Life’s Coincidences

One of my newsfeeds shows a study from Iran linking drinking hot tea with oesophagal cancer while I am reliving my own overland experiences of my youth reading Rory MacLean’s Magic Bus Checking back on the original link a few days later leads nowhere, but there are several links mainly from 2009 showing increased gullet or oesophagal cancer in the Golestan province of Iran, where tea is drunk very hot. Having heard of a triple point of water and with my own cancer being in the same area plus having learned to drink scalding tea in Iran, I am almost tempted to wonder if there is a triple point of cancer and I don’t mean a horoscope.

The Hippie Trail

It’s the 1960s and the baby boomers are growing up. Living standards are rising and if you haven’t got a job a few months after leaving college, there is something wrong with you. One thing we really want to forget is the greyness and austerity of the 1950s. Early in the decade, a handful of people reach India after travelling overland, and when the Beatles and other famous people latch onto transcendental meditation thousands more make the journey.

George’s turn comes in 1970 and after the beauty and poverty of Eastern Turkey, Iran is a pleasant change with motorways and progress. This is the time of the Shah of Iran and westerners are welcome. After detours south to Istfahan, Persepolis & Shiraz where the road runs alongside the Great Salt Desert and Great Sand Deserts, it is time to resume our journey East where the next big town is Meshed/Mashhad, centre of the Persian carpet industry and at the time, home to the largest mosque in the World.

Driving east from Teheran, the start of our 900km drive is pleasant enough. Our Thai friends have gone to the airport and the four of us in the LWB Land Rover are quite relaxed.  82km southeast from Teheran is the small town of Garmsar, these days best known perhaps as county town of the birthplace of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad It is Saturday afternoon and the town is quite busy. Our vehicle is RHD while Iran drives on the right, so I am in no hurry to rush through the busy main street. Several times, local drivers honk their horns at my caution and ahead of me a coach is parked on the wrong side of the road so the passenger door opens into the middle of the road, rather than onto the pavement. Pulling out to pass, a small boy dashes out of the bus with his head down, looking straight ahead running to my left. Instinctively, I step on the brakes and the Land Rover skids to a stop. In slow motion, I see him bounce off the front of our vehicle while his elbow breaks an amber indictor light cover. He lies very still and the broken light cover bounces in the road coming to rest near him. I feel sick. Having learned first aid in the Scouts perhaps I can help? Before I get to him some locals bundle him into a taxi and take him away. The boy’s relatives are crying openly and I wander around the Land Rover wondering what I can do. Nobody notices me – it is as if I am invisible.

Eventually, the police arrive and bricks are wedged against the tyres to prevent the Land Rover being driven off. At the police station, my passport is taken and my friends are told to come back the following morning as I will be going to the local court. There is little my friends can do so they camp outside town while I am put in a spare room with bars on its high windows. There is a camp bed and an old J T Edson paperback but I am not in the mood for cowboy stories.

When it is dark, I am invited into the reception room and invited to join the guys there. I sit at one end with two guys while the uniformed duty officer sits at his desk at the other end. After a while, my friends ask me for “pul” which from the rubbing of the thumb and forefingers, obviously means money. My friends have not left me with any cash apart from three little coins which I put on the table – not even enough for a cup of tea. My hosts shrug their shoulders.

Tea but no Sympathy

By now it is Saturday night and like many police stations around the world, they are busy. A small heavily-pregnant lady walks in and starts a dialogue with the duty officer. Several people are locked up in the cells and it looks like she is trying to get her husband/relative released. No dictionary is needed to see she is getting nowhere. The duty officer sits with his arms folded shaking his head. She does not give up and tries a more sympathetic approach. With a little sigh, she places her bump on the duty officer’s desk leaning on her right hand. Her sweet voice continues with graceful hand gestures – all to the great amusement of my friends sitting at the table. After a couple of minutes, she moves her belly to the left of the desk making another little sigh as she continues her plea. Shortly afterwards, and with a final sigh she heaves her belly to the right side of the desk again and carries on with her sweet voice and hand gestures. Ten minutes of this and it is obvious she is not going to succeed although my friends are really enjoying the show. With loud screams and curses, she finally storms out of the room slamming the door while tears of laughter come from the rest of us.

My Asbestos Throat

In the meantime, tea has been made - boiled in a small aluminium teapot on top of an old upright paraffin stove, but drunk out of one small shared glass that would serve as an egg cup. My turn comes round but the tea is far hotter than I am used to so only manage to drink a few small sips. Never mind, the contents are thrown away and the glass rinsed, so the next person can have some. Next time, I manage to drink just about all my tea and for years afterwards, people are amazed at my asbestos throat.

