BAD IDEA 6

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es tasi Fan uru x e S r ’s iness G es s ellie ki en T ew Bu n Flun eurs i t s a n N e Seb Cent’s orgott trepre 50 hol’s F ent En bies War ’s Stud For Ba ord ook Oxf Faceb

05 ISSUE 6 // Summer 08 // £4.50 ISSN 1751-9152

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FROM THE HIP

Photographs by JOHN “HOPPY” HOPKINS 1960-66 John “Hoppy” Hopkins is a Cambridge educated former nuclear physicist and a seminal photographer of London’s 60s underground, shooting for Melody Maker and the Sunday Times. Alongside Barry Miles he co-founded the International Times. Lee is proud to present the first publication of his photographs, From the Hip.

ALLEN GINSBERG’S 39TH BIRTHDAY Ginsberg was on a world tour, and he was on a high. He’d just been thrown out of Hungary (after being thrown out of Cuba), for being too open about his homosexuality.

In London, we put on this big poetry reading in the Albert Hall and Allen was the top of the bill. Soon after that it transpired that it was his 39th birthday, so we had a party for him in a basement apartment in Belgravia. I walked in and there was Ginsberg, naked except for a pair of underpants on his head, joking and laughing with the other people there. We were eating and drinking and having a good party when there was a knock on the door, and John and Cynthia Lennon turned up, with George Harrison and Patti Boyd. When he saw Ginsberg he sort of did a double take. He was a bit uneasy, had one drink, and then made for the door. Barry Miles (centre in the photo) said, “Hey, why are you going so quickly?” Lennon leaned over and whispered in his ear: “Look, you don’t do this sort of thing in front of the birds.” And then he left.

BILL’S TATTOO PARLOUR When I first went to Notting Hill in the early 60s, Portobello Rd was really a run down place, its shop fronts boarded up with corrugated iron. Among the boarded up properties there were people living in what would now be referred to as squalid poverty. One of the little places that was open at night was Bill’s Tattoo Parlour, which was in a very narrow shop, about eight feet across. It turns out he was a very nice guy: you’d look at his eyes and they were very soft – he wasn’t aggressive or anything like that.

There weren’t many people who had tattoos in those days, unlike today where everybody has a tattoo on their arse. It’s fashionable now. I can’t really say as a class of people who those interested in tattoos were, but they were street people as far as I was concerned. Tattoos are rather painful: people interested in tattoos often have a penchant for pain and resisting it.

BRIAN JONES This is 26th June, 1964, at an all nighter at the Alexandra Palace. The Rolling Stones were launching their single ‘It’s all over now’. John Lee Hooker, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers and Alexis Korner were on the bill. This photo is taken at about 4am, and Brian Jones has his back to the audience, almost oblivious to what is going on. To me he always put out this really rather unpleasant vibe, except when he was playing the guitar. I ran into him a number of other times, the most memorable of which was Brian Epstein’s birthday party in 1965. Again, there was Brian scowling as usual. Maybe he was unhappy about his role in the band. At this point though there was definitely still the room for Jagger and Jones to both be front men. Up until 1963 they had been playing mainly covers, then they started to produce their own music, and by 1965 there were virtually no covers in their sets. This picture was taken in between those two periods, when they were gaining in confidence and making more of their own material.

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EDITORIAL F

or many of us, it looks like we’re about to go through our first recession as fully-fledged taxpayers. As the American economy unravels, and banks worldwide begin to admit the terrible amount of bad debts they have on their books, there’s that feeling that we’re in the eye of a massive cyclone.

The crisis of confidence towards mortgage-backed securities – caused by the subprime loans scandal – could potentially spread to other bad loans: credit cards, car loans, and overdrafts. Or it might not. Perhaps central banks can slash interest rates and everything will simply return to normal.

In any case, manic economic cycles and catastrophes have become a ubiquitous feature of our modern experience. They come, they go, someone in Mustique loses a billion dollars, some canny trader in New York cleans up and becomes an over night multimillionaire, life moves on.

In Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s classic expose of Wall Street in the 80s, he described the first creation of mortgage-backed securities as an event that “burst the dam between several trillion investable dollars looking for a home and nearly two trillion dollars of home mortgages looking for an investor.” Capitalism inevitably tends towards the trading of everything, and as with all other markets – from tulip bulbs to carbon credits – there is a perpetual dynamic of frenzy and depression, of bullish and bearish markets, of people rushing in one direction like lumpen migrants heading for a gold rush, and running back the other way minutes later shrieking and sobbing, their shirts ripped from their backs.

Two decades later, writing in Portfolio in March this year about the current crisis, Lewis expressed incredulity that the Black-Scholes model – the primary mathematical method through which the finance industries manage risk – was still being used, given its inability to adequately factor in one-off market crashes.

And a large part of that naiveté has to be put down to the fact that for many of the twentysomethings working in investment banks, hedge funds, and retail brokerages – for many of our generation – we’ve never seen anything like this happen before. It’s a bit like having your first child, or further back, your first kiss. These were things you heard about, but could never really believe. Economic chaos was the story of myth – Gordon Gekko type characters unravelling, a hail of pinstripe suits falling on Wall Street as traders jump out their windows, tumbling figures flashing on computer screens while grown men jump up and down on their desks like rioting chimps.

The fact is the financial industries are a mixture of high-level pyramid scheme, necessary efficiency, and the bleeding, inevitable edge of capitalism. Bigger than any government, more complex than any ideology, they will never really change, although they constantly adapt. Most new regulations brought in to try and solve the problems that led to this latest crisis will be irrelevant to the market by the time they’re instituted. This is the constant, unavoidable theatre of our capitalist lives.

What then can we learn from this crisis? Like the other profound mysteries of life, drawing simple lessons seems too cheap, and the best we can do is bear witness. Or rather, sit back, watch, and perhaps try and work out a way to get in on the action.

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Founding Editors Jack Roberts jack@badidea.co.uk Daniel Stacey dan@badidea.co.uk Design and Art Direction Steve Sawyer steve@badidea.co.uk Chief Photographer Sebastian Meyer sebastian@sebmeyer.com Contributing Editors Alyssa McDonald alyssa@badidea.co.uk Jean Hannah Edelstein jean@badidea.co.uk Contributing Art Directors Oscar Bauer and Ewan Robertson www.oscarandewan.co.uk Editorial Interns Ruth Stokes ruth_stokes@hotmail.com Thomas Stogdon tdots@hotmail.co.uk Advertising Director Sten Cummins sten@badideaa.co.uk Events Manager Ben Harrison ben@badidea.co.uk

Writers Chris Baraniuk chris.baraniuk@some.ox.ac.uk Amanda Caverzasi amandacaverzarsi@yahoo.com Kim Conway info@badidea.co.uk David Foster dpfoster@gmail.com Jean Hannah Edelstein jean@badidea.co.uk Chris Flynn www.falconvsmonkey.com Oliver Harris oliharris801@hotmail.com Alastair Harper alastairharper@gmail.com Edward Hogan www.davidhigham.co.uk Sam Jordison www.myspace.com/samjordison Rory Kinsella www.myspace.com/rorykinsella Alyssa McDonald alyssa@badidea.co.uk Sebastian Meyer sebastian@sebmeyer.com Jack Roberts jack@badidea.co.uk Daniel Stacey dan@badidea.co.uk Ruth Stokes ruth_stokes@hotmail.com Joe Stretch www.myspace.com/joestretchfriction Tat Usher tatsan@clara.co.uk Artists and Illustrators Gideon Baws www.formpluscontent.blogspot.com Bill Bragg www.legun.co.uk Harold Cohen www.jacobsongallery.com Louis T. Fowler luckyludo@hotmail.com Comics James Nash jamesnash61@hotmail.com Ink Illustration inkillustration@googlemail.com Jess Wilson www.jesswilson.co.uk Photographers David Foster dpfoster@gmail.com Sebastian Meyer sebastian@sebmeyer.com Rebecca Miller email@rebeccamiller.org Leon Neal www.leonneal.com Mark Seager www.markseager.com Ben Turner ben@turnerphotos.com Francois Valenza info@badidea.co.uk Hair and Makeup Tomokazu Akutsu info@tomokazu-akutsu.com Yoshiki Kirino sunshinedaydream@hotmail.co.jp Model Amanda Mitchell Bookings Model Agency Published by Good Publishing Ltd. www.goodpublishing.co.uk GOOD PUBLISHING Ltd., Floor 4, Shacklewell Studios, 18-24 Shacklewell Lane, Dalston, London E8 2EZ. Tel: +00 44 (0) 207 690 0118 The views expressed in BAD IDEA are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the editors or Good Publishing Ltd. If you would like to contribute to BAD IDEA, or if you just have a good story to tell, please write to editorial@badidea.co.uk For all advertising and marketing enquiries, please contact Sten Cummins / +00 44 (0) 207 254 0298 / sten@badidea.co.uk For any other enquiries about BAD IDEA and its contributors please contact info@badidea.co.uk

CONTENTS BAD IDEA // ISSUE 6 // SUMMER 2008 Out Of The Ordinary 18 Daniel Stacey, Rory Kinsella, Chris Baraniuk, Kim Conway, Adam Wonnacott, Amanda Caverzasi, Tat Usher, Edward Hogan, Joe Stretch, James Nash Tell It Like A Story 32 Bucharest or Bust Alyssa McDonald 40 Confessions 1: Sebastien Tellier 42 Web Heads Jean Hannah Edelstein 50 A Subprime Primer Jess Wilson 58 Confessions 2: Robert Greene 60 Swine of the Times Sebastian Meyer & Jack Roberts 74 Testimony of a Torturer ‘Jasim’ 82 Special Report: The Credit Crunch Zaida Cruz 92 Low Rollers Ink Illustration 100 Confessions 3: Nifa McLaughlin 102 Left to Care for Themselves David Foster Cultural Revelations 110 Modern Art Takeaway Oliver Harris 114 Hiponomics Alastair Harper 118 Life Lessons of a Persistent Drowner Chris Flynn 122 No Pot to Piss In Sam Jordison 126 Magazine Makeover 130 Back Story: Millionaire Gypsies Sebastian Meyer

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www.badidea.co.uk BAD IDEA is supported by the UK Arts Council

Cover Photograph: Rebecca Miller Hair & Makeup: Tomokazu Akutsu & Yoshiki Kirino Model: Amanda Mitchell, Bookings Model Agency Logotype: Supermundane.

