrift etc Primary poverty is where incomes are very low while secondary poverty is caused by spending too much, wasting money and in its most recent version, adding it to the mortgage.

Result is the UK’s first State Pension of 5 shillings a week in 1909 which was means tested and payable at age 70. Germany and New Zealand had got there earlier. Current retirement age is a legacy of the Germany’s Iron Chancellor Bismarck who concerned about the cost, visited his Treasury. Asking “at what age are most of them dead?” he was told 65 which became the German retirement age and others later on.

Fast forward two world wars, there is our National Health Service with a State Retirement Age of 60 for women and 65 for men. These ages will have been equalised by 2020 but the other numbers are frightening. From average life expectancy in 1900 of 49 for women and 45 for men, they are now 84 for women and 79 for men with the gap narrowing slowly. 40 per cent of deaths in 1900 were for children under 5 whereas the figure is now < 1 per cent.

Check your own life expectancy here on the Government Actuary Department website http://www.gad.gov.uk/Demography_Data/Life_Tables/Interim_life_tables.asp

Better health and the pill result in a drastic fall in the birth rate. In 1950 for example, there are four people of working age for every pensioner. Today, the figure is 2.7 and the number is expected to fall to 1.1 by 2050. With two very expensive world wars in the first half of the twentieth century and none in the second half, living standards reach their peak just as the baby boomers born between 1947 and 1964 start to reach retirement age.

So what, you might say? It’s all about taxes or to quote Benjamin Franklin’s certainties, death and taxes.

We pay taxes to support the public sector. Starting with our borders for example, and watching TV programmes like Passport Control, there could be a pretty good case for more guys doing this work rather than less. Defence similarly as the freedoms we all cherish are a bit academic without it. Our Armed Forces are stretched thinner and thinner and in the case of soldiers, buy their own boots as the issued ones aren’t up to the job. Afghanistan is becoming our Vietnam and with the UK’s worst ever military defeat also in Afghanistan in 1842, history really does repeat itself. Count myself fortunate to have visited this beautiful country in my youth where the image of a cobalt blue sky reflected in mirror-smooth paddy fields with new irridescent green rice shoots coming through, all set in red sandstone valleys under bright sunlight, still haunts me. But I digress.

Growth of the public is most worrying with 700,000 more public servants than 1997 and nearly 1 in 5 of the workforce paid for by taxation. Gold-plated pensions for this group will now cost £1.2 trillion. A public sector payfreeze is now mooted but it’s all too little too late – will the current government hobble the public sector or its pensions? With a regime that can create a Better Regulation Executive (it used to the just the plain Ministry of Better Regulation) http://www.betterregulation.gov.uk/ suggesting that the others aren’t doing a very good job – unlikely. It’s bit like a prayer my grandfather had to say in school:

God bless the squire and all his graces

And keep us in our rightful places

But the squire and governments make the rules, printing more money like their predecessors debased the coinage and the cost can be deferred onto our grandchildren. One wonders when these little dears get the vote, take a look at the mountain of debt and all these oldies to support will finally say enough, or perhaps they will reinvent the workhouse?

Some people are aware but few have the courage to say much. Early in this Government, Frank Field was told to “think the unthinkable about pensions” but it cost him his job. His legacy is the Stakeholder pension but this has not been the panacea it was supposed to be, as people on low wages in primary poverty if you like, don’t worry much about pensions. Lord Turner’s recent announcement that he wasn’t radical enough in his previous pension report http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4482528.stm helps a bit, but is not enough.  Raising the retirement age to 70 will mean 27% of men and 17% of women dying before receiving their pension benefits. At least with a private pension something can be passed on to your family but with the State pension, die early and you lose everything even after paying into it for your whole life.

But as always there is good news. An estate agent brings forward plans to move into property management and his gardening business is now very busy, no problems putting bread in the table for his young family or paying the mortgage and still time for the occasional viewing when needed. Another marketing company reduces its staff from 5 to two and half people but has now recruited someone again – turnover down but profits up. Last but not least, most millionaires started their business in a recession.

Unhappy with rates on your deposits or need to borrow and can’t?? Web technology allows ordinary mortals to lend or borrow by matching one side with the other - without the banks.

One site is http://uk.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/ and another is  http://www.firstfunding.org/ As someone who originally trained as a banker, this is interesting to say the least. Like any new investing or new financial territory, do your homework and read the small print. There is unofficial stuff about these sites on the web as well and if you are not happy then don’t – no point in giving yourself sleepless nights for a slightly higher return.

But if you are prepared to take the risk, the higher returns could be there.

Interesting and taxation in the same context might be an oxymoron to many people where military intelligence and United Nations are better known examples. But regular exception seems to be US Tax & Financial’s www.ustaxfs.com annual seminar on/near 4^th July. Providing tax advice only (no accounts or audit work) last year’s one introduced How to make use of Foreign Tax Credits which US citizens acquire when working ex-pat (which can be invested in UK pensions, for example) but this year’s one has a scary Orwellian flavour. Like many good presentations, it starts with a history lesson commencing early in the millennium, when US Government finally gets the Swiss to disclose information about US nationals who have foreign bank accounts there. Estimates vary – Government view says, 1m accounts but with 4 – 7m Americans living overseas, the true figure might be higher.