Dinner arrives and my hosts share what they have with me. Eventually, I retire to my room and am given a paraffin heater against the cold. Around midnight? some men start singing in the street outside my room, stamping their feet in the chorus. This is the only time I am afraid as I am wondering, are they putting a curse on me? The singing stops and I manage to get some sleep.

To be continued

You have discovered a cure for breast cancer, now what?

First question might be is it really new? Next, can you prove it? Notebooks in particular are essential to establish who did what & when. Christi Mitchell Intellectual Property Director and Founder of Highbury Ltd, an IP consultancy has some intriguing insights at May’s 3Cs Community meeting.  A handwritten note can do the job like the one below showing the first message sent between two computers over the internet’s ancestor ARPANET but a breast cancer cure is likely to be more complicated.

Even when you can prove you did it, getting a patent can take ages. In some areas like biotechnology, nanotechnology and stem cell development, there is a chronic shortage of Patent Examiners with a backlog of up to 48 – 60 months. A patent isn’t always the best protection for your Intellectual Property either: there are also Trade Marks e.g. the name/brand Coca Cola Design Rights e.g. the Coca Cola bottle, Copyright and Know How or Trade Secrets e.g the Coca Cola formula/process. Few new businesses have the resources for long legal battles, so a good place to start might be the British Business Library near Euston Station in London to see what else has been registered. In the case of cures for breast cancer, there are 10,000 patents/applications already and once your application is made, it is public knowledge.

Patent Trolling is a new game in town where you get sued by someone who says they have the idea (the Intellectual Property) that you have worked so hard for, but their real motive is to get some money out of you rather than use the actual patent itself. One guy’s story is below, but some smart people have even applied to patent the idea of Patent Trolling

The proper order for protecting your idea is: Trade Mark, company name then Domain name although as the latter may be the cheapest, people often do it in reverse order. If you need to raise money for starting the business, a real one (doesn’t matter if it’s part-time) has a much better chance than the one that is just an idea on paper. Don’t give up your day job, has much to commend it. And for proving what you have done before applying for your patent or whatever, there are Online Notebooks if you don’t want a paper one.

Legal Stuff

So how much is it going to cost to get some legal protection for your idea or business? Graham Stedman of Nabarro solicitors, hosts for the latest 3Cs Community meeting at give us an idea, having a dedicated department which has helped 46 businesses so far. Fees for companies which need to raise funds are fixed and related to the amount of finance being raised: funds required up to £500,000 – fee £5,000; up to £1,000,000 – fees £10,000 and for over £1,000,000 – fees £15,000 but only payable when the funds are raised.

Nabarro’s Due Diligence Questionnaire at around 50 pages eliminates 90% of the usual questions and their Business Agreement between the entrepreneur and investors has only one Warranty Clause where some business agreements have pages of them. With companies practically trying to patent the idea of patenting (see above) perhaps there’s a patent opportunity here for American law firms to use only one Warranty Clause as in my experience, American law firms sometimes seem to charge by the word? (Only kidding)

The Castaway film (2000) starring Tom Hanks has a sad moment when he is looking for useful tools to help him in his exile on a remote island. A package he opens from his crashed plane contains a divorce agreement – two inches thick. One of the more amusing aspects of my earlier international banking career was the difference in methodology between New York and London, for identical international syndicated loan business. Give it to an English law firm and the loan agreement was typically not much over 50 pages and in large type. Same type of loan with the same international banks from a Wall Street law firm and it was twice as thick with double the density of words per page and many more clauses. All pretty useless when the market collapsed, proving the old saying: If you owe a bank £1,000 you are in trouble, owe the bank £10 million (choose your amount) and they are in trouble and may have to lend you more. All this before the Euro was invented and Greece was only thought of as a tourist destination.

Next 3Cs Community meeting is Thursday 5th July 2012 at UCL Advances the incubator unit of University College London. Two pitching slots are available.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of prosperity, it was the winter of austerity…..Thank you Charles Dickens and his immortal opening to A Tale of Two Cities.

Shall we Dance?

It’s Friday night, George is driving to tango at Negracha near Holborn and on the radio it’s BBC Radio 4 Any Questions? As a change from the ongoing Leveson Inquiry questions where the moral might be the so-called 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught, austerity questions and the solutions to our economic woes are popular topics.