Cover Type: Hudson-Powell Title Pages: Bill Bragg 15

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Available from bookstores everywhere, May 30, 2008 www.anovabooks.com

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Bad Idea

Out Of The Ordinary

Short Struggles With A Malevolent Universe

Student Entrepreneurs ◆ Debt Culture ◆ Celebrity TV Cemetery Gardening ◆ Cheap Sex ◆ Dirty Oil Money

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Bad Idea

Daniel Stacey

DEBT CULTURE doomsayers With the current crisis in mortgage backed securities, you cannot turn a corner without some dull pundit or slack-jawed beat poet wailing at you about this terrible, ugly monster called DEBT CULTURE. There is nothing like an economic crisis to bring out the doomsayers and jeremiahs from their morbid little caves.

But as long as you don’t go overboard, what is the great gaping problem with racking up debt? And what makes saving so holy?

Whilst opining the life affirming nature of poker has become ubiquitous – despite us all knowing the risks of gambling – debt culture has been left unchampioned. From Al Alvarez’s claim that money in high stakes poker has no meaning itself, and betting is “simply a form of communication,” to Herbert O. Yardley’s freewheeling treatise on intimidation and social Darwinism in card playing, Education of a Poker Player, the beauty of risk, power, and the abstract interplay of money in gambling is widely recognised.

Milton Freidman, along with many other modern economic theorists, likewise praises the interplay of money as a means to let us express desire, want, and need, as flexibly as possible. Money is a power: it allows you the freedom to travel, to buy, to feast.

Borrowing money is a loan of power, and although it leaves you indebted to your creditor, as long as you borrow within reason, is saving any more free?

No. Commentators who attack debt culture as if it were a malevolent plague are little more than luddite naysayers, wishing a rigid, non-negotiable power structure on a world much more free flowing, fast paced and chaotic than makes them comfortable.

Think about it. Saving assumes that today’s version of you is a given and a constant: that you’re willing to work and toil for months towards something you have in mind to buy, or towards an abstract vision of the future. But the crux of debt culture and consumerism is the unexpected moment of purchase, that nexus with the present that happens when you slap the plastic down and say ‘WHAT THE HELL, CHARGE IT’. What is the point of saving for things you want now? By the time the money piles up all you’ll be able to do is purchase a rather dull, careworn portion of your past yearnings.

The fact is, saving is a slave mentality – fearful and paranoid, it assumes some cataclysm will occur in the near future. If you die with savings, you have categorically failed in life. That money represents

a storehouse of time spent unwisely: futile and unnecessary work ossified in the thousands of unspent, inward looking pounds you have hidden away in your savings account.

In small quantities, and with the borrower displaying self restraint, the availability of easy credit – like the excessive imbibing of alcohol, or a night of drug taking – allows those who can handle it to revel in the heady orgies of plenty, and the violence and desperation of penury: they live day-by-day depending on the means and resources at their mercy.

Such is the brilliant ethos of debt culture. From guerilla filmmakers funding their productions with 15 separate pieces of handy plastic, to global travellers without a cent to their name but a £5,000 credit limit, it’s a culture of instantaneous, virulent satisfaction.

Like Petronius’s Encolpius, yours will be a journey on the tantalising crest of an ever-breaking wave.

Easy credit lets you do things when they matter, and then work the debt off knowing you had your kicks when it counted. The poverty following a spending splurge is meaningful, and feels wholesome – you’ve had your fun and now, exhausted as at the end of a marathon, you need to recover. With saving though, there is this terrifying sense of delayed gratification, of wedging such a great chock of time between initial desire and eventual satisfaction that you very nearly tear yourself in half as a human being.

Freud, that wonderful polygamist and charlatan, told us our manners were a controlling, ordering force over our basic animal desires. By accepting delayed gratification of these desires, by being courteous and orderly, we can pursue long-term projects and function as members of a modern society. But that kind of behaviour also leads to all manner of neuroses and anxieties. Not with debt culture – we are at once linked back to the hyper-optimistic animal energy of our wild living primordial origins. We are given a taste of the feral uninhibited lives we once lived, where we felt powerful ownership over the world around us. No waiting, no saving, no penny pinching and bitter yearning for a far off future. Debt culture gives us moments of ecstatic purchase and gluttony never afforded the piggybankers. Anyone who tells you otherwise is opposed to the rapid velocity of a new exploding cult of spending they are too fearful

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trillions of pounds currently owed by British borrowers 21

and prudish to join, for no other reason than that debt culture and all its attendant charms confronts them with the very elastic and unpredictable parameters of life itself

Rory Kinsella

TV’s Envy for Celebrity Blogs There are certain news stories that define a generation. Do you remember where you were on that sombre morning in August 1997 when news filtered through that the most famous woman in the world had died? How about on September 11, 2001?

I was quietly shuffling around a Curry’s in a retail park in Birmingham when my mission to buy a toaster was cruelly cut short by a wall of TV screens playing and replaying images of airliners banking into skyscrapers.

Do you remember where you were on March 4, 2008 at 10.36 am though? Come on, it wasn’t that long ago. Let me paint the picture: the world’s last remaining superpower is engaged in the most exciting presidential nomination battle for years, with a black man and a woman duking it out in Ohio and Texas.

President Putin cedes power to Dmitry Medvedev. But more importantly…

STOP THE PRESSES! News just in!

Sarah Harding talks about her breasts: “My boobs aren’t too bad, but they fluctuate.

They go up and they go down. They’ve got a life of their own. I don’t like them too small or too big, just in the middle.

“I used to think I wanted them done when they got really small. I used to be a DD cup but when I lose a bit of weight, they get smaller. And it’s not like they just suddenly shrink and stay really pert either – sometimes you need something just to refill them a little bit.”

OK, Harding’s pneumatic approach to her bust didn’t exactly break into mainstream new bulletins, but if British television executives really are as desperate to co-opt the innovations of the internet as they appear, with the appalling user generated chat show Lily Allen and Friends, and tele-viral flop LennyHenry.tv, then it’s surely only a matter of time.

A recent Observer list of the ‘50 Most Powerful Blogs In The World’ featured more than half a dozen celebrity blogs, with Perez Hilton at number six and the UK’s Holy Moly! a respectable 23. What draws readers online must surely draw viewers on the box, right?

So is it too much of a stretch to imagine, in a not22

too-distant future, a stony-faced Sir Trevor McDonald shuffling his papers and bringing the full force of his gravitas to bear on Camera One...

BONG! Lindsay Lohan gets her tits out for a magazine shoot, the skanky whorebag! BONG!! Pete Doherty spotted in the street – we ask the question, have you ever seen a heroin addict look more like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man? BONG!!! Does Kerry Katona really dip her chips in ketamine? Find out in our extended report. BONG!!!! Is Johnny Borrell porking Emma Watson or is it Daniel Radcliffe or someone else entirely? We ask our panel of experts.

This might seem absurd, but 30 years ago it would have been unthinkable that mainstream TV news would have been saturated, as it was last year, with coverage of a woman mostly famous for a homemade sex video going to prison (briefly) on a drink driving charge. But apart from the debatable news value of Paris Hilton compared with, say, genocide in Darfur, there are two main problems with TV news covering celebrity stories – timing and lexicon. That TV can’t keep pace with the Internet is obvious, but the fact that it doesn’t have the language to deal with celebrity stories is a new point. TV news can’t access the sort of bile needed to chastise these wayward imbeciles; so something has to give. Either TV news leaves celebrity news alone or it learns a new language. Personally, I’m for the latter.

Embrace the inescapable rise of ‘citizen journalism’! Welcome THE REVOLUTION! Let the lunatics take the asylum! Let the noble Jon Snow be dragged into the gutter by the hordes of ROLFing Internet posters! Rejoice as they poke Huw Edwards with sticks until he shrugs, says fuck it, and turns to Camera Two with the full charm of his valleys drawl as he intones breathlessly, with a wink: “Paris Hilton there... the wonky-eyed slut.”

Welcome to the future

Chris Baraniuk

Student Money Men Auctomatic.com markets software used to manage eBay businesses, track auction templates and ‘optimise your listing strategy’. On its ‘About’ page there’s a grainy mobile phone snap of the company’s CEO – a 24 year-old dressed in a white polo shirt with the collar turned sharply upward, sporting bug-eyed sunglasses – above the caption: ‘Kulveer Taggar: Shrewd Operator.’

Taggar is one of the poster boys for a new breed

Bad Idea

photography by leon neal

of ambitious newcomers: the student entrepreneurs.

