Monday 31 October 2011

BRIDGE (5)

The biennial World Bridge Championships have been going on for the past two weeks in Veldhoven, the Netherlands. There are three competitions; the Bermuda Bowl (open), the Venice Cup (women) and the d'Orsi Bowl (seniors). In each competition, the 22 teams play round robin matches over 16 boards, 3 matches a day for a week. The top 8 teams then proceed to the knock-out stages, over 96 boards.

The powerhouses of world bridge are Italy and the United States. In the previous 39 editions of the Bermuda Bowl, the U.S. has won 18 times and Italy 14; not much room there for anyone else. Italy were champions in 2007 and the U.S. in 2009. Furthermore, although the U.S. were sending a new, young team to defend the title, Italy had four of their 2007 squad on the 6-man team, and were confident enough to be able to drop the world's number one ranked pair, Fantoni and Nunes.

As expected, Italy cruised through the round robin stage, finishing top, and then beat China in the quarter-finals. However, they then came unstuck in the semi-finals against a Dutch team playing out of their skins on home turf. A very close match resulted in a dead heat with 16 boards to play. In the final session, the Dutch bid and made two small slams, whereas the Italians with the same cards made the same twelve tricks, but had only bid game. 26 imps to Holland and the match.

In the final against the U.S., the Americans started well, and led after two sessions. However, the Dutch hauled them back and won comfortably in the end to record a second world title after their first in 1993. Congratulations to them.

In the women's competition, Indonesia surprised most pundits by staging huge comebacks to beat first the U.S. in the quarter-finals and then England in the semi-finals. Then they ran out of steam and lost easily in the final to France, the match stopping after 80 boards since the French were so far ahead.

However, the performance of the tournament  belongs to the French seniors. Winners of the round robin section, and easy victors over Germany in the quarter-finals, they needed a 6-imp swing on the very last hand of the semi-final (a little part-score contract) to beat Poland by a third of an imp! Then, in a seesaw final against the U.S., they let a 44-imp lead at the halfway stage slip to a 9-imp deficit with 16 boards to play. But they dug deep and won a tense final session 33-19 for an overall victory by just 5 imps.  

I watched some of the matches live on my Bridge Base computer programme (where you can also play with people from all over the world). Although the players are much better than me, it was reassuring to see that they also make mistakes from time to time. Though I suppose it is always easier to play the hand when you can see all four sets of cards!

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 30 October 2011

THE EURO CRISIS

Notwithstanding politicians' understandable statements to the contrary, the most important thing to note about this week's "comprehensive package" to sort out the Euro crisis is that it is not a solution, merely yet another means of buying time. Personally, I do not think that this is a bad thing (see below). However, other commentators are demanding more red meat, so I can see why the plain paper package was wrapped up in bows and ribbons.

There are three elements to the plan, and all of them represent wishes rather than decisions. First, Greece's private sector creditors will accept a "voluntary" haircut (i.e. write-down) on their Greek bonds of 50%, rather than the 21% agreed as recently as July. The agreement has to be voluntary in order to avoid a ruling of default, which would trigger credit default swaps on Greek bonds and might well have nasty implications for the bonds of other Euro area countries. However, a default ruling might occur anyway (if someone's decision not to pay you back half of what they owe is not a default, then what is?) and some bondholders may not go along with it.

Secondly, European banks (both within and outside the Euro area) will have to increase their capital by around Euro106 billion, so that by June next year, they have a capital ratio - capital to assets - of 9%. The problem here is that there are two ways to increase a ratio. What Governments want is that the banks increase the numerator, by going out and raising fresh capital. But that may well be difficult in today's markets, not least because of point 1. The alternative is to shrink the denominator by liquidating assets. In simple terms, that means lending less, which is the last thing said Governments want.

Thirdly, the Euro440 billion European Financial Stability Facility, the means of helping Euro countries in difficulties, is to be beefed up. The problems here are twofold. First, most commentators say that it should go up to Euro2 trillion (we are now firmly in the world of trillions!), but the package only talks of Euro1 trillion. Secondly, this will not be done by Euro Governments' stumping up more resources, there is instead talk of "leveraging" the existing facility by treating it as a sort of insurance scheme. Apart from the difficult message that that gives ("isn't this the sort of smoke and mirrors operation that got us into the mess in the first place?"), nobody yet knows exactly how this will work. Officials are working round the clock in order to put together a framework in time for the G20 meeting in November.