Some of the answers are not so much The Usual Suspects, rather the usual omissions. Spend more money on infrastructure projects, bring them forward to create jobs? We are doing that already with Crossrail for example (map above) costing £14 billion making it the largest construction project in Europe, not to mention the £billions spent on the 2012 London Olympics. Borrow more money, reduce the government spending deficit more slowly to ease the pain – so our grandchildren are going to pay off our debts? Soak the rich, increase taxes to fund economic growth and one panel member is willing to pay higher taxes to help! Tell that to Tony Blair please who manages to pay £315,000 tax on £12 million earnings and with the London Mayoral elections this week, how about a whisper in Ken Livingstone’s ear, now he has jumped on the tax avoidance bandwagon?

This is all now, but a strange silence about the future where the subject is basically pensions, or how much income will we have when we are old and stop working – voluntarily or involuntarily? Protests from public sector workers about higher pension contributions are a typical spoiled brat reaction to  reduced pocket money. The need for higher employee contributions is a direct result of our living longer as a result of better healthcare – the older lower rate of contributions ain’t enough. There is a big silence about the huge contributions made by public sector employers, which can be nearly double the personal contribution. And a deafening silence about the guaranteed nature of public sector pensions where the employer – that’s the Great British Public or all of us, pay higher taxes to insulate the public sector from the pension investment risks everyone else has to face. To cap it all public sector wages are higher than private sector wages. It’s criminal,  unsustainable and hampering economic recovery. Recent government changes have not helped either.

With a final salary (or defined benefit) pension based on service, the longer you work the better your pension. Work 30 years in a company with one of these pensions where the so-called accrual rate is based on 60ths and you will have earned 30/60ths or half of your final  (or average or whatever) salary as a pension. The government knows that this is unsustainable so decides to change things. Jolly good! But hang on a minute, the new rules include an accrual rate of 54ths which is more expensive? 30 years service with 54ths accrual gives a pension of 55 per cent rather than 50 per cent, and you are supposed to be saving money?  It’s almost like being told that you need to replace your petrol-guzzling car which does only 20 miles per gallon. Government does this for you – and the new car does 18 miles per gallon. Savings to the government in the long run? Nil according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies. Back comes the feeling that Gordon Brown’s ghost lives at No. 10 & No 11 Downing Street.

And the other news this week? As most people don’t save enough for their pensions, 45 per cent of over 50s will be working to age 75 according to The Pensions Institute. Less than 10 per cent the planned austerity cuts planned for the next 5 years have been made, so enjoy the good times now.

Chancellor’s Prayer

Saddest thing of all? This government (and others before it) believes that you can increase taxes and have higher growth, rather like adding weight to a racing car will make it go faster. That increasing taxes which give people less to spend will cure a recession. Recessions are by definition what happens when we, employers, companies & governments spend less.

The Chancellor’s Prayer? Please Lord let it be different this time!

I’ve written it, now what?

An idea for a TV series based on a financial adviser. Had the idea for ages and between Christmas and New Year most evenings are spent getting the script written, rewritten and rewritten. Leave it for a week and look at it again and you’ve guessed it, it gets rewritten. As Made in Dagenham writer William Ivory said, “Writing is about rewriting”. The catalyst that makes me finish it is a screenwriting competition with a January deadline found via BBC Writers’ Room 

Part of the story involves the Foreign Legion about which I have written before, but the newest book I have read talks about experiences from the 1990s. Don’t want to get facts wrong so onto the net for some research. A few ex-legionnaires have their own webpages but there is a Foreign Legion Association of Great Britain where I find contact details for a Brig. Hunter-Choat. My email lists several questions asking him to confirm what I have read and a few days later come the answers. Three more questions are answered in 24 hours and job done.

The first 10 pages of the script go in to the competition with nearly 2,000 others, but doesn’t make the final cut. It would have been nice to be able to go back and say someone likes the story and thank you for your help, but seeing Brig. Hunter-Choat’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph yesterday sadly puts that out of reach.

Brig. Hunter-Choat’s time in the Foreign Legion overlaps fellow British Legionnaire Simon Murray’s time as they both served in Algeria before the Foreign Legion moved back to Aubagne just north of Marseilles. The latter’s book Five Years in the Foreign Legion apparently led to a generation of SMLs (Simon Murray Legionnaires) while Hunter-Choat’s time in the Legion is shared with quite a few German soldiers who join after WW2.

At 1,400 words Brig. Hunter-Choat’s obituary is much longer than the average Daily Telegraph one, but then it reflects a remarkable life.