They view university as an opportunity to network, build companies with other students, and secure investment capital, an experience in which their chosen degrees – in Taggar’s case a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics – become merely incidental.

Auctomatic’s genesis harks back to 2003, when Taggar helped found the Oxford University Entrepreneurs Club and began working with other students on business launches. Last month, together with his partners, he sold the company for $5 million.

“We ran the Oxford Entrepreneurs club like an efficient start-up: we weren’t affiliated with the university in any official way,” says Taggar. “We built the society like a brand: Bob [Goodson, CEO Younoodle.com and founding President of Oxford Entrepreneurs] was really serious about it. All the committee members had to learn the society’s mission statement off by heart and we kept detailed files about our activities as well as giving each other monthly targets.”

As Press Officer, Taggar’s job was to get the club a certain number of mentions in the national press each month. Soon some of the students began attracting money from business angels, and companies like American Y Combinator, a seed-funding group that travels between the world’s top universities, buying up equity in student startups.

The London colleges were quick to follow suit,

and at Imperial College the Imperial Entrepreneurs club was set up by Jayraj Chokshi in 2006. Their first step was to launch a student salon, called ‘The Garage’, described as ‘a fusion of ideas, borrowing from the Homebrew Computer Club meets of California that gave rise to Apple Computers and the OpenCoffee and SeedCamp events of Europe.’

Chokshi tells me how he landed their first big corporate speaker: “Stelios [Haji-Ioannou, founder of EasyJet] was speaking at the London School of Economics. Because he was speaking on stage, to a big audience, it was going to be hard to talk to him in person. So in question time I asked, ‘What do you think needs to be done to promote student entrepreneurs?’ Stelios responded by saying, ‘It’s important to invite successful entrepreneurs to events and let students talk to them’. I knew I had him then so I went right ahead and told him I was President of Imperial Entrepreneurs and I invited him to one of our events.”

“There was a lot of laughter from the audience, and he was pretty much put on the spot, but he asked me up onto the stage and gave me his business card.”

I mention Taggar to Chokshi and it turns out that Chokshi bought a start-up Taggar abandoned a few years ago and developed it himself. Then he tells me about a close friend Furqan Alamgir, fellow Imperial Entrepreneur and 5th year medical student, who’s had considerable success with his own business, the telecommunications startup Connexin.

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Connexin takes the idea of Skype and transfers it to mobile phones. Customers buy a mobile that is able to call other Connexin customers anywhere in the world for free.

The idea took off when Alamgir managed to corner an Orange executive for a few minutes. “I said that we’d done some research (actually based on talking to five of our friends) that suggested that mobile phone users with dual-mode phones were more likely to use the internet in areas where they didn’t get free wi-fi – they got into the habit of it and started to pay extra to use the internet anywhere.”

“Next thing we knew we were talking to him in his office. Since then he’s given us a lot of advice and given us his time whenever we ask for it.”

“I’d say we have an annual turnover of around £85,000.”

The business was launched with a loan Alamgir managed to secure for £20,000, ironically because he studies medicine, and his bank manager considered his future earning potential would cover the risk of the loan. He has no intention of using his degree to become a doctor though.

“Medicine is a long, hard course. The exams, the administration and the bureaucracy at Imperial got too much for me. And then the NHS made it harder for students studying in London to get jobs as doctors in London.”

“There’s a string of Imperial [College] medics launching their own companies. They’re fed up with the linear nature of the course and they want to do something different. I’ve decided to work for myself.”

pink kneepads begin to look like a creepy attempt to assimilate the totems of the innocents? Does the joy of sartorial tribalism necessarily disappear once we outgrow the trends of youth? NO! If anything, Ari Versluis’s Exactitudes should have taught us there’s hope. And to prove my point, I’d like to draw your attention to a few of the mature style tribes which stalk this great city, and try, as best as I’m able, to decipher their laws and primordial mythologies.

Let us begin at The British Library, which perhaps more than anywhere else in London acts a fortress/ cathedral/palace for a particular style tribe. Tweed hacking jackets, black woollen long-coats, felt Loden trenches, with touches of green, red and tan never tolerated in the city set. Scarves indoors, shirts slightly untucked beneath rotund bellies cultivated to act as the epicenter of a determined, unamused slouch.

The toilet cubicles serve their usual function as an occasional meeting place for homosexual trysts, with many of the offerings quite charming and inclusive: “age not a limit,” and “suck my cock? Older men welcome.” After spending all day reading about medieval history and Hellenic intrigues, who wouldn’t want to get up to a little mischief, or ‘knavery’ as it is known in the British Library. But instead of being scrawled in thick marker pen, blighting the walls and doors, these open appointments are written carefully in minute script on the grout between the tiles.

On the second floor, the large disabled cubical

Kim Conway

London, more so than perhaps anywhere else, is a city defined by its style tribes. Each year the beating drums of youth culture boom through Shoreditch, Brixton, New Cross, Dalston, Kings Cross, Soho and Peckham: JOIN US, JOIN US. Children flock from their homes and, after brief induction ceremonies at various underage parties and gigs, emerge reborn in the festive vestments of their new primitive confederacy.

Goth, Indie shoe gazer, Emo, Neon Fag Core, Toonstep ravers, generic hipsters, punks, gutter punks, anarchists in their coloured-by-numbers patchwork jackets. We band together, and thus we grow beyond ourselves.

But what to do once the drainpipe APC’s and 24

Bad Idea

photography by sebastian meyer

ENTERING ADULTLESCENCE

is occupied on an indefinite basis by an old man in comically sized orthopaedic rubber moonboots. He could be asleep, or maybe there’s one of the dwarfish, ruddy potbellies from Humanities Reading Room 2 whispering into his ear while executing a silent hand shandy? On the grout next to them in rich vermillion ink is written: ‘Want to rub my stalk and also discuss literary interests? Tusday 11.30am’, followed by, ‘Yes, does Milton suit?’, in a spidery cursive. As long as there are pens and grout, empty cubicles and a congenial atmosphere of curiosity, these people don’t need Facebook.

Move west along Euston Road, then head south towards Charlotte Street, and you’ll find the Noho Mourner. Dressed almost exclusively in black, they represent the highflying vanguard of London’s successful creative set.

I’ve been tempted to join them lately – having bought a jet-black London Fog overcoat and a pair of thin 5% elastane black pants. I thought about getting some Cutler and Gross frames as well, despite having 20/20 vision. If you can find some black leather Herme’s ankle boots on Ebay, you’ve really nailed it.

Where do they hang out? In all the new money and ‘design’ oriented top line hotels in Noho (the new name for the area being regenerated north of Soho): take your binoculars to the Sanderson and the Charlotte St Hotel, and you should be able to spot some. Or you might find them staring over the rubble at Noho Square, chatting with the Candy brothers about completion dates for their new eco-apartments.

What does their black dress symbolise? Its sombre uniformity, combined with the rakish silhouettes in vogue amongst its devotees, is the creative industries approximation of corporate dress. Clean, unfussy: the onyx business uniform about which the colour of creativity sprouts. An apotrope against the cattiness

of the creative communities, it eschews the risk of asserting individual fashion statements, instead saying: ‘I’m thin, rich, hard-edged and have managed to make a living out of my creative ideas alone in a world where everything is vitiated by money, pushy people and the play of ego and ambition: don’t fuck with me.’

Leaving Noho, and putting away your binoculars, head to across to Regent Street and Liberty’s, where every second Thursday night, in the Tea Room on the ground floor, you’ll find a collection of women in their late 20s nattering in baby voices and knitting. The Liberty’s Knitting Club represents the glamorous edge of a ubiquitous tribe of would be mothers, whose broody urges are assuaged with hobbies and pets.

They knit little woolly hats and miniature mittens, clacking their fingernails and needles together in a group murmur of hope and apprehension about their soon to be coddled children.

A cleaner and less expensive, and probably more social and mentally healthy, alternative to the ‘cat-woman,’ those in the knitting group wear their parenting trainer wheels with pride, the whole exercise representing a trial outpouring of motherly instincts: lots of cooing, over exaggerated, wispy compliments and vocal exchanges conducted in ‘silly voices’. Watch as the swirling emotions surrounding the spectre of approaching motherhood are woven together into gauche, unwanted knitwear, which doubles as the tribes ritual costume. They like to stay ‘warm’, in their wooly hats and scarves, and frequently overdress, being particularly partial to large, puffy winter wear that destroys their silhouette and prepares them for the inevitable aesthetic fluctuations of pregnancy.

Tightly knit, this group sticks together and offers its members a strong sense of belonging. And at worst, they only look marginally as ridiculous as a Camden steampunk

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Adam Wonnacott

Financial tombstones Financial tombstones, sometimes also known as deal toys, are trophies given to the major parties involved in large finance deals: mergers, acquisitions, the issuing of bonds. With cost not a concern, each is fashioned to create a symbolic sculpture representing the companies involved and the new relationship formed. Adam Wonnacott, from UBS Debt Capital Markets, fills us in on his favourites

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

1. This orange thing celebrated a US $500 million bond issue for a Norwegian petrolium company called Statoil 2. The chess board was for a 750 million euro perpetual bond issue for AXA 3. We helped Italian utility ENEL to issue bonds, so they could raise proceeds to purchase a stake in Spanish electricity utility Endesa 4. This was a 400 million euro bond issue for a chemical company called DSM 5. Sainsbury’s wanted to restructure their entire debt portfolio, so we set up two issuance vehicles for the new debt and named them after two famous British lighthouses: Eddystone and Longstone 26

Bad Idea

Amanda Caverzasi

Meeting Maja Changing the subject at a lull, I ask her, “Can you tell me any stories about Marko?”