So if this is not a comprehensive package but a wishlist, why do I nevertheless think that it is OK? The answer is that it buys time, which (as I have said before) is crucial in a financial crisis. Consider the position of a bank that has a mortgage to a householder, who (because they lose their job) suddenly can't service the payments. If the bank calls the mortgage, and sells the house, then it will incur a guaranteed loss today. Furthermore, that loss will never be made up, since the householder will incur a break-up of the family, sink into depression and never get a job again. Even worse, the sale of the house will drag down property values in the neighbourhood generally, possibly triggering other foreclosures, where the bank has a mortgage. Against that background, isn't it better for the bank to hang in there, accept the occasional payments that the householder makes, and hope that they find a job in due course when things look a bit better?

The householder in the Euro area is Greece, and the bank is the other Euro area Governments, in particular Germany. The strategy has been to keep Greece in its house (in the Euro), while it undertakes reforms (to make it more likely that it gets a job in the future) and waits until things get better. In that respect, the strategy has been successful. Greece has been going bust, and the Euro has been collapsing, since at least 2009; but it has not yet gone bust and the Euro has not yet collapsed. Sure, the Euro area has problems; but everyone has problems. Even China has problems.

In the meantime, the Euro area countries are slowly groping their way to the sorts of longer-term changes that will represent a real solution to the crisis, in particular some sort of fiscal transfer mechanism between Member States and the right of the European Central Bank to issue unlimited liquidity to Euro area Governments. Both happen at national level; but the first was stymied by Member States' unwillingness to give up control of fiscal policy when the Euro was established, and the latter by the ECB's own statutes. Moves to change this will inevitably be slow, partly because they require changes to the E.U.'s treaties, and everybody remembers the saga over the Lisbon Treaty; and partly because the changes will have a major impact on E.U. countries (notably the U.K.) that are outside the Euro area, deeply affected by its decisions, but unable to influence them. If anybody had called for these changes two years ago, then the answer would have been a flat no. Sometimes things have to get worse before people accept the means to make them better.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is leading on this issue, is often criticised as a bit of a tortoise when compared to some of the political hares in the European forest. But we should remember that the tortoise won the race in the end. To mix my metaphors, I think that up to now, she has played her hand with some skill.

Walter Blotscher   

Friday 28 October 2011

THE LOCAL CINEMA (4)

I was the projectionist this evening at the local cinema. Columbiana. Not the greatest of films, but easy on the eye.

Some good news. We have managed to raise the kr.500.000 we need in order to upgrade our equipment so that we can show digital films; and this morning I ordered it. It will be installed in the week before Christmas, so we can go live at the beginning of January. It should give us a real boost.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 27 October 2011

DIGGING (2)

I am halfway across the barn, and have laid new pipes that stretch that far. So today I filled in the big trench that I had previously dug. When that's done, I can start doing exactly the same with the other half.

During the 1930's, the great economist John Maynard Keynes was very exercised with the idea of paying workers to dig holes and then fill them up again. All I have got to do now is find someone to pay me.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 26 October 2011

BICYCLE THEFT

Virtually everybody in Denmark owns a bicycle. It's a very bike-friendly country, with lots of cycle paths, traffic lights and other infrastructure. Many people in the big cities commute to work on their bike. And in rural areas, people cycle to the bus stop and leave their bike there in special bike racks, ready for when they come back again.

If everybody already owns a bike, then what is the point in stealing one? But stolen they are. Last year the police recorded more than 71,000 bicycle thefts, which cost the insurance industry more than kr.200 million. Yet almost nobody ever gets caught or prosecuted for the offence. There were less than 300 convictions in 2010, a clean-up rate of just 0.39%. The police admit that it is not one of their highest priorities, and who can blame them?

That still leaves the question of what happens to all these bikes. My guess is that they are hoovered up and taken out of the country. But I have no way of knowing.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 25 October 2011

U.K. HOUSING POLICY

The U.K. is - compared with (say) Denmark - a very crowded place. Or, at least, Southern England is. And the problem is going to get worse. The largest country in the E.U. at the moment is Germany, whose population is old and shrinking. By 2050 it is expected to have been overtaken by the U.K., the biggest proportion of whose citizens live in Southern England.

Where will all of those people live? The number of new homes built in 2010 was a mere 134,000. That is not only the lowest figure since the Second World War, but a lot less than the 234,000 new households being formed each year. So not only is there a problem, but it seems to be getting worse.

Basically, there are four "solutions" to this problem, and none of them are easy. The first is to restrict the number of immigrants, who will be responsible for a fair chunk of the forthcoming increase in population. However, as well as not being easy to control (net immigration, the figure that matters, is the difference between two rather large numbers, namely immigration and emigration), it would almost certainly be illegal (if the immigrant were from the E.U.) and undesirable (if the immigrant were highly qualified and came from anywhere else). 