Brigadier Tony Hunter-Choat, who has died aged 76, was a special forces soldier who served with the SAS; his remarkable military career began, however, with the French Foreign Legion, with which he was three times decorated and took part in a coup to unseat Charles de Gaulle.

6:22PM BST 23 Apr 2012

Anthony Hunter-Choat was born on January 12 1936 in Purley, south London, the son of Frederick, who worked in insurance, and Iris, a schoolteacher. The family would later move to Ascot.

Brigadier Tony Hunter-Choat

Tony was educated at Dulwich College and then Kingston College of Art, where he trained as an architect. On holidays he hitchhiked around Europe, developing a taste for travel and an affinity for languages.

In March 1957, having decided that architecture was not for him, he decided to indulge his thirst for adventure and made his way to Paris to enlist in the Foreign Legion. He was pursued by his mother, keen to get her errant son back to his studies, but by the time she caught up with him he had signed up.

Hunter-Choat was sent for basic training to Algeria, then in the throes of increasing anti-colonialist insurrection, and volunteered to complete the extra training necessary to become a paratrooper. He was duly posted, on October 15, to the 1st Battalion, Régiment Etranger de Parachutistes (1e REP), with which he would be involved in continuous operations for almost five years.

By the late 1950s the Algerian War of Independence had become a high-intensity conflict fought on a wide scale, and required the presence on the ground of 400,000 French and Colonial troops to maintain a semblance of order.

Hunter-Choat and his comrades were involved in hundreds of operations, and suffered and inflicted considerable casualties. In February 1958, as a young machine-gunner, he took part in the battle of Fedj Zezoua, in the woods east of Guelma, in the north-east of the country. Two armed units of the rebel Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) were dug in on a hillside. The legionnaires began their attack at 7am and met stiff resistance, but after being dropped by helicopter (balancing precariously on a cliffside) in the midst of the FLN positions, they overwhelmed the enemy. Hunter-Choat was awarded the Cross of Valour – the first of three. He would also be awarded the Médaille Militaire.

Less than two weeks later he was wounded as the 1e REP pursued FLN groups through the wooded territory close to the border with Tunisia.

It was an odd fact of life in the Legion that one in four of his NCOs was German, and many had fought on the Russian Front. Hunter-Choat recalled that their homes had become marooned behind the Iron Curtain and that, to his brothers-in-arms named Adolf, Rolf, Hans or Karl, the Legion had “become their country”. Some of them were former SS troops and were, Hunter-Choat noted, “superb soldiers and great trainers of men”. “They would expose themselves to danger in order to bring on the young soldiers,” he said.

After recovering from his wounds he was repeatedly involved in intense fighting against the FLN. But as the tide of war turned, and it became clear that Paris was preparing to negotiate Algeria’s independence, Hunter-Choat found himself fighting his own side.

The Algiers putsch, as it became known, was a coup launched by four retired French generals to oust Charles de Gaulle and seize control first of Algeria, then of Paris. Hélie de Saint Marc, commander of the 1e REP, agreed to take part, and, on the night of April 21/22 1961, Hunter-Choat was part of the plotters’ force which occupied key locations in Algiers.

On April 22 the message was broadcast throughout Algeria: “The army has seized control.” The following day, however, de Gaulle appeared on television, wearing his uniform of 1940, and called for soldiers to back him. As his message was retransmitted through barracks, support for the coup collapsed. The 1e REP was disbanded; as its men were marched out of camp they sang Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien. Shortly afterwards Hunter-Choat’s five-year term of service expired and he returned home.

His father encouraged him to join the British Army, but his first application for a short service commission, in March 1962, was rejected by the War Office as he “exceeds the age limit for a commission under any existing procedures”. By April a second letter, written by his father, elicited a more positive response: “It has been agreed that you may be accepted, as a special case, for consideration.”

After passing out top of his course at Mons officer cadet school he was commissioned into the 7th Gurkha Rifles (Duke of Edinburgh’s Own) and posted to Malaya. From there, in early 1963, he was sent to Brunei and on to Sarawak and Borneo, where he fought in what became known as the Indonesian Confrontation . The scale and ferocity of this war was considerably lower than Algeria, but the hostility of the climate and jungle environment made for hard soldiering. Jungle patrols often lasted several weeks and contact with the enemy, though infrequent, was frequently a vicious affair. While there Hunter-Choat took part in cross-border raids into Indonesia (officially denied at the time) as well as coastal raids.