Governments these days are generally strapped for cash so are not inclined to be kind where evading tax is concerned and the new penalties are draconian. Having already been fined US$780 million by the US Government for abetting tax evasion, UBS is expected to pay US$3 – 4 billion to settle the case next year. The Obama regime’s new rules are the most fundamental change in US tax law since the Kennedy regime of the early 60s. For the uninitiated, tax avoidance is OK (well usually) while tax evasion is not – problem being that the line between the two can be very thin and increasingly, governments have a habit of rubbing it out and drawing it in a different place.

The US Tax Return has a little box that you tick if you have a foreign bank account, but getting your tax return wrong = perjury. Having a non-US bank account does just not mean an account with your name on it as account holder either. It means that any non-US account you may have an interest in or have signing power over and the fact that you get no benefit from this account or have no knowledge of it isn’t the point. Where aggregate value is > US10,000, penalties can be up to 35 per cent of the account plus any tax that is due. So say, a British/American couple with joint bank, broking accounts and property may now have to report all their assets etc to the US Tax Authorities. The forms aren’t simple either and while the law has been in existence for years, enforcement and penalties are recent – with the new President it seems.

With the US Government getting into the Swiss banking system, French, Italian and UK governments think “me too” and HMRC creates a HNW (high net worth for my less affluent readers) unit and special section for the über wealthy. Quite logical you may think, but just to help them get the feel of the people they will be dealing with, HMRC hold a lavish launch party in Whitehall with champagne, canapés etc to which some tax professionals are invited – taking their cue perhaps from Labour MPs a few years ago where the likes of John Prescott and Tony Blair taking their Summer hols on some billionaire’s yacht were a common news story.

Nastiest aspect of the new rules though is that some of the wealth in Switzerland for example, was put there when people fled or were expelled from their homelands thus including, a lot of Jewish people and Iranians for example. Parents who may now be in their 80s have often told their children little or nothing about these accounts and one would hardly expect Swiss bankers to write to potential owners or beneficiaries telling them their good fortune.  The Swiss “Numbered Accounts” are legendary here. If you want to want know how much is in one of these accounts, you have to go the bank yourself and speak to the respective bank manager. Bank statements are generally not given unless specifically requested giving an interesting angle to the old saying, “if you don’t ask, you don’t get…”

But there is some good news, and the tax equivalent of “buy now while stocks last” or maybe a car boot sale, is an Amnesty. In the US, this has the label Voluntary Disclosure Programme which comes in a Noisy version (spill everything, conference call, pay everything including penalties – off the hook if you have told them everything) or Quiet version (whoops! I forgot something, here are the forms – hope everything is OK now).

Come Autumn, HMRC are due to have their version with the sale of a lifetime, bargain basement penalty of 10 per cent on unpaid tax, as cheap as any sanction gets for this sort of thing, provided full disclosure made and other conditions are met. 20 years of tax returns?? US states are at it too but calls to Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia reveal widely differing approaches especially as to whether previous non-disclosure will be treated as penalties and interest. To add to the fun, reporting detail of foreign bank accounts is done on a US Treasury form – separately from the IRS Tax Return and since these are Federal forms, there maybe state reporting to do as well.

Interviews with some of the IRS Criminal Investigation Special Agents who are enforcing the Voluntary Disclosure Programme start off with a list of 30 questions, with the first one something like: Are these funds legal or illegal? Sensible answer might be: can you define legal please?

Some of above Special Agents are young, inexperienced and don’t get through a lot of the questions properly but after 6 weeks, you get a certificate basically telling you if have been accepted into the Voluntary Disclosure Programme or not. In an unkind moment, one might think that the people drafting these rules don’t open an Atlas very often with one consequence that UBS and Deutsche Bank for example, have basically sent their US clients a cheque politely but firmly asking them to take their business elsewhere with Lloyds TSB recently announcing they would be doing this too.

It’s all a bit sad. Tax avoidance used to be a game for intellectuals where a smart individual would spot a loophole which would be closed down at the next Budget. But political pressures have made this a game of “hardball” with sometimes retroactive legislation (e.g. apportionment rules for film tax schemes) and one wonders how much of the extra revenue goes into running the cost of an ever-enlarging public sector? With their employment and pensions effectively guaranteed or insulated from the rules of government, no end it is sight and in the meantime, we all get poorer – there are people in government who seem to believe that increasing taxes will somehow stimulate economic growth.

For the foreseeable future and if you have money that is spread around a bit, the word is probably Amnesty – but for God’s sake get proper advice, as the above is but a brief summary.