The second is to increase supply, by building lots more homes. Builders and developers would love to do this, and they seem to have managed to have bent the Government's ear to their point of view. The proposed changes to the planning laws, which are currently wending their way through Parliament, put a "presumption" in favour of development, which opens up the possibility of scarce land being turned into building sites, particularly in suburban and rural areas. Not surprisingly, this proposal is being furiously opposed by all sorts of groups who fear that the countryside will be concreted over in the same way that Japan (another crowded island) already has been.

The naysayers do have a point beyond rural nimbyism. That is because although there is an acute housing shortage, there are at the same time nearly 1 million empty homes, of which around 350,000 have been empty for more than 6 months. There are lots of reasons for a home being empty, ranging from going on holiday to being evicted for non-payment of the mortgage. But the third option is to find a way to bring some of these houses onto the market through a mix of carrots (eg tax breaks for renovating) and sticks (eg banning second homes in some areas).

The fourth option is to change the way the population lives. Children could live with their parents for longer, as they do in southern Europe; or elderly people could move out of large properties when their children have left home and downsize to something smaller. However, although in some ways eminently sensible, it is notoriously difficult for Governments to change "lifestyle habits" by decree.

Since none of the solutions is really a solution on its own, existing and future British Governments will probably try to do a mix of all four. Expect some measures to restrict immigration, easier planning laws, tax breaks for renovating old properties and changes to the inheritance tax laws to encourage old people to sell early. And then sit back and listen to the howls of protest from disaffected groups. This is not a problem that is going to get solved in my lifetime. 

Walter Blotscher

Monday 24 October 2011

THE RUGBY WORLD CUP (2)

Perennial favourites New Zealand finally won the rugby world cup yesterday for the first time since the inaugural one in 1987. Like then, it took place against France in front of an adoring home crowd at Eden Park, Auckland, a place where they are almost invincible.

Yet it was a damn close-run thing, reflected in the 8-7 victory score. Indeed, if France had kicked an (admittedly very long) penalty with 16 minutes remaining, then one of the greatest ever upsets might well have happened.

France were a revelation. While New Zealand had romped through their pool matches, defeating France by 20 points along the way, and then comprehensively beating first Argentina and then Australia in the knock-out stages, les Bleus had seemed all at sea. Not only had they lost to New Zealand in their pool match, but they were also defeated by minnows Tonga. In the quarter-finals, they soundly beat a very unimpressive England, but then only scraped through to the final by beating Wales 9-8 in the semi-final, a game they should have lost by some distance, if only Wales had found their kicking boots. Going into the final, New Zealand were the odds-on favourites.

The only people who didn't seem to agree with that judgement were the French. After falling 8-0 behind, they scored a converted try with 30 minutes remaining, and then piled on the pressure. In the end, it was New Zealand's defence that won the day, since France had the better of both possession and territory (55 to 45).

And so the cup returns to the country for whom rugby is almost a religion. France, losing finalists for the third time, will be left to rue what might have been, their only consolation being the award of player of the year to their captain and tryscorer Thierry Dusautoir.

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 23 October 2011

ALPETRAMP

Together with 1,300 other amateur cyclists I did the Alpetramp this morning, 63km in the hills of Southern Fünen (plus an extra 25km to and from the start line). The hills are of course not really big enough to be called Alps; but they are short and steep (7-12%) and add up in the legs. In all, we had to climb almost 700m.

It was a lovely sunny October day, but cold and with a fair easterly wind. However, for some reason (probably the early start to the day) I wasn't feeling very good, and struggled even in the warm-up. I then made the fatal mistake at the start of not managing to get my shoe into the click pedal immediately, meaning that my 50-man group was off and away without me. I picked up other groups on the way round, but it was a bit of a mental blow.

The wind was against during the first half, which made life tough. However, after taking on chocolate and banana at the halfway depot at the top of the fearsome golf course climb, and with the wind at my back, things got easier. I came in with a time of 2 hours and 35 minutes; which I thought was pretty good in the circumstances. Until you consider that the winner did it in an hour and 42 minutes. 

Walter Blotscher

Friday 21 October 2011

TECHNICAL FOREIGN WORDS

One of the things about living in a foreign country (as opposed to just visiting it) is that you get to learn lots of technical words. The Danish word for clingfilm probably won't be in the set of useful phrases outlined in Baedeker's Guide to Denmark. But if you live here for a while, and do any sort of grocery shopping, then you'll get to learn it eventually (it's husholdningsfilm).

The obvious areas for technical words are in your hobbies. So I have learned the Danish words for shuttlecock and racket (badminton), squeeze, finesse and endplay (bridge), derailleur, brake pad and puncture (cycling), reel, aperture and splice (film). Learning these words are easy, because you hear them again and again; and if you forget, then you can always ask in a roundabout way, as in "what's that thingie you use to change gear with?".