“I don’t clearly remember Marko,” she says.

Maybe she doesn’t but I feel she’s trying to snub me.

But then she touches my arm and asks me about Marko and London. I return the interest. She tells me she studied architecture but is managing a foreign store for the money. She’s lived in the same neighborhood her entire life. She hasn’t travelled abroad yet. I start to feel close to her. She’s sharing her life.

Suddenly she says, “For me, I felt happy about 9/11.”

It hurts. I’m blinking at Jadranka. She gently shakes her head.

I try to understand. Earlier that day, on Kneza Milosa Street, I looked at the buildings NATO bombed. It’s so stupid they don’t rebuild them.

But most Serbs won’t pardon anybody. Perhaps it’s because they don’t feel the promise of a better future. If they made concessions, they could join the EU someday. But is it so desirable to be an Eastern European in the EU? Jadranka tells me that for 10 years in Belgrade, she stood in fuel and bread lines, among desperate, and sometimes cruel, people. “The weight of what happened is on the top of me. I can’t change it,” she says. “I can only move a little bit.”

That’s all anyone can expect of anybody in Serbia

photography by mark seager

In London, Marko helps me pack my suitcase, as I get ready to visit his parents.

“In Belgrade, you’ll meet Maja,” Marko says as he arranges my belongings like Tetris pieces. Maja helped Marko when he fled to Belgrade at the age of 13, during the break up of Yugoslavia, leaving behind his parents in Zadar city. She enrolled Marko in school and tutored him in math.

“I couldn’t concentrate,” Marko says. “She had this mini skirt, and these green eyes.” Perhaps he also couldn’t concentrate because he had run out of money, and couldn’t contact his parents.

“I had such a bad crush on Maja that I felt nauseous each time she left,” Marko says zipping up my suitcase. No need for me to sit on top of it.

He packs as adroitly as a refugee.

Jadranka, Marko’s Croatian mother, holds tight to Maja as she introduces her to me. Maja is green eyed alright. They’re light peridot. At 33, she’s married and manages a major Italian store. I can’t help but compare myself to Maja. Perhaps she’s doing the same to me because she says, “Studying at an American university is easy. In America, you don’t need to prepare for months to pass the exams.

In Belgrade, you must possess total theoretical understanding before you graduate.”

Milan, Marko’s Serbian father, argues that Serbian institutions don’t possess the facilities to do practical applications. They’re grounded in theories because that’s all they’ve got.

Out Of The Ordinary

27

Tat Usher

Me and My Oil Man He makes it so easy, that’s the thing. And he pays so well. It’s four o’clock on Thursday afternoon and I’m pacing round the flat, close to tears, promising myself yet again that this will be the last time. Julie is sitting at the kitchen table pretending to swot for her microbiology exam.

“Don’t go!” she says. “Tell him to fuck off ! It’s not worth it...”

At half four on the dot the doorbell drills a hole in my head. I kiss Julie a hasty goodbye and stumble down the steps after the Oil Man, dumb with misery and self-hate, clutching my bathrobe in a Norco bag.

The Oil Man’s brand new silver Saab is parked on the double yellow. I can feel Julie frowning down at me from the kitchen window as I climb in.

“How’s the dissertation going?” the Oil Man asks me as he starts the car.

“Fine.”

We glide through the concrete squalor of Seaton, past Norco, St Machar’s Cathedral, and on up the hill to the houses of the oil-rich holy. The Oil Man has started telling me about some perverted show he saw at the Edinburgh Festival last year and I’m trying hard not to listen. There are huge flakes of dandruff on the shoulders of his grey suit. “… And then she pulled this whole string of Union Jack flags out of her vagina.” I stare out of the window at the hard grey sky darkening over

I avoid looking at my reflection in the floor-toceiling mirror. It’s only three hours of my life, after all hard grey granite Aberdeen. There’s a kitchen knife hidden in the folds of my bathrobe.

I get undressed in the Oil Man’s bathroom, which is the size of Julie’s entire flat, and put on my tatty blue bathrobe. I avoid looking at my reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. It’s only three hours of my life, after all.

For the next two hours I ache and endure and manage to be largely absent. Twice during the Session, the Oil Man’s doleful Stick Insect wife 28

comes into the room and just stands there, staring. I think she does it to show how cool and open-minded she is about this, how completely unthreatened she is by it.

After the Session comes dinner. This is part of the whole oily package deal, and it’s the final humiliation, but I can’t seem to bring myself to turn it down.

Tonight it’s chicken in grapefruit sauce. A brown Bad Idea

envelope containing my wages has, as usual, been placed discreetly by my plate. The Oil Man pours me a glass of good red wine and I down it in one.

He smiles indulgently and refills my glass.

It’s almost over. The Oil Man is driving me home.

“There was an elephant of a model at the Art School last week,” he says, smirking. “She was even bigger than you! I mean, really. What’s the point?”

I catch a whiff of paint as he leans towards me to switch the radio off. I wonder if his blood will smell of oil. “If you lost a few pounds, I might be able to use you for some real work,” he says reproachfully, as we pull up outside Julie’s flat, “instead of just for practice”

Out Of The Ordinary

29

Edward Hogan

The Art of Strimming We, the temps, in our green jerseys and trousers, wait. Our boss, Martin, ginger mullet, custom-made protective attachments at the sides of his tinted glasses, necks an allergy tablet and regards us with contempt. “In the van.”

I sit between Sandeep, a student, and ‘Potter’, a 52-year-old who acquired his nickname when the permanents saw his side-parting and spectacles.

A former tool-maker for Rolls-Royce Aerospace, he was made redundant after 9/11.

“It’s the fault of you fuggin A-rabs, Sand Heap,” he says to Sandeep.

“I’m Sikh, isn’t it, you twat.”

We are new. The last temps fell-ill, having spent an afternoon sniffing two-stroke fuel. I announce that I will undertake a Masters next year.

“What subject?” asks Sandeep.

“Writing,” I say.

“What, joined-up?” says Potter, winks.

“Out the van,” says Martin.

I do not recognise this part of my city. A maze of council bungalows, the gardens fenced in. Our job is to get the grass that quad mowers can’t reach.

Ours are not the electric strimmers used for domestic borders. They are dual-handled, petrol-powered,

Martin is a vicious defoliant. He makes his shuffling waltz across the communal gardens like a man looking for buried treasure strap-on Stihl 540s, with rip-cords and mandatory eye-wear. We have face-guards, ear-defenders and harnesses. The trick, Martin explains, is to swing the strimmer in sweeping arcs as you walk. Martin is a vicious defoliant. He makes his shuffling waltz across the communal gardens like a man looking for buried treasure, ducking clotheslines, a green flotsam rolling before him.

“In the van,” he says after an hour. I get there first and he tells me I have the knack. “It’s in the 30

hips,” he says. I am pleased. Potter, says Martin, is no wizard. “He writes his bloody name in it.”

The local FM station runs a competition called ‘The Secret Sound of Derby’ – a one second thudclick, which must be guessed for a grand. Martin is hooked, and repeatedly slams the door, flicks the indicators, as if all sound in Derby is contained within the Transit.

Potter strimmed a dogshit; its rusty colour is spattered on his greens. Martin tells us the worst thing you can strim is a dead hedgehog. “You stink for a week.”

“The Secret Stench of Derby,” says Sandeep.

We spend most of the afternoon in Spondon Cemetery.

“Potter, stay on the old graves,” says Martin.

“Nothing this side of 1900. I’ll do the babies.”

He weaves through cuddly toys.

The pollen blinds me and I strim a plastic Jesus, taking off half the head and one crucified arm, so that he appears to be doing the Night Fever dance.

I apologise to the occupant, 1947-1992.

“In the van,” says Martin Bad Idea

Joe Stretch

My Affordable Girlfriend The first time I met her, I gave her a tenner. A tenner was cheap considering the way she glided towards me across the dancefloor.

Early on, she was a great girlfriend. They bounced, my balls. They bounced around my boxers.

And her boobs! They swilled in their cups and mimicked the movements of joy. I paid for our first kiss with a crisp fiver. At her front door, I touched her hips. “Have that one on the house,” she said.

I blush to remember. She was so fairly priced.

In a rip-off world, she ripped off her blouse and demanded only a quid. A quid!

Affordable to a fault, early fingerings came two for the price of one. Even my more dangerous probes came in well under budget. And what a bargain her breasts were! Once unleashed they were priced as a pair whereas others charged through the nose and by the tit.

My girlfriend’s body came decorated in deals.

Ten spanks for a fiver. Five gropes for three quid or ten for five. Having paid to suckle her nipples, one was entitled to close and kiss the lids of her eyes.

It was romantic. She was so generously priced and I was such a willing customer that inevitably we fell in love. We saw each other often and after five hundred quids worth of foreplay, I said, “I really, really want full sex, babe, yeh?”

I was astonished as, again, she priced herself perfectly. Neither too expensive nor too cheap. I paid

on my card. I took down my boxers. I threw caution to the wind. And then I tore down her knickers with my teeth.