Lunch with  Trevor who has always handled my second mortgage enquiries well, not to mention getting funding for people in the sub-prime category at reasonable rather than the more common eye-watering rates is interesting. If you need extra borrowing, sometimes it can be better to keep an existing loan and have a more expensive second mortgage – especially if you were smart enough to sign up for a juicy longish-term fixed or discounted one. This can avoid paying a penalty on an existing loan and then replacing it with a larger and more expensive first mortgage which may have a fresh set of Early Repayment Penalties.

But 28 years in business and Trevor and IFA business partner make their first loss and sub-prime lenders are very few and far between. Solution: close the office which sadly means letting staff go; work from home (Trevor has always been good at visiting clients to get the paperwork done) with spouses helping with office admin + do Buy-to-Let business which was turned away before. Result: business is now cash positive, profitable and lean enough to survive not to mention confirming confidence in a supplier. Interesting if the government took a similar approach to our enlarged public sector and its gold-plated pensions  http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jun/29/public-sector-pensions-reform – taxes could be reduced, we would all have more money to spend and green shoots of recovery might start showing themselves.

But some people prefer to make their own green shoots or at least help others to do this. Bill Morrow of Angels Den http://www.angelsden.co.uk/?vcn=googleadwords&vcad=angelsden&gclid=CLfy-8u8tJsCFc0B4wod0B3DOg entertains us at www.3Cscommunity.org on 30th June giving us as he puts it, some dirty little secrets about angel funding:

* Registration costs £500 – less than some other organisations charge, but still 100 people a week just send their stuff in i.e. without paying. Reminding us of his Scottish ancestry, he points out that these are not looked at! Angels register and answer a 14 point questionnaire about the type of deal they are interested in. If one meets their criteria, they get an e-mail but it is up to the investor to log in and examine it.

* Minimum investment £6,000, 156 deals done so far, 2,700 registered angels of which 300+ visit the site daily looking for reasons to invest, rather than the opposite. Average investment £227,000 and maximum investment so far, £1.2 million. One large deal was done without consulting the legal people – investor was experienced  and went thorugh proposal pointing out what he liked and did not. Amendments made, deal done.

* After Speed Dating and Speed Networking, Speed Funding seems to work too. Monthly events costing the entrepreneur £250 allow a three minute presentation to a table of three angels, then they move on to the  next one. The passion/skill of the presenter but particularly the strength of the management team seem to carry the day > the business plan and 3 or 4 deals are typically done at that these events.

* Plain English please! Digital/IT people are particularly prone to lapse into techie speak and I can see your lips moving but don’t understand a word of what you are saying, helps nobody.

* Other fees are 5 per cent of funding raised but they do not take any equity stake in the business, unlike many other angel organistations who want both.

* 56 per cent of investors lose all their investment which represents an average of 9 per cent of their investable wealth. Needless to say, these are unregulated investments with no protection under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme but most common mistake angels make is to invest only once. There is a learning curve here and a series of investments is likely to be wiser than a one-off.

* How long before you can exit? Business plans are often structured to a 3 or 5 year timetable where the exit might be: selling the business to someone else, selling some shares on the second-level stock market AIM, or maybe someone buying in to the business (MBI) but the answer here is nobody knows. Still tempted? See above website.

Information retrieval specialists http://www.oneis.co.uk/ are first main presenter while Bradford Backus of Audio 3 Ltd is back looking for top-up funding to finish tiny noise monitors that will track – Noise-induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) for which there is now an EC directive. Cellists are particularly vulnerable here and it seems we now have an inkling why Beethoven went deaf – the musicians did it. How much they will use this little toy remains to be seen but have no doubt he will get his money and Brad is that rare example of technie who speaks the same lingo we do which has helped him win several innovation awards including  http://www.ucl.ac.uk/advances/resources/UCL%20Bright%20Ideas%20Award%20guidelines%20for%20web.pdf Final speaker is aussie Giles Russell of Imaculum whose pocket gizmo allows doctors to do 5 main neurological tests, rather than carry around a set different tools for each one. His vision of the potential of current technology to medicine is worthy of a  blog on its own, but that will have to wait. Next 3Cs meeting in September.

Reverting to a musical theme, regular treats for me are three concerts a year with Barnet Symphony Orchestra where troisieme fille is in the horn section. Three pieces of music usually fill the programme on a Sunday evening with location back at St John’s Church in Friern Barnet. Walking in at rehearsals end at 5.30, it is strange to see them them all in open sandals, T-shirts and chinos but especially intriguing with a strong smell of incense still in the air. Two hours later in full bib & tucker see Grieg, Brahms & Tchaikovsky dealt with very well – led by two brother soloists aged 18 & 20 in the Brahms Double Concerto - there is a third equally talented one as well. With no shortgage of young talent coming through, one never leaves a concert without a feeling of optimism to counter current gloom, scandals and of course just now, all those Michael Jackson jokes. Previously mentioned vacancies for trumpet and trombonist  appear to have been filled http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/2009/03/through-the-ecliptic/ but still vacancies in the strings. Each concert means 11 rehearsals held on a Monday evening, with next concert Sunday 29th November 2009 www.barnetsymphony.org.uk meaning rehearals start again September.