He was now keen to convert to a regular commission. Told that he was too old to do so in the infantry, he discovered that the Royal Artillery age limit was higher, and joined in early 1964. Upon transfer, he remained in Borneo, where he served as a forward observation officer until 1966, when he returned to Britain.

Hunter-Choat attended staff college at Camberley in 1969-70, then served in 45 Regt RA before becoming a battery commander and second-in-command of 3 Royal Horse Artillery in Hong Kong.

Between 1975 and 1977 he was on the directing staff of the junior division of the staff college at Warminster and then, unusually for an officer without a British special forces background, was offered command of 23 Special Air Service Regiment, a territorial unit. His accomplishments there were so highly regarded that he remained with special forces, in a variety of command and staff roles, for the rest of his Army career.

He commanded 23 SAS until 1983, though the sensitivity of his work during this period means that, to this day, few details of his service can be published.

From 1983 to 1986 he was a senior staff officer at Nato headquarters and a special forces adviser to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe. His last post was a personal liaison between the Commander-in-Chief of BAOR and his American equivalent.

He was appointed OBE.

After his retirement from the Army in the rank of colonel he immediately became commander of the Sultan of Oman’s special forces in the rank of brigadier. He was responsible for increasing numbers in the Sultan’s special forces from under 1,000 to more than 2,000, and for improving their equipment and capability. In 1995 he was presented with the Omani Order of Achievement by Sultan Qaboos.

He retired from the Sultan’s service in 1997, and in 1998-99 he helped verify the crumbling ceasefire in Kosovo, before becoming head of security for the Aga Khan. This involved helping to create a base for the Aga Khan, famous for his interest in the Turf, at the celebrated racing town of Chantilly, France.

After the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Hunter-Choat became head of security for the Program Management Office (PMO), which was involved in overseeing the distribution of billions of dollars of reconstruction funds to projects throughout the country. There he briefly became embroiled in controversy after the PMO awarded a contract worth $293 million to Aegis, a private security company headed by Tim Spicer.

According to Vanity Fair, Hunter-Choat and Spicer had known each other for years. DynCorp, a rival to Aegis, lodged a protest with the US Congress, but this was rejected, and there was no suggestion that Hunter-Choat had behaved improperly.

Hunter-Choat was later responsible for the security plans for US Aid in Afghanistan. He was also an accomplished lecturer on leadership and security issues.

Hunter-Choat was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Freeman of the City of London. He was a former president and secretary general of the British branch of the Foreign Legion Association and also a keen Freemason.

He was appointed an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 2001 and promoted Commander in 2011.

Tony Hunter-Choat was regarded by his friends and comrades as an outstanding soldier and leader.

He married, first, in 1964, Maureen McCabe. The marriage was dissolved, and he married secondly, in 1982, Linda Wood. He is survived by his wife and their son and two daughters, as well as by two daughters of his first marriage.

Last Will & Testament

Wills seem to be in the news again or at least twice on BBC Radio 4 this morning. Curiously, writing wills is regulated in Scotland but not south of the border. Most people do not get round to writing one including quite a few solicitors I have met, so there is a raft of rules the government has made up over the years so money and chattels can be dealt with when someone passes on. It would be chaos otherwise. Needless to say, these rules may not suit everybody and there are always horror stories like my earlier Will You, Won’t You?

But here is another will story from Tony Millson, at Royds solicitors.

David was a very understated guy, people just knew him as the quietly efficient company secretary always puffing on his pipe (in the days when one could puff away on a pipe in an office!). Mavis his wife, did some clerical work and they lived in a modest but well maintained semi-detached in the suburbs of South West London.

The company where David was secretary was now a household name – an international public company and he was getting paid to match with some significant share options. He and Mavis had married relatively late in life – his pipe smoking went with the confirmed bachelor image and he was now in his mid-fifties. They had no children, but he had the responsibility of his aged mother in a nursing home. David had a married sister with two daughters at university while Mavis had no family.

One of David’s habits was a postprandial bath, but one evening when Mavis went into see him – he was dead – and he had not made a will. The semi-detached house had been David’s before the marriage and was still in his name. Conveniently for Inheritance Tax, it was valued at £450,000 and on intestacy, this house (together with his personal chattels) amounted to the entitlement that Mavis had as his surviving spouse.

The remainder of his estate worth about £1,000,000, passed: one half to Mavis on a life interest only basis - after her death the capital of that half passed to David’s mother (if she was still alive or, if not, to David’s sister). The other half of the excess over the initial £450,000 passed to David’s mother outright.