More problematic are technical words where you learn a new thing that you haven't done before. This applies to most of my building work, where I now know lots of Danish words, yet have know idea what the English equivalent is. Sure, I know that a hængsel is a hinge; but what's an anverfer, a funny sort of hinge that I have only ever seen on Danish windows? And I know that a bræt is a board; but what about a stjernebræt, one of the two boards you put at the end of a gable in a v-shape in order to finish it off? No idea.

I was reminded of this this week when I went to buy clothes pegs for my newly established outdoor washing line. They are called tøjklemmer, if you're interested. But I had to ask my wife first before I went to the shop.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 20 October 2011

LIAM FOX (2)

The Cabinet Secretary has submitted his report, and Mr. Fox has given his personal resignation statement in the House of Commons (a tradition given to all resigning Ministers in the U.K.). As I predicted, the Cabinet Secretary said that Mr. Fox had broken the Ministerial Code. Things happened which shouldn't have happened, Mr. Fox has taken responsibility by resigning, procedures will be tightened up, blah, blah, blah.

However, as I also predicted, the Cabinet Secretary was silent on what Mr. Fox' friend Adam Werrity was actually doing at all those meetings in the Ministry of Defence and abroad. He wasn't a lobbyist, no classified or security sensitive information was ever given to him, he wasn't an adviser, he shouldn't have been there. So why was he there? Bored and wanting a chat with the Minister over a cup of tea? Somehow I don't think so.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 19 October 2011

CRIME AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Observers, both in the U.K. and abroad, were appalled at the rioting and looting that took place across the country at the beginning of August. It seemed at one point as if the British authorities had lost control. Getting on for 2,000 people have been through the judicial system, with some courts sitting through the night in order to clear the backlog. Judges and magistrates clamped down with harsh sentences, including (unusually) custodial sentences for first-time offenders.

Too harsh, said criminal lawyers. They focussed in particular on sentences of 4 years each for two young men, who had encouraged further rioting and looting on their Facebook pages. These two, plus five cases of burglary and three of handling stolen goods, were the subject of appeals against sentence (though not conviction) that the Court of Appeal reviewed this week. They could be considered as test cases for many of the other convictions.

The Court of Appeal, led by the Lord Chief Justice, was not impressed. The two Facebook cases and the five burglary cases all had their sentences confirmed; the stolen goods cases had their sentences halved (though that still represents jail time of between 6 and 8 months for first-time offenders caught in possession of - eg - a stolen television, even though they hadn't stolen it themselves). The gist of their Lordships' argument is that doing things for a lark cannot be dissociated from the context in which the actions take place; so writing something on Facebook in Cornwall which incites rioting in Newcastle is exactly the same as if the writer were standing in Newcastle and egging on his fellow citizens. Sentence should, therefore, be both a punishment and a deterrent to others.

With the prison system currently bursting at the seams, and a mass of research showing conclusively that prison is a very bad place to be for young men convicted of a first offence, this outcome will dismay the many people (including myself) who believe that the U.K. has a serious problem with its criminal justice system. In saying this, I am not in any way condoning what happened on the ground; I simply believe that the judicial reaction has been too strong. Spending four years in jail is a very long time indeed for a 20-year old.

The decision also highlights - once again - the risks of saying things on social media that you wouldn't necessarily say face to face. People have been warned.

Walter Blotscher 

Tuesday 18 October 2011

GILAD SHALIT

The release of Israeli Sergeant Gilad Shalit after more than 5 years as a Hamas prisoner is obviously great for him and his family. It is also a very concrete example in practice of Israel's policy of doing all it can to bring its soldiers - whether alive or dead - home to the motherland. This is the flipside of the requirement that virtually every Israeli has to do military service.

However, the price for this good news is very high; the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, 477 immediately, and a further 550 in a month or so's time. Some of these people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time; but they also include murderers and terrorists serving life sentences. The families of the victims of these attacks are not all convinced that they should have been let go.

The worst aspect of the whole affair is that Hamas, the more militant of the two camps claiming leadership of the Palestinians, can (and will surely) brag that it is only violence that brings rewards in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If that view is not to prevail, then the Israeli Government needs to start reaching out to the Palestinian Authority with concrete proposals for restarting stalled peace talks. Otherwise, Hamas will simply wait until all of the 1,027 are back home, and then go out and nab another Israeli soldier.

Walter Blotscher 

Monday 17 October 2011

THE PERILS OF POLITICAL COMPROMISE (2)

I said earlier that negotiations on the new Danish Coalition Government's Programme for Government were widely seen as being dominated by the centrist Radikale Venstre under Margrethe Vestager, and not by the Social Democrats under Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Even though the Social Democrats have a much larger representation in Parliament.