Some year. Some two thousand and whatever, my balls felt weird. They bounced, of course. They still bounced! But as I banged away at my affordable little princess, it felt as if my balls were not bouncing freely but bouncing about in a mouth that would soon snap shut. I went to see my bank manager.

“They exist, you know?” said he.

“What do?” I replied.

“Your rotten accounts.”

I was in debt. Everyone was. Even given the cheapness of our lovers. Very, very randy, we had spent a fortune. We had lived on credit like kings: chip and pinning for elaborate pleasures, borrowing from the cunt to give to the anus, all of us, putting civilisations on our cards.

“I had no idea,” I said.

“No one does,” said my bank manager.

Disgusting, they are. Foul. Dark black rooms, walls wet, columns like dead tendons. No cash at all.

No one sees. But, naturally, even in a world like this one, some things exist. And it’s funny. And so.

I do not pay for sexual favours now. I haven’t got the cash. My girlfriend lives with a wealthy man who calls her bits her gash. It breaks my heart. This is my tomb. I’m bargaining, bargaining, in dark black rooms

Out Of The Ordinary

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Bad Idea

Tell It Like A Story

Dispatches From The Frontiers Of A Savage Age Romanian Property ◆ Sebastien Tellier ◆ Pig in the Middle Credit Crunch ◆ Iraq’s Secret Police ◆ Foreign Carers

Alyssa McDonald

Bucharest or Bust Young Property Investors Raid Romania

“Y

ou can relax, this is a very safe city.”

Shouting over the nightclub blare, Daniel Prieto’s tone is gentle and encouraging.

“Why don’t you just get drunk and dance sexy?”

A giant glitter ball throws squares of light over the expensively dressed Bucharest crowd, as they drink £6 gin and tonics and moodily check each other out. The four guys in the DJ booth polish off the last of their bottle of Jack Daniel’s. R’n’B recedes, to be instantly replaced by a grunting rock number. Prieto holds up his empty glass.

“Another?”

I consider my options, then nod yes, and he starts elbowing his way to the bar.

Short, sleepy-eyed, 32, with spiky brown hair rigid with waxy product, Prieto is that most ubiquitous of young entrepreneurs: a property manager. Originally from Madrid, he’s worked in real estate in South Korea, France and Spain, chasing after various booms and acting as a middleman and fixer. Last year, after investing in apartments in Bucharest, he decided to move here and run a property management company – “The first in Romania, and I’m very proud of it.”

Inside the club, the group of bored-looking men and women Daniel steers me towards speak in English to each other. These are Bucharest’s other young property managers, and almost none of them are Romanian. A tall man with a shaved head keeps one eye on me as he speaks close into Daniel’s ear, then turns around with a broad smile and firmly shakes my hand.

“You should speak to Aris for your article,” Daniel says over his shoulder. “He is in property too.”

Aris is Greek, and it turns out that almost everyone else he introduces me to is foreign: mainly Spanish and Greek. The exceptions are Razman and Irina, the only two Romanians in the small crowd; Daniel met them when he sold Razman a flat. Razman, crammed into a small, slightly transparent white shirt, looks like he’s been roughly carved from a small boulder. Irina is Gucci model beautiful, but dressed like a low-rent Victoria Beckham: black patent stilettos, skin-tight leather trousers, white-blond hair extensions covering a back left naked by her halter-neck waistcoat. She teaches me the Romanian for “cheers” before disappearing off to do a circuit of the room. I try small talk with Razman, asking if this is his favourite club. He looks at me with pitying disdain, shouts “Bamboo, Bamboo” – the name of the city’s most expensive venue – then stalks off.

Some hours later, we’re all still in more or less the same spot. Daniel grins sloppily at me.

34

Bad Idea

40 percentage annual capital growth in Romania, 2006

Photography by Rebecca Miller Hair & make up by Tomokazu Akutsu & Yoshiki Kirino Model: Amanda Mitchell, Bookings Model Agency

“Razman is a Latin lover, he is always about women.”

I nod, blearily looking on as the two Romanians teasingly unbutton one another on the dance floor, their deeply tanned noses almost touching.

“I am a Latin lover too,” he confides at the top of his voice, leaning in so I can hear him.

I gaze into what remains of my whisky and coke.

A

t Bucharest (Otopeni) airport, the corridor between the plane and Arrivals is lined with adverts. The first shows an illustration of ‘Copper Beech, 16,000 properties around Bucharest. Golf, property, leisure.’ In the taxi to the city centre, the driver points out new office blocks and plots of freshly churned earth which have trebled in value in the space of a few years.

“There’s big business here now,” he says, and starts reeling off figures: “15 years ago, one hectare here was $500.”

We pass a huge, beautiful park with a sign advertising a new lakeside development.

“35 hectares,” quotes the driver.

The city centre traffic is a crush of Maseratis, Porsches and Ferraris, as well as the occasional squat Romanian-built Dacia. As we reach the Piata Revolutiei, he says quietly, “Many person is dead here.”

We sit in near-silence for the next few minutes, as he weaves towards the side street my hotel is on.

Romania is changing at an amazing rate. Until the revolution of 1989, the country was suffocating under the dictatorship of Ceausescu, and the government owned all property. However, after the revolution Romanians were able to buy Tell It Like A Story

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Out Of The Ordinary

37

For foreigners used to working the cutthroat property markets of Western Europe, Romania is one big barrel full of fat, sluggish fish panelled rooms are quiet and almost empty. I sit down and wait.

I’ve been put in touch with Prieto by British company Arc Property, which specialise in eastern European investments, and use Prieto as one of their main property managers in the Bucharest. Arc’s Romanian market research file is printed in capital letters, in a big bold font prophetically named PERPETUA: ROMANIA IS TODAY THE NUMBER ONE PLACE TO MAKE MONEY IN EUROPE… WITH ANNUAL CAPITAL GROWTH MORE THAN 40% IN 2006, AND RENTAL YIELDS AS HIGH AS 15%, THE REAL ESTATE MARKET IS IN FULL BOOM. MOREOVER, GIVEN THE EXCELLENT ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, AND EU ACCESSION IN JANUARY 2007, THERE ARE STRONG REASONS TO BELIEVE THIS TREND WILL BE SUSTAINED. THE INCREASING AFFLUENCE OF THE POPULATION AND THE CURRENT HOUSING SHORTAGE IN LARGE TOWNS POINT TO STRONG LOCAL DEMAND FOR BOTH SALE AND RENTAL...

Persuasive stuff. More so because it’s true.

When Prieto arrives he gives me a brief smile and sits down, orders himself a coffee in English, then in a soft voice begins to run through the basics of the country’s property market. He has the perfunctory delivery of a man bored with his own story, but patiently re-explains the points I don’t understand.

“Two years ago I could buy something with my eyes closed and get a huge benefit for sure. You know, I bought some apartments, and in two years they have doubled in price. And the rent is amazing. It’s even more expensive than Madrid or Paris. A one-bedroom apartment in Bucharest you can buy for 150,000 euros.

And you can rent it at 1000 euros per month. An apartment that you rent for 1000 38

Bad Idea

photography by alyssa mcdonald

their flats back from the state for nominal sums of around 100 euros. Most families now own the property they live in. But in some poorer parts of town, two or three generations can be found living in one old, decaying apartment.

This means there is potentially a massive demand for new-builds, and a large untapped rental market. Combined with a growing economy, and Romania’s accession to the EU in January 2007, these factors have created a red-hot housing boom. Normally local investors would swoop; but in Romania, foreigners have bought up 40-50% of the properties. It’s impossible to know for certain, but it seems likely that the proportion is so large because there is no history of a property market here, and little understanding amongst locals of the culture of leveraging, buy to let properties, or, for that matter, the swift pace of capitalist business.

Among the more astonishing comparisons with other markets: Britain’s mortgage debt averages out at 21,000 euros per person, in Romania, it’s 19. Not 19,000 euros. Just 19 euros. For foreigners used to working the cutthroat property markets of Western Europe, this makes the country one big barrel full of fat, sluggish fish.

After a few minutes walking back through the Piata Revolutiei, past the stately Art Museum and alongside a block of crumbling flats that wouldn’t look out of place on the set of Brazil, I arrive at Cream Caffe, my first meeting point for Daniel Prieto. The street is bustling with people and small stalls selling trinkets, and single flowers wrapped in cellophane, but inside the café, the high-ceilings and wood-

Daniel Prieto, Property Manager

19

average Romanian per capita mortgage debt in euros

photography by alyssa mcdonald

euros in Spain will cost you minimum 300,000 euros. I’m sure in London it’s even more. So here the rate is incredible. It’s crazy.”

He reels off more numbers, then gives me a sober, weary little smile. “For people who are interested in business, this is the right country right now. You can get very good deals here.”

He looks down at his hands, then qualifies this statement. “I’m a very optimistic person. I live in many countries, I am a traveller. And this is the first one I don’t really like. Here there are only two things: business and pretty women. It’s true. It’s what is interesting in Romania.”

I ask him what his own plans are. The answer comes out as a sigh. “I may go. My company has no big secret to work. We are doing property management, which is new here, so we standardise processes, and we get to a big volume of clients, and then we can get a big profit, no? But Romania – it’s impossible. It’s really impossible. This country, I don’t know, it doesn’t work. There is a lot of corruption here in Romania, a lot. It takes a lot of time to do everything. But in front of my clients, sometimes it’s very difficult to explain to them things that happen. How can I explain to one of my clients in Switzerland that the lady at the commercial register didn’t process my application because I didn’t bring her the right chocolates?”