Doing the Right Thing?

By the time of David’s death, David’s mother dementia had reached such a stage that she did not understand that David had died – possibly happily. A few months later she herself was dead. It being a family tradition she also had not made a Will. The whole of her estate, including the half a million or so pounds she was about inherit from David’s estate passed to David’s sister. David’s sister was embarrassed about this all and believed that morally the money was Mavis’s. Accordingly, because the deaths had taken place in fairly swift order, she was able to enter into a Deed of Variation relating to Mavis of her mother’s half share of David’s estate to the effect that that passed back to Mavis – incidentally it also saved something like £70,000 in Inheritance Tax.

It is not entirely clear what the moral of this tale is. In my experience, families rarely ‘do the right thing’ when money is involved. David’s sister certainly did the right thing. Mavis has done her best, particularly for David’s nieces, ever since.

However, this issue that was left to chance could easily have been dealt with by David having made a proper Will.

In the same vein, if you have any old pension policies you might wish to check that your beneficiary details are up to date.

Spies Wide Shut

George is confused. UK Justice Secretary Ken Clarke wants new closed courts where our security services MI5, MI6 & presumably GCHQ can testify behind closed doors. This will allow important evidence to be given without risking revealing the identity of our spooks and protecting their sources. People object (well someone always will) but in the 40th anniversary year of Watergate, the Americans object as well? It’s a bit strange.

Standing as a monument to openness and accountability, the Watergate Scandal started with a burglary that went wrong in 1972. A bug had stopped working at the offices of the Democratic National Committee and needed to be replaced, which meant another break-in. With the intriguing nickname of the Plumbers, the burglars’ connections went to the CIA, the White House, Attorney General and US Justice Department. The cover up was gradually exposed by two intrepid reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and crucially published in The Washington Post with the support of Executive Editor Ben Bradlee. Even with US libel laws being looser than in the UK, the Washington Post took tremendous risks in publishing the story or series of stories. As was commented at the time, an equivalent story would not have seen the light of day in the UK. Imagine 10 Downing Street staff engaging MI5 and freelance operatives to bug Labour Party offices? It took 18 months of slog for The Daily Telegraph’s exposé of MPs expenses to see the light of day, for example.

Looking back unearths some intriguing points. One of the more entertaining characters is E Howard Hunt a lifelong spook and prolific author of spy novels.

When Woodward and Bernstein are told to go and investigate the Watergate break-in, they are less than enthusiastic with one of them muttering that it was “just another burglary”.

Completed 1971, the Watergate Complex was a 10 acre property development in a very good location comprising, offices, a hotel and apartments. One of the offices was taken by the Democratic National Committee and since the President was a Republican, ordered the bugging of their offices. In particular, Nixon was worried that the Democrats might have evidence about his shady deals with billionaire Howard Hughes and with an election coming in November, best try and find out what they know.

The key to the unravelling of the Watergate Scandal was a source with the name Deep Throat taken from a 1972 porno film of the same name. We now know his identity to be Mark Felt former FBI Associate Director. Early on in the investigation, he gets very annoyed when they contact him at his office, and when early enquiries reveal little, the reporters are famously told to “follow the money”. Meetings took place at night in an underground car park.

One thing that has always intrigued me about the Watergate scandal was why did the bug stop working? Was it from a bad batch? Were they always going wrong? Did the quality control guy at the manufacturers have an argument with his wife the night before and just didn’t “give a damn?” Probably too far in the past to be investigated now, but one which might have yielded some interesting facets of human behaviour?

Just over 2 years from the second burglary in June 1972 to 9th August 1974 when Nixon resigned.

American objections to Ken Clarke’s new courts still seem ironic from a country which prides itself on openness and accountability or maybe it reminds us of George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote:

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

What Colour is your Parachute?

…has been a popular job hunting book for 25 years having been updated in 2011. While this has helped many people find a job, what about the other end? How do you lose your job or retire? To a certain extent this issue may solve itself with retirement ages being raised, but that still leaves millions now with no idea.

My first proper job, which was in a bank – when being a banker meant rather more than it does now – being able to take early retirement at 50 was a perfectly reasonable option, if not that likely. Increased life expectancy has driven the need for a higher retirement age where if life expectancy had been increased in line with higher life expectancy from 1948 (when the NHS started), we would get our State Pensions at age 71. Only a year more than the original State Pension Age in 1908 when they were first introduced, and State pensions were means-tested then as well.