A new opinion poll shows exactly how widely. An astonishing 75% think that Ms. Vestager had most influence on the document, against only 10% for Ms. Thorning-Schmidt and a miserable 2% for Villy Søvndal, leader of the third party in the coalition, the Socialists.

These sorts of numbers must be worrying for the Prime Minister. And the situation will be difficult to rectify in the short term, since Denmark takes over the Chairmanship of the E.U. on 1 January. While Ms. Thorning-Schmidt and Foreign Minister Mr. Søvndal will be jetting around Europe all the time (a process that has already started), Ms. Vestager will be quietly consolidating her position back home.  

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 16 October 2011

T.V. WEATHER

There's a lot of weather on television these days. After every news bulletin, for instance. And at least twice an hour on the 24-hour news channel. There is also in some countries (though not yet in Denmark, thank goodness) a 24-hour weather channel.

What's surprising about it is the proportion that is useless. I can understand wishing to know what the weather will be tomorrow; I might decide to go to the beach if it is going to be very hot, or not paint an outside wall if it is going to rain. But I don't need to know what the weather is right now, since I can work that out by looking out of the window. And I certainly don't need to know what the weather will be in 5 days' time.

I would like to find out exactly how many "5 day hence" predictions end up being true or false, because I suspect that many of them turn out not to be correct. I could of course do my own survey, by methodically comparing prediction versus outcome over (say) a year. But that would require far too much weather-watching and take us back to paragraph 1.

Walter Blotscher

Saturday 15 October 2011

LIAM FOX

Until he resigned yesterday, Liam Fox was the U.K.'s Defence Secretary. Adam Werrity is his close friend, and was a former flatmate and the best man at Mr. Fox's wedding. Mr. Fox assures everybody who will listen, that Mr. Werrity was neither a paid nor an unpaid adviser. Yet it has emerged that since May 2010, Mr. Werrity has accompanied Mr. Fox on no less than 18 overseas trips, and met the Defence Secretary 22 times at his office. Mr. Werrity also had business cards printed that said that he was an adviser to Mr. Fox.

Like most countries, the U.K. has rules about political advisers. In particular, it should be clear who is an adviser, and who is paying for him/her (a political party, the civil service, whatever). Most people today can't afford to go on so many foreign trips out of their own pocket, and Mr. Werrity is no exception. It turns out that rich people who support Mr. Fox's views (he is to the right of the Conservative Party and came third in the 2005 leadership election that propelled the more centrist David Cameron to the top job) have been paying Mr. Werrity, presumably in order to get make sure that those views continue to reach Mr. Fox's ear. If true, then Mr. Werrity is a political adviser, whatever Mr. Fox may say.

All in all, this is an odd state of affairs. But the oddest part of the whole thing is that Mr. Fox - until yesterday, at least - did not think it odd at all. It is yet another example of how people often go a bit bonkers when they obtain political power. The job of a politician, and the reason they get paid by the state, is to represent the people who elect them. But having got elected, many politicians then go off and do all sorts of bizarre things. In recent memory, we have had the Parliamentary expenses scandal in the U.K., when M.P.'s were claiming expenses for (eg) second mortgages that they didn't have. In Germany, the Defence Minister tried to brush aside the fact that he had plagiarised his PhD thesis. In the U.S., a congressman sent pictures of himself in his underwear to women he wanted to get to know. The head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, had a sexual encounter with a hotel cleaner. And so on and so forth.

Back in London, the country's top civil servant is now investigating whether Mr. Fox broke the Ministerial Code. His report is due out on Tuesday, but I can guess the outcome; yes, he did. On whether he gets to the bottom of what Mr. Werrity was actually doing, I am less sure.

Walter Blotscher

Friday 14 October 2011

TWO SMALL SUCCESSES

I had two small successes today. The first is that my jam from all of the ex-freezer fruit has now set, and tastes pretty good.

The second is that with the help of my neighbour, I managed to fit the first section of new piping for the drain in the barn. This was not an easy task, partly because I had to dig under an outside wall, partly because the pipe we had to connect it to was not at right-angles to the wall, and partly because the water table was above the level of the pipe itself. But we managed it. I felt like a soldier in the trenches during the First World War. It must have been terrible to have lived in such conditions, even without people trying to kill you.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 12 October 2011

CURRENCY WARS

Many Americans think that China is stealing their jobs. So the U.S. Senate has voted through a bill, which would penalise Chinese imports, if the Chinese authorities do not increase the value of the yuan against the dollar. Although the House of Representatives is unlikely to pass it, and President Obama would probably veto it if they did, this is a terrible piece of legislation. For three reasons.