I start to ask him how he can bear to live somewhere with nothing going for it, but he corrects me, grinning. “There are a lot of things – very good business, and very good women!” After a moment, he becomes more philosophical: “When I first came here I had no contact, no idea, nothing. So I was quite adventurous, no?

I was walking on the street, asking people what to do, and it was a good beginning.

And now I have my little world here in Romania with my few friends and that’s it.”

“I wouldn’t recommend this area, this country to any of my friends as a tourist.

It’s not really much from that point of view. Many of the investors, they don’t even come to Romania once. I have many clients who have apartments here and they never came here. They buy them on the Internet, and I am taking care of them.

And they are having great profit. Which is great,” he adds flatly.

His ringing phone calls time on the interview, and once he’s finished we walk out into the street together. He apologises for being too busy to walk around the city with me this afternoon, but offers to lend me a map so that I can find one of the new blocks of flats, and suggests I meet him and his friends for a drink later. We walk the five minutes to his flat – an immaculate old building with a tiled stairwell, which also doubles as his office. We formally shake hands, and go our separate ways.

The new apartments are a little way out from the city centre, so freshly-painted that they look like they’re coated in plastic. They are the kind of pleasant newbuild blocks you might find anywhere in Europe, differentiated only by the burly man in a corporate baseball cap who suddenly appears, glaring menacingly while I take photos. The pristine high-rise is virtually back-to-back with a grim Soviet era building: its battered grey heating pipes weave cinematically around a dirty, flaking exterior.

As I walk back to the city centre, I pass another grim building whose eastfacing windows are almost completely covered by a giant advert for a new resort development. Most of the roads I walk have large areas of pavement ripped up to allow for works underneath; when I moan about it to Daniel later, he tells me that they’ve been that way for months. And wandering down into the metro station at Piata Revolutiei, I’m hit by a weird, rotten-rubber stink. It comes from the burnt out escalators, stripped of any removable pieces of metal. Judging from the festering rubbish nestling in the gaps, they’ve been that way for a long time.

A

led, a 24-year-old banker with a nervous, friendly manner and two flats in Bucharest, is typical of many of the young British investors who’ve claimed their piece of Romania over the last few years. He peppers our phone conversation with phrases like “bullish markets” and “Savills Reports”. Eventually his Tell It Like A Story

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Bad Idea

romanian national tourist office

descriptions simmer down to the one key fact: he expects his investment to increase “by three, four, five times in the next five years.”

Like Daniel, he has been prepared to travel for the promise of success – he’s currently living and working in Hong Kong – but when I ask if he’s planning to visit his Romanian flats, he sounds surprised, half-laughing his response.

“Bucharest is certainly not on my list of destinations. It’s not a finished city yet.”

At Cream Caffe I’d asked Daniel what he saw for Bucharest in the future, and his view had chimed with Aled’s.

“I can’t tell you how Romania will be in ten years. I can tell you about China or India, but Romania? I can’t tell you. It could be exactly the same, or it could be like a very modern city. I can expect anything to happen here.”

Romania has become a completely different country in the past few years, but

by EU standards, it is still very poor: the average wage is only about a third of the European average. If the economy continues to grow at the rate it has over the past five years or so, then it could potentially overtake more established EU member states. But if Romania experiences mass emigration on the scale that, say, Poland did directly after it joined the EU, that growth will inevitably grind to a halt.

A week or so after I get back, I call Pietro’s office to ask Florentza Barbu, his 34 year old, Bucharest-born business partner, how she sees things. She’s incredibly upbeat about the opportunities that have now opened up, but she points out that “if you ask almost any 18-35 year old in Bucharest, they will tell you that they want to leave.”

She isn’t in a hurry to go, although that’s largely because she has a six year old, who “needs stability.” But she also points out that Romania’s reputation as a poor, corrupt nation means that Romanians are not always well received abroad. And besides, leaving is not a prerequisite for success: “If you are really serious, if you work, you can have great success. It hasn’t changed as fast as it could have, but I really believe that in five years you will see a completely different Bucharest.”

Her tone stays bright, but the problems Romania still faces are evident in what she says.

“Even if 100% of building projects don’t happen, I think 80% will,” she says, answering a question I didn’t ask. “And if they aren’t completed then people will just get their money back.”

It transpires that only three of the many planned new housing projects around Bucharest have actually been finished: around 1000 homes. By Barbu’s and Prieto’s accounts, whilst the potential is huge, the pace of change in Romania seems to be improvised and sluggish. As property management consultants, foreign investors give them power of attorney to sign contracts, check the flats for defects, sort utilities, find furniture and tenants. They claim it often takes six visits and 20 odd phones calls for local furniture providers to furnish a single apartment.

Customer service and the idea of competitive business don’t really seem to have caught on here yet. But then, if it were easier to do, it’s unlikely that they’d be so successful.

“Before I was a partner in this company, I was so used to the way things are done here that they were not even bothering me,” says Barbu. “But Dan is frustrated, and I am getting more upset about things now. You start your days like you are going to war, you have to fight for everything.” She has a warm, easy laugh.

While the EU’s pledge of 30 million euros for local infrastructure over the next five years may help wake the country up, and speed up modernisation, Barbu remains unsure. The influx of money into the country doesn’t necessarily mean the government knows what to do with it, or that locals will benefit.

As we finish our conversation, she tells me one last story about a Spanish journalist she knows who visited the country recently, and interviewed the Romanian Minister for Economy and Finance Varujan Vosganian.

“He asked him what his priorities were,” she says.

“The minister said his main priority is to find a consultant to tell him what his priorities are.”

Palace of Parliament, Bucharest

1

Romania’s ranking for corruption in the EU

41

Confessions 1: Love and Sex

Sebastien Tellier Pop sensation, and France’s 2008 Eurovision Entry

Photography by Francois Valenza

M

y new album Sexuality is my attempt to create a really beautiful story of sex.

It is the story about the perfect night of sex: in the beginning you talk with a girl about your past, you take her to an exhibition; after that if it seems to be going well, we talk more, we smoke some joints, we make love, and then I think very deeply. Think about everything – my problems, my previous mistakes – because when I make love I feel so good I can go against my past. I’m full of energy and happiness, I can look my destiny in the eye, and I can be in front of myself; I can think about all my problems in a different way. But afterwards, I fall into deep introspection. Sex is the best school for the mind.

Making sexual music is very hard, because sexual harmonies are very rare. It’s very easy to play simple chords, and then after that the intellectual music that you can learn at school. But sexual music is impossible to learn at school, it’s something you have to find by yourself. It’s a very deep adventure to find these kinds of notes. Usually when you find a sexual harmony, it’s so rare. That’s why all the great musicians – Michael Jackson, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder – play sexual music, because sexual music is the most pleasure for a musician because it’s so hard to find. You can find the real flavour of art there.

It was very important to get in the mood. So I changed my apartment, I changed my car, I changed my girlfriend. And my new girlfriend is really obsessed by sex.

I moved from the outskirts of Paris, to the centre – the most sexual place in Paris, Place de la Madeleine.

To have a good sexual life you have to organise that, it’s not just natural. You have to think about it, and you have to be a particular person. Before, I was someone really afraid of life, with paranoia, so I did work on my mind to become someone new, someone full with sexuality; before, I was not really intellectual about sex, although I thought I was. Then one day I

42

discovered, you have to use your intelligence not just to create something or make money, you have to use your intelligence just to feel good. It’s important to try to use your intelligence in everything. A happy guy is a curious, thinking guy; a sad guy is a stupid guy.

I just try to be the condition of my music. I want to ‘be’ my record so I wear a beard to be mysterious like my music, a tuxedo to be sophisticated, and long hair to be almost a woman – because when you want be in that mindset to talk about sexuality it helps to be almost a woman as well.

I create new characters for every record. One of my main inspirations for this character in Sexuality is a beautiful Italian guy – I have always this image of a beautiful guy, making love in the wind.

For me, a guy can be sophisticated, but he has to be a real guy: rustic, with a touch of bling bling. I love the style of Karl Lagerfeld, the German/French designer. Sophisticated, almost a woman, but, at the same time, a touch of bling bling.

One of my most intellectual songs on the album is about my fantasies of sportswear. You know, those small shorts for women. This may sound like something light that I’m talking about, but these fantasies, they give me a small shock. The uncontrollable desire I feel when I want to touch a woman’s sport shorts: that is the spark, the meaning, the beginning of life. Reaching out, alive, tearing them off with my teeth. There is no life without desire.

But I don’t want to listen to my music when I make love. I used to make love to music when I was younger, but now my favourite soundtrack for sex is noises from nature: wind, water, birds. Outdoors is the best. I never think about making love in a bedroom, it is the most boring place for sex. The kitchen, outdoors, the beach – perfect As told to Daniel Stacey

Bad Idea

Out Of The Ordinary

43

Jean Hannah Edelstein

WEB HEADS The Human Face of Britain’s Information Revolution

Photography by Ben Turner

2.8 billions of pounds spent on Internet advertising in the UK in 2007, up 38%

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t 10 o’clock in the morning the office has only just begun to buzz – or rather, to click and to hum, with the rhythmic sounds of enthusiastic typing and purring hard drives. For the team behind Nestoria.co.uk, the day starts officially at 11 o’clock, when they assemble for their daily meeting. For the most part, the all-male staff begin trickling in around 10 am, assuming their designated stations behind the enormous computer monitors which are arranged in neat lines down the colourless room that the organisation occupies in an old building in Covent Garden: wonky staircases, uneven floorboards, the sort of place where a Dickensian solicitor might once have plied his trade.