Ask people how much they earn, and they will tell you. Even a self-employed person will usually have a good idea what they are going to earn this or next year. Ask them what they will live on in retirement and the near-universal answer is that they haven’t got a clue. To cap it all, people hate saving for pensions and don’t have any plans about selling their business which might give them a lump-sum.

So what happens? Their retirement age arrives quite often involuntarily and most don’t have any plan. Established business people whose enterprise is worth something, can be so wrapped in their work that they carry on when they don’t need to. It was nice a few years ago to be able to ask a client and his wife why he was still working? What do you mean? he said. I went through the picture of their assets, businesses and buy-to-let properties with the income from each. The wife had given me a detailed budget so I knew what income they needed to live on. In front of them, I added the assets up and using a 5% yield, showed them that selling up now and stopping working was not as outrageous as it sounded. Selling everything would have meant some tax to be paid but this can be kept low with good planning. With one of their children now involved in the business, their retirement has moved forward.

But for most of us, how do you plan to be able to stop working?

a) Cheapest, simplest and for many people most appropriate option is a boring old personal pension. If your employer offers a pension where they put in money too, join that one while you can. Contributions will need be about 15 per cent of your earnings which figure can include tax relief. Work out your own retirement income projection on a pension calculator here.

If you want it all in a book, there is Martin Bamford’s How to retire 10 years early

b) Buy-to-Let can be fantastic when it works. You put down a deposit on a property and somebody else pays off the mortgage, making it a self-financing asset, usually after about 15 years. It’s also a tangible asset – you can see it and visit it, but can turn into a nightmare with a bad tenant. Deposits are much higher now than 5 or 10 years ago when you could get a property with a 15 per cent deposit but you will need 30 per cent plus for a buy-to-let deposit these days. This is one sector of the economy doing quite nicely thank you, as when people can’t afford to buy a property, they have to rent or maybe live with parents.

c) Sell your business if you have one, but what would anyone be buying without you in the picture? A list of clients? How much would you pay for your own business and what would anyone be gaining if they bought your business rather than started up on their own? Recurring income is very valuable here and the multiple that someone would pay will vary hugely with type of business and economic conditions.

Another key is what sort of brand does your business have? Does it have an attractive premises/van/logo/website that people remember? You will find brand consultants in business networks.

Who would the buyer(s) be? People starting out for a one person business perhaps. For more substantial businesses, competitors (trade sale) and established companies buying in to a business (MBI).

Other alternatives include Business Agents (think estate agents for businesses) or taking on a younger partner(s) who will gradually take over the reins and pay you something in the process or as an ongoing income. Think of this as a financial marriage and have a proper business agreement. Great if it works but divorces are expensive. If you don’t like the idea of paying commissions, it won’t cost much to advertise via Gumtree for example.

A last point in favour of boring old pensions. If everything goes pear-shaped and you end up bankrupt, the money in your pension is probably safe from creditors.

What’s on TV tonight?

Increasingly, not much it seems or perhaps something is happening to my boredom threshold? Alternatives after you have been through Catch-up TV? Surf the net or perhaps that ancient piece of technology – a book. We all like a good story and as a window on a life George has never encountered, spy thrillers will do nicely. Being a regular reader of them, truth does seem to be stranger than fiction and often seems to be a way of telling it without being punished. Some modern spy writers occasionally publish (part of) their sources or mention the inspirations for their stories, Charles Cumming and David Ignatius being two notable examples.

Having exhausted Cumming’s writings, David Ignatius works are now largely read and some of his detail is nothing short of amazing.  My latest read SIRO about a young American lady academic who gets bored and joins the CIA unearths Mata Hari’s intriguing personal detail.

Mata Hari was flat-chested

In a spy hall of fame two of the most famous would probably include Sidney Reilly and Mata Hari. The former worked for MI6 and the latter for the Germans, both doing their work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both were shot, Reilly (né Sidney Rosenblum) by the Russians in 1925 and Hari (neé Margaretha Zelle) by the French in 1917. Reilly has earned the soubriquet Ace of Spies while Mata Hari still has a reputation as the ultimate femme fatale or woman spy. Reilly was Ian Fleming’s model for James Bond but never thought the latter in the same league, famously dismissing his creation as a piece of nonsense I dreamed up…However, his choice of Sean Connery as hero for the first feature film was certainly inspired, made after seeing his walk – like a panther, he said.