First, trying to manipulate currencies (whether by China or anybody else) has a long history of failure. Generally it doesn't work.

Secondly, the reason why China has a massive trade surplus with the U.S. is that U.S. consumers love all those things that China is producing. Or to put it another way, they don't like all those things that America is producing.

Raising the value of the yuan against the dollar might work, at least for a while, and might wean U.S. consumers off Chinese goods. However, that uncertainty has to weighed against the absolute certainty of point number three. The flipside of the Chinese trade surplus is that the Chinese have invested most of those dollars in dollar assets, notably U.S. Treasury Bills. To put it simply, China has financed the huge budget deficits that the U.S. Government has been running for the past few years. If the value of the yuan rose against the dollar, then all of those billions of Treasury Bills would immediately fall in yuan terms, and the Chinese would suffer a loss. Why would the Chinese go along with that? Apart from the immediate hit, it would also make it much less likely that the Chinese would buy Treasury Bills in the future. Which in turn would give the U.S. Government a financing problem.

U.S. politicians have been hopeless at economic policy during this financial crisis. The Senate vote is but another example of that.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 11 October 2011

DIGGING

How much effort does it take to dig an 8 metre long trench, that is 1.5m deep and roughly 0.5m wide, armed only with a spade?

The short answer is; a lot. And I know, because I am currently doing exactly that. After bashing out the concrete floor of the barn, I am putting in a connection pipe between the drains on either side of the building, that take away rainwater from the guttering. This is the only part of the drainage system that wasn't renewed when we moved into the house in 2002. The sewage man said at the time that we shouldn't bother until such time as we wanted to do something with the barn. Since I am now busily building a garage in that part of the barn, I have to get digging.

Back in 1931 they didn't have long plastic pipes. So what they used instead was clay pipes, each about half a metre long. They didn't interlock, but were laid end to end. They are actually a real pain, since over time they move out of alignment and/or plants and roots get in between the cracks and/or they crumble. Which means in short that after 80 years, they are as good as useless, and the water simply seeps out into the ground.

Fortunately, I know this, since I also dug up most of the other old drains back in 2002. But it does mean that it's a hard job. The soil at the top - being protected by the barn roof - is bone dry. Even worse, as you get down below one metre, the soil turns to clay; and this clay is wet and heavy because of the seeping pipes below it. Standing one metre down in the trench, digging out the wet clay, and then throwing it over your shoulder onto a pile at the side is tough work for a 52-year old, particularly when so much of the gunk sticks to the spade.

Anyway, I have dug 1.5m down the inside wall and found the pipe where it comes in from the drain outside, That should make life easier from now on, since I can fit the first two metres of new pipe and then throw the muck from digging the next metres to cover it. It would of course be much easier if I had my own little mechanical digger, but where would be the satisfaction in that?

Walter Blotscher

Monday 10 October 2011

FIREWORKS

One of the things that Danes go nuts about, along with flags and candles, is fireworks. Not every day, and certainly not on 5 November (when we moved into our house 9 years ago, I invited all of our neighbours to a Bonfire Night evening, an interesting exercise in cultural cross-pollination!). But whenever there is a national event, and always at midnight on New Year's Eve. There is a small hill up the road from where I live, and from there you can see the nearby town 3km away completely lit up for the first hour of the new year, as most of its inhabitants let off a succession of ever bigger/brighter/noisier fireworks. And on a clear night - which it was this year - you can look the other way over the bay and see the same thing happening 15km away. An airplane flying over the country at that time would think that a spontaneous revolution had broken out.

Like most things today, these fireworks are not made in Denmark, but in China (which has its own long tradition of such things). Unfortunately, Chinese fireworks are not always made in super-safe factory environments; equally unfortunately, they are not always imported into Denmark in scrupulously legal fashion, or stored properly.

This can cause problems, particularly in the build-up to New Year, when the majority of fireworks are used up. In November 2004, a fire started at a (legal) firework warehouse in Kolding when an employee dropped a load of rockets while he was unloading a 40-foot container from China. The fire service was called; but before they could put out the fire, the container exploded, killing one fireman and injuring seven others. The authorities withdrew and evacuated the area, letting the fire spread to the main warehouse, which then duly exploded. That explosion measured 2.2 on the Richter scale and flattened - literally - 12 businesses and 75 houses in the surrounding area. Total damage was estimated to be kr.750 million (more than US$100 million).

On Saturday it happened again, albeit on a more modest scale. In a village not far from Kolding, an explosion took place at an (illegal) firework warehouse in a disused barracks. A number of houses have been damaged, the village has been evacuated; at least two people have been killed.

When money is involved, people will always take risks. But to me, this is just daft. Fireworks are dangerous; Chinese fireworks are doubly so.