Superficially, it seems that turning up for this daily confab is the only regular responsibility of the employees of Lokku Ltd., which is the company that produces and manages Nestoria, a property search engine. Click on to the page, and it’s not much to look at – if anything, it appears to be a rather less sexy, property-centred Google.

“People always look at Nestoria and say, ‘there’s no advertising,’” says cofounder Ed Freyfogle, pulling the home page up on his giant monitor. “But, of course, it’s all advertising.”

He shows me how to find a home in my neighbourhood, drawing me a sketch of how the website works. “Basically, let’s say this guy has a house,” he says, indicating a stick figure, “and he wants to sell his house. So, in the UK this guy then goes to an estate agent. That estate agent then typically lists the house with multiple [Internet] portals. We want to be the first point of contact.”

In an industry that largely burns on potential, rather that realised profit, Lokku is unusual: founded in 2004 by Javier Extebeste and Ed Freyfogle, both refugees from Yahoo! Europe, they’ve already started making money.

Not lots of money, mind you, not lots of money just yet.

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h, Internet. How I love you. How we all love you. How we are painfully and passionately and pitifully addicted to you. With handheld web-surfing devices constantly clasped in our moist palms, we need not remember any piece of information (Train times? Directions? How old Mum is?), because we can always just look it up on the web. And just as we were once faintly aware that there was money to be made in television and films, we’re now somewhat clued in to the fact that someone, somewhere, is making lots of money from our addiction.

Who are these someones? Well, we think, picturing Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, they are a little doughy. They probably didn’t have very many friends in high school, and they were at the top of math class. They are the chaps who used to sit around the table in the school library during lunch when we were about 15, throwing cards with pictures of wizards on them at each other. And now reading the paper (online, natch), we have a feeling that all of this technological mumbling about 2.0 and IPOs and Google buyouts is an indication that those geeks from high school could now buy all of the wizard cards that they wanted, because they are terribly rich. What is going on within these hotbeds of contemporary capitalism, the internet start-ups, where the finest minds of our generation go to type code into keyboards and retire at the age of 35 with their surprisingly attractive wives?

On a chilly day in March, I stand on the sidewalk, a little nervous, waiting to find out.

One of the Lokku employees sees me as he pulls open the door to go into the office.

“You coming in to Nerd Central?” he says.

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sually, the very informal conference is supposed to actually get going at 11 – it’s the only constant in the company’s day – but Javier, who supervises the business side of things while Ed oversees the product, has been out of the office, deep in discussion with Lokku’s funders all morning, so they’ve delayed it until after lunch time. Formerly the head of Yahoo! Europe, Javier is unusual amongst the rest of the team in that he comes from a business background.

“The big challenge is connecting the online business with the other side of the business,” he explains. “Credibility is a plus.”

Persuading investors who might not be entirely familiar with the ins and outs of an Internet business like Lokku, who might be aware that the web is a big deal but don’t know how it works, is a particular challenge. Though Javier is not a software engineer by trade, he does try to keep on top of how things work, and he places a great deal of trust in his partnership with Ed, building on their relationship from working at Yahoo! Europe several years ago. “Ed and I have this ambition on [sic] the business and the product. We have full agreement on the product,” he explains, in fluent English that sounds a little rehearsed. Javier, 46, primarily lives in Spain, near Barcelona, where he has a wife and family – so his is an arduous commute, pegged to the belief that the online classified business is going to be a big one.

Talking about funding is the only time when the atmosphere at Lokku can feel a tiny bit corporate. I ask Javier how much money they’re talking about, how much is getting pumped in and out, and he is reluctant to answer.

“Millions?” I say, with a lightness that I hope will charm him.

“Oh, no,” he says.

“Hundreds of thousands?”

“You’re good,” he says.

The money comes from private investors – some from so-called ‘Angel Investors’, who hand over their cash and then don’t try to interfere in the daily running of the business. This proves a relief for Ed, who says he has friends who’ve been stymied by having to devote so much time to managing investors that they couldn’t devote sufficient time to the development of their products.

“Time is our greatest resource,” he says.

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Javier Extebeste, Co-founder Lokku Ltd.

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In general, the day at Lokku is flexible. The daily schedule of each member of the company pretty much boils down to: sit at computer typing furiously and thinking creatively; eat lunch; type and think and compute; go home. The phone never rings, but that’s hardly surprising for a company where colleagues (who sit so close to each other that they could easily have a fistfight without moving their chairs) still find it most natural and convenient to conduct the majority of their professional relationships – particularly when it comes to disagreements – via email.

“We have our meeting standing up so we can’t get too long-winded,” Ed says, as his colleagues shuffle across the carpet to assemble in the clearest space in the office, forming something that approximates a circle. I’m not sure I remember such obedient formation of a perimeter since primary school. “We struggle with communication,” Spiros says to me, looking a little doleful.

For a moment, I wonder if some kind of embarrassing corporate trust-building routine is about to begin. They look at each other, they look at the ceiling, they look at their shoes. Something about the general atmosphere of overwhelming discomfort makes it feel like we are attending a 12-step meeting.

“We usually go around in the circle,” Ed explains. “It’s quite short… Javier, why don’t you start?”

Javier – by far the most extroverted member of the company, beams.

“Sure! Big announcement, today launched we formally Hot Property, one of the two top players in the UK, finally we agreed last night and it’s alive today.

And this morning we had a key meeting with one of our key clients, it went well.

Easter starts in Spain tomorrow, and I have a wife and kids. I’m going to, it’s my last chance to go to Paris [with them].”

There is a silence. Shoes are stared at.

“All right,” Ed says.

Opposite page Ed Freyfogle, Co-founder Lokku Ltd.

Something about the general atmosphere of overwhelming discomfort makes it feel like we are attending a 12-step meeting

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n the last decade or so, as the Internet has flourished, most users have gone from being constantly amazed with new developments to almost lazily sanguine in their attitudes towards online innovation. If we can’t find a web product that gives us the information we need (or simply crave) within seconds, we click on through, disgruntled. We regard media reports of the multi-million pound valuations of web companies (SuperPoke? Millions? Um, OK) with tacit acceptance, because we don’t really understand how they work – and most of us don’t really care to try to understand it, provided we can get the data that we need about the movie we want to see this evening from the touch of a button on our mobiles.

As the story of the Industrial Revolution has been cemented in history as one dominated by plucky, innovative lads who got off the farms thanks to their particular flair for exploiting new technology, the narrative of the contemporary Information Revolution seems inclined to be inextricably linked with a cast of bespectacled, once-spotty, computer-game addicted youths who have woken from their pixel-induced stupors in the second half of the noughties to discover, much to their delight, that after years of being condemned to the dingiest corner of the cafeteria by dint of their excessive skills with computer languages, now everyone wants them to sit at their lunch tables.

But apart from photographs of ex-nerds parading around the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas, accompanied by young women eager Tell It Like A Story

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Opposite page Alex Balachet, Nestoria employee

to befriend them on social networks, is the daily grind of the start-up all that glamorous? What qualifies someone to be one of these brave Captains of Web 2.0 Industry?

In any other context, Ed wouldn’t stand out as particularly charismatic. Tall, extremely lanky, and fair-haired, he outwardly lacks the smarmy self-confidence of the pin-up Web 2.0 boys of websites like Facebook, Digg and de.lic.ious. It’s not to say that he couldn’t be transformed into a Mark Zuckerberg-like character if Nestoria really exploded, but then Ed isn’t providing users with a platform for spying on pictures of their drunken ex-girlfriends: he’s helping them find homes.

It’s certainly not the sexiest corner of the web. But does it have the potential to be one of the most profitable? That’s what Ed, and Javier, and their top-secret investors are counting on.

Ed was educated in Germany and the United States; trained as an engineer.

Following his departure from Yahoo!, he hit business school at MIT and then headed to the UK, refreshed and inspired, to leap on the 2.0 wave.

I press Ed to find out if he has a particular passion for real estate, if that’s what’s behind the time and effort he’s put in to Nestoria, but it’s quickly apparent that he doesn’t. Ed is simply an entrepreneur who has hit a good product: 150 years ago, he would have been running a factory manufacturing new-fangled clothes fastenings or perhaps a distribution centre for innovative gaslights. For Ed, the key to success is sticking with what’s dull, workaday, but secretly cutting-edge and, above all, oriented towards user-friendliness. Ed is critical of search engines that take a fancier approach.

“Is Google really giving me what the best answer is? Or is it giving me the Google answer?” he says. “That’s a dangerous path to go down. I can tell you, this is what killed Yahoo!”

Having identified that online classifieds were one areas that remained to be exploited, and having lots of search experience from his days at Yahoo!, it wasn’t terribly difficult for him to commence building Nestoria. When social networking falls out of fashion, when no one cares anymore to compile lists of hundreds of acquaintances, and – perhaps most importantly – when the credit crunch means that no one wants to actually buy a home anymore, everyone will still need to find somewhere to live. Above all, endurance is key in the industry. Cha-ching.