But back to Mata Hari. While Connery may have got his break because of his panther-like manner, Mata Hari seems to have learned something similar from her life in Indonesia. There, an unhappy marriage led to her studying local customs, enabling her to style herself as an exotic dancer when she returned to Europe – which is probably the key to her lasting fame. With her Dutch nationality and the Netherlands being neutral in WW1, she could cross borders gathering valuable information, all duly reported back to the Germans. In the days before radio, invisible ink would have been used to transmit this data which provides pretty solid evidence if you are caught. February 1917 she is arrested in Paris and shot by firing squad in October.

One myth begets another (for example, over 1,000 books have been written about the 1962 President Kennedy assassination) and one of them is that Mata Hari was a double agent. If you wait till October 1917, further Court papers will be released which should nail this theory.

Protecting the Crown Jewels

But when you have first class intelligence, first priority has to be protecting your source. In WW2 for example, Winston Churchill knew that Coventry was due for a massive air raid by the Luftwaffe. Switching more fighter planes to shoot down the bombers would have given the game away, so very little could be done. In the late twentieth century, the Head of Palestinian Intelligence is an American agent or asset. Fine for the Americans but not for the Israelis who end up killing him, all fictionalised in Agents of Innocence.

So you still want to be a Spy?

Perhaps the most surprising difference between the American way of doing things and the British, is shown by the websites. Go to MI5 and MI6 websites and there is the usual corporate detail and vacancy info. Go to the CIA one and they have a Suggested Reading page too.

A British List might include MI5′s first female head, Stella Rimington’s autobiography Open Secret and perhaps some of her novels like At Risk and Present Danger.

Many are called but few are chosen

Found in a shoebox in Iraq. Limbs missing. You grow up in an orphanage and your stepmother takes you to Australia where you are now 17. You have a dream and you go for it. X factor in Oz gives the lad a break and unlike some competitors there, he does at least seem to have practised singing. Puts other problems into prespective and if you want something to recharge your batteries, the video is 8 minutes long.

Thanks to Glen, otherwise known as @Viperchill on Twitter for posting this.

The difference between Kizomba and Zumba

Thursday night at The Zoo Bar near Leicester Square and about 30 of us are doing the warm up for our Kizomba class. Friends from Salsa Rhythm have suggested that I would enjoy kizomba, so here I am.  A salsa class has just finished and now it is our turn. Music is on and the routine is: step left (clap, clap) step right; step left (clap, clap) and so on. Thirty seconds of this and then it is doing the same thing going forward, then backwards followed by going round in a circle. The music helps but hands and feet together plus the moving round make it difficult. Galling to think those jokes about men not being able to multi-task might have a point.

But this is the second week for me and even though it is two weeks since my last class, it is easier this time. A few other beginners are struggling and are just doing the steps or the clapping rather than both, but warm up finishes and we divide into three levels. When you have done four sessions, you can move up into the second class beyond which is a real pundit’s class, but for me I am one of about 14 in the beginners’ class. Men and women divide up and we are learning the basic steps: primeiro basico, segundo basico and basico do lado meaning respectively: first basic, second basic and sideways basic which can be done to a normal beat or more slowly at a half beat.

Trying to take this all in, the guy next to me tells me I look terrified! Can’t say I feel that nervous but the music is very appealing and I am not going to chicken out now. First we practise leading with the couples holding each other’s elbows and ladies are told to close their eyes while the guys lead.

Eyes open, we do the steps to music where now there is an equal number of men and women. Two minutes and the teacher shouts “Rotate!” and the ladies move on. Breaking up into separate groups again we add another step and pair up once more. It starts to fall into place and the music makes it easier. The normal hold is the so-called Cuban hold or embrace with forearms touching, chests touching (paunch in my case) and hand fairly high on the lady’s back  (on the bra strap as a lady once told me – not the sort of advice a guy forgets) Two more ladies join in so when we rotate two have to stand out, but we all progress and the evening is great fun. Seems I have made better progress than I thought when my last dance partner tells me that I lead well! It really makes my day.

So what is kizomba? Firstly, it is not what you might call Latin Keep Fit or Zumba. Kizomba originates from Angola as hinted by the Portuguese usage and has its distinctive beat, but it’s roots are in Zouk music which started in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Most people for example, know waltz is 1-2-3, 1-2-3. Many other dances use 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 while salsa complicates things slightly with three steps in four beats so it’s 1-2-threeeeeee, 1-2-threeeeeee.

Kizomba’s beat is best described as: slow, quick-quick, slow, slow all done in four beats and is very catchy – listen here. KizombaUK have been here since 2005 although the dance has been around in UK since 1991.

See you next Thursday evening?