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 9 October 2011

THE PERILS OF POLITICAL COMPROMISE

The new Danish Government is a classic compromise. Its core of the Social Democrats and Socialists had (respectively) bad and very bad elections, and the red block only won a tiny majority because the very left-wing Enhedslisten and the centrist Radikale Venstre had very good ones. As a result, the SD/S/RV Government programme is widely viewed as a Radikale Venstre blueprint. As one political commentator put it, Social Democrat Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt will have to pay a very high political price for being the first woman to get her hands on the top job.

A price that is already being paid. An opinion poll taken after the announcement of the Government programme on the opening day of the new Parliament showed that the red block has already lost its majority. Governments inevitably become unpopular over time, but to be unpopular before you have started is quite unusual. Not surprisingly, it is the Social Democrats and - especially - the Socialists who have lost ground. The latter lost 7 of their 23 seats in the election, so there are a lot of disgruntled ex-MP's and disappointed non-Ministers in the party, a feeling exacerbated by the Tax Ministry's being given to a 26-year old Socialist whippersnapper who failed to get elected as an MP. There are grumblings of unrest in the party, a feeling that it has accepted a Faustian bargain of power at the expense of its principles; true Socialists fed up with Social Democratic trimming and Radikale Venstre bossing will leave it for the politically pure Enhedslisten, a process which has already started.

All of which suggests a strong hand is required on the party tiller at this time. However, the Socialists' leader Villy Søvndal has made the same mistake as the Conservatives' Lene Espersen did in the last Parliament by taking the job of Foreign Minister in return for being the Coalition's junior partner. In quick succession, Ms. Espersen ruined her reputation for competence and lost the leadership of her party, which then had a truly terrible election. It would not surprise me if Mr. Søvndal and the Socialists suffered the same fate, and for the same reasons.

Walter Blotscher

Saturday 8 October 2011

MAKING JAM

All that fruit from the freezer has to be used for something. And I have enough crumble to last me a week at least. So the rest is going to be used for making jam. This is not something I have ever done before; but my mother-in-law knows how to do it, and has told me how. By tomorrow evening I should have ten jars of strawberry, raspberry and redcurrant mix.

Walter Blotscher

Friday 7 October 2011

WAGE COMPARISONS

One of the reasons for some people's advocating that Greece leave the Euro is that any new Greek currency would immediately depreciate. That in turn would reduce Greek wages (in Euro terms), something which is both currently impossible and absolutely necessary if Greece is to regain its economic competitiveness.

I am not so sure. I was in England last week, when the new rates for the minimum wage took effect on 1 October. They are £6.08 an hour for those over 21, £4.98 for those between 18 and 20 and £3.68 for those under 18. Translated into Danish kroner at a rate of 8.5, this gives roughly Dkr52, Dkr42 and Dkr32 respectively.

Seen with Danish eyes, those rates are terrible. My daughter is 17 and has a part-time job at the local bakery, exactly the sort of job that attracts the minimum wage. She gets paid about Dkr60 an hour (i.e. almost double the equivalent for someone of her age in the U.K.), plus extras if she works on Sundays or after 6pm. It's also almost 20% more than a 21-year old would get in the U.K. My son worked as an 18-year old as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool, and got quite a bit more than Dkr100 an hour.  

So what, you may say? Wage rates don't take account of taxes and/or living costs, and so are a crude comparison. I accept that; though I would have to say that a part-time job in Denmark rarely generates enough income to become taxable, and living in rural Fünen must surely be cheaper than living in (say) London. My real point is that nobody is saying that Denmark should devalue the krone (which is tied to the Euro) against the pound, so that Danish wage levels equalise with Britain's.

In other words, things are a tad more complicated than the headlines suggest. We should remember that, the next time a politician suggests booting the Greeks out of the Euro.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 6 October 2011

A GOOD AND BAD DAY

Do you ever have a good and bad day? Well, I had one today.

The bad bit came after I had moved things around in the barn in preparation for bashing out the concrete floor and putting in a new pipe connecting the storm drains on either side. The light on the freezer that has long sat in the barn was blinking furiously, and that was followed shortly afterwards by smoke coming out of the cooling unit, and then fire. It was a crappy old freezer, so that didn't upset me too much. What did was having to empty the thing. I now have a fridge stuffed full of vast quantities of formerly frozen fruit (there will be crumbles galore next week), the remains of last Christmas' turkey, lots of (ex-)frozen green beans (which I don't like very much), plus all the meat chunks that have sat in the freezer since my daughter went vegetarian. And at some point I have to get the freezer to the dump. 

The good bit came when my mother-in-law dropped by shortly afterwards to help me plant my seven Hans Christian Andersen-variety rose plants that I bought this week. They will fill out the little circle that I have built for them in the middle of the new lawn that is part of the 2011 Project, and give a splash of red in the midst of an otherwise sea of green. My mother-in-law thought that the plants had terrific root systems, and that they will come up very nicely next spring (the probability of which was increased markedly by her planting them rather than me). Even better, I don't have to do anything to them during the winter, I just have to pull out any neighbouring weeds and wait.

The up and down day was completed when I went for a cycle ride at 5.30pm with two others in a howling gale. Going west directly into the wind, we were struggling at times to do 10km/h; on the way back, we were doing over 50km/h and cruising.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 4 October 2011

THE PREMIER LEAGUE AND E.U. LAW

Karen Murphy, the landlady of the Red, White and Blue pub in Portsmouth, has just done European football afficionados (of which there are many) a big favour. In 2006, she was fined for showing live Premier League matches accessed from a Greek service provider and using a decoder, which was cheaper than that available in the U.K., usually via Sky. Selling the rights to an exlusive provider in each country was one of the main ways in which the Premier League has massively increased the value of its brand (and one of the main ways in which Sky has come to dominate U.K. sports television).

Ms. Murphy appealed; and, since the case involved matters of E.U. law, it was referred to the European Court of Justice. On the specific point at issue, Ms. Murphy won hands down. The single market really is a single market, and suppliers can't ban consumers from accessing cheaper foreign suppliers by blocking their decoders. The ECJ comes in for a lot of stick at times, notably from the U.K., so it's worth noting this case. This was a victory for the little man (well, woman) and his pleasure against big businesses trying to restrict access to that pleasure; and will almost certainly result in a change in which the Premier League sells its television rights abroad.

However, not everything is clearcut. Although the sport itself can't be protected by copyright (which would otherwise have trumped the single market rules), the ECJ ruled that other parts of the broadcast, such as graphics, music and logos, can be. So if the Premier League choose to transmit live games with these things incorporated - as they will - you still need permission to show foreign broadcasts.

The case now comes back to the U.K. courts, who will have to disentangle the respect merits of the diametrically opposing rulings on access and content. Let's hope the judge in question is an Arsenal supporter, who likes to watch football in his local pub.

Walter Blotscher

Monday 3 October 2011

THE DANISH GENERAL ELECTION (6)

The election may have been on 15 September, but it was not until today that Prime Minister-designate Helle Thorning-Schmidt could formally announce a 3-party Government made up of her Social Democrats, the Socialists to their left and the Radikale Venstre to their right. As I said would be the case, the negotiations between the parties were protracted and difficult, and required serious compromises. The Radikale Venstre's deal with the former Government to scale back efterløn was, by force of necessity, accepted; which in turn meant that the proposed "12-minutes extra" policy was dropped. The idea of extending the working week from 37 hours to 38 (hence 12 minutes extra a day) was the left's alternative to efterløn reform, but was always a fairly weedy policy, since it would only have come about if the unions and employers had wanted it (and that seemed, for different reasons, unlikely). The weakness of their flagship policy on the economy was - in my view - the main reason the Social Democrats had such a bad election, so I suspect that deep down, Ms. Thorning-Schmidt is quite relieved to be able to ditch it. In return, she gets approval for a stimulus package, a traditional Keynesian pump-prime of infrastructure spending.

After nearly three weeks stuck in a hotel thrashing out a plan for Government (running to 70+ pages), things almost got derailed at the last minute when it came to the doling out of Ministerial posts. Ms. Thorning-Schmidt's loyal lieutenant, Henrik Sass Larsen, withdrew from consideration after the intelligence services had cast doubt on his security clearance because of links to biker gangs. Since he had been widely tipped to be Finance Minister, this was quite a blow. As it was, the new team of 23 includes only two people who have held Ministerial office, and has two Ministers still in their twenties, covering the heavyweight portfolios of health and taxation. Apart from the country's first female Prime Minister, it also has the country's first Minister from an ethnic minority. A fresh team; but also an inexperienced one.

New Governments do things differently in Denmark from the U.K. A couple of the Cabinet, though having political links, are not M.P.s; and five Ministers arrived at the palace to be sworn in by the Queen on bicycles rather than limousines. The tradition is that the outgoing Minister then formally presents the new Minister to his/her department and they exchange gifts, all in the glare of the T.V. cameras. Having to say nice things to an opponent who has just ousted you must test one's emotions and political skills. 

Finally, amid all the excitement and media attention of a switch in Government after 10 years, it must be remembered that it is a minority one, dependent on the very left-wing Enhedslisten to get its policies through Parliament. In a day of gushing commentary, they were conspicuous by their absence.

Walter Blotscher