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n the realm of 2.0, it’s hard to buck the stereotypes. Mike Astle’s keyboard is warped and strange; it looks like it melted in the conflagration of the first dotcom boom, but it’s actually specially shaped to prevent him from falling victim to the programmer’s career-ending sports injury – a repetitive stress injury, carpal tunnel syndrome, what have you. But the yellowed lump of twisted plastic – it must have been terribly modern when it was produced, but now, juxtaposed with the rest of the faintly humming and glowing streamlined equipment, it looks hopelessly retro – is so much more than a keyboard. In fact, it is a tech-geek trophy of honour, signed by colleagues from his previous career in the late 90s, before the first web bubble burst so very spectacularly and a surfeit of unemployed geeks surged into the job market like so much flotsam, only to get swept up again in the wave of 2.0.

Ed is, in fact, one of those former colleagues: ‘Nerd! – Ed F’ was his contribution to the graffito, dripping in irony. Mike is the engineering manager, and he appears to have been plucked from a central casting supply of software engineers: he slugs water from a Caltech-branded Nalgene water bottle, he is a little pale, perhaps from not spending very much time outdoors; he is a little jaded and sarcastic, a lot smart, a lot geeky, and American. This last point is notable: there’s rather a dearth of British employees at Nestoria.

“I think it would be difficult for English developers to create the kind of organisation that we have,” Mike remarks, citing his experience in the red-hot Silicon Valley development culture as key to his success at Lokku. “The culture behind [Internet] companies is not entirely obvious to users.”

Of course, the market in London for Internet start-ups is simply smaller, and 48

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Mike Astle, Engineering manager

they have to compete with global organisations that have the more significant financial backing that is available in the US. But that’s why Nestoria works so well: property search is country specific, so they don’t actually have to fret about getting trumped by something that comes out of a teenager’s basement in a small town in Indiana, or even Silicon Valley.

Whereas Ed appears to be slightly more concerned with maintaining the fact that there is more to him than an affinity for writing code, Mike is decidedly not self-conscious, plonking himself down in his chair upon arrival and commencing to munch with a certain degree of heartiness on greasy toast.

“There’s an impression,” I say to Mike, floating the idea carefully, “That it’s just a bunch of people…who once played a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons when they were growing up and who are now quite rich.”

Silently, Mike immediately places a photocopy of a chart that ran in The New York Times following the recent death of the creator of Dungeons and Dragons in front of me.

“Ah,” I say. “Such as yourself.”

“Funny you should mention that,” says Ed. I examine the chart: it maps of the key links between the various areas of DD ‘fandom’.

“I did play Dungeons and Dragons in my youth and adolescence,” Mike admits.

“Also a variety of other role-playing games. The first programme that I ever wrote was a script for cheating at a computer game. So that’s what kind of got me down the path of…,” he pauses, looks at Ed, “…suffering.”

Ed admits that he also used to play computer games quite a bit. “It’s a habit I’ve managed to break,” he says.

But if you like computers – no, if you love computers, if you want to spend your day programming them in languages called things like ‘perl’ which very few people speak, then I am reliably informed by the Nestoria staff that you have two clear career choices in London. As Mike explains it: you can go and work in the City, where you will be handsomely compensated for programming while wearing an uncomfortable suit and being shouted at by people who can’t make head nor tail of the streams of code that scroll down your screen, or you can go and work for a company like Lokku, “in a slightly underlit office in Covent Garden”, Mike says, where you can wear a woolly hat at your desk, or a fleece or a t-shirt with a geeky slogan (or all three) and still be the recipient of a handsome selection of stock options.

I have a quick glance around the room. Why don’t they have any female employees?

“We have Monica,” Ed says, of their colleague in their smaller Spanish office.

“They’re employed on really more of a short-term contractual basis,” Mike says, joking. I frown at him. Ed rolls his eyes. “The most important thing is that they’re smart,” he says, “regardless of gender.”

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he American West Coast remains the place where the streets are paved with venture capital gold, and many British and European developers have hitched their wagons to that community in their quests for global Internet dominance.

The smaller British market is very imperfectly formed. Poke around a bit, and you will find dozens of websites that still sputter along, just a little, but which have essentially folded as a result of British developers failing to create a product that trumps its better-funded American counterparts.

A quick squizz at the guest list for Top Cats, a monthly networking event for the top names in the digital industry, convened by Paul Walsh, Chair of the British Interactive Media Association, reveals that some of the leading Web 2.0 companies are offshoots of American companies – Google, Excite, the usual suspects. But there are a number of burgeoning British companies in there as well – Toptable, one of the longest-running, which rode through the slump; Coull, centred around a web video application, and Pikum, a social networking gaming site that was most recently reported to have scored £2.6 million in funding.

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Indeed, for aspiring developers who don’t want to make the move to Silicon Valley, there’s plenty to be exploited in the particularities of British and European markets, rendering London an increasingly desirable alternative hub of innovation. The spectre of crazy London success stories also adds the element of buzz: Last.fm was bought by CBS in 2007 for £140 million, and Bebo was bought in March 2008 for a dizzying $850 million, despite being significantly behind other social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook in terms of user uptake.

dozens of BRITISH websites have folded as a result of developers failing to create a product that trumps its better-funded American counterpart But achieving those fortunes remains, for the most part, an unglamourous business.

“You don’t wake up and say, ‘hey, I’m going to make out with my computer today,’” says be-tuqued programmer Spiros Denaxas – the fellow who invited me in to Nerd Central in the first place – when I ask him to go into the details of the life of a software developer. Originally from Athens, Greece (as opposed to Georgia) Spiros came to the UK to do an undergraduate degree in Bradford and is now tackling a PhD in bioinformatics in tandem with his job at Lokku. Spiros is a little doleful: “It’s sort of draining the life, out me,” he says of his PhD work, unsmiling.

Spiros admits that he once had what some might regard as an unhealthy relationship with technology. “I used to spend, like, 20 hours a day on a computer,” he remarks, but of course it seems to have paid off in terms of his career. Now, he appreciates what he describes as the “mutual understanding” that is shared amongst his colleagues at Lokku. “The direct implications,” he says, of a computer-based lifestyle, “is that your social skills drop to a minimum.” He squints at me. I smile, awkwardly.

It’s time to go: I’ve met everyone, I’ve watched them work, and it’s apparent that the team would like to get on with things unimpeded by my attempts to make them justify what they do in terms that the noncomputer-savvy might comprehend. Quietly, steadily, they’re working on becoming stupendously rich via means that the average Internet user will never fully understand. The combination of their Silicon Valley smarts and appetite to tap into unexploited markets makes it apparent that Lokku, and companies of its ilk, are poised to make big money off the Internet before most of us figure it out. When the next crash comes it will be the people who try to ride on the coattails of these early developers who’ll get screwed. Ed and Javier et al may well be enjoying early retirement by then.

I say a proper goodbye to Ed and wave wanly at everyone else. I look back across the vista of heads dwarfed by computer screens covered in fine type and metrics, and I realise: I still don’t quite get it. I came here today expecting to dispel stereotypes, to understand what programmers are really like, to get beyond the geek. I failed, sort of. They are geeks.

They are on the road to vast riches. And it’s a journey on which I cannot join them Tell It Like A Story

1.34 billions of venture capital dollars invested in Web 2.0 companies in the US last year

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Confessions 2: Money & Power

Robert Greene Bestselling author and strategist

Photograph courtesy of Robert Greene

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he whole idea behind my book The 48 Laws of Power is that power is timeless and universal, and doesn’t depend on any culture or time period.

It was going on in the Bible when Joseph’s brothers threw him into a ditch and took his coat, and it’s going on today. To make that point legitimate, I had to bring in as many sources as possible from all periods and cultures, and also all arenas. I didn’t want to talk about just politics or war, I wanted to bring in figures like Houdini, and con artists, because I think of power as largely being a con game. This was Machiavelli’s idea of power as well. It’s about the art of indirection.

Black Americans form a large portion of my readership. I can only speculate why that is, but some of it seems to be related to their viewpoint on power in America. They realise that America isn’t necessarily about all the values it propounds – it’s not really about decency, justice, democracy, and fairness, 60

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millions of dollars Forbes estimates 50 cent made from his stake in Glaceau VitaminWater after the company was sold to Coca Cola in May 2007

it’s more brutal than that. Much of it is about money, and they’re on the short end of it, they’re on the outside looking in.

When African Americans read a book like The 48 Laws of Power, they think, ‘Well, he’s just being honest. That’s just how power operates. That’s what the white guys have been doing to us for years. That’s how corporations are run. That’s how this country is run.’

I’m not totally cynical, I know America stands for many things that are good, but much of its values are very hypocritical, and black people can see through that.

48 Laws is an honest revealing of the inner workings of power. The people who whine and complain the most about the book are usually people of privilege, who consider themselves ‘liberal’. It happens time and again – they whine because the book tears away their illusion of what the world should be like. Black people have none of these illusions.

I wanted to bring in figures like Houdini, and con artists, because I think of power as largely being a con game. This was Machiavelli’s idea of power as well. It’s about the art of indirection 50 Cent was a huge fan of The 48 Laws of Power.

When the book came out he really, really took to it; he felt that he had been following the laws before the book was written, that they were already in his ‘DNA’.

50’s literary agent got in touch with me and arranged a meeting between me, him, and people from his team in New York. This was a couple of years ago, when 50 was having a feud with a rapper called The Game, and it was getting pretty nasty.

50 is a very interesting character. He’s a very smart guy – complex and very contradictory. He’s not easy to read or figure out, and he’s not the thuggish image that is sometimes presented. He’s got sides

to him, and has something a little extra than the average person.

The book we collaborated on is based on our endless meetings and discussions about philosophy.

It’s called The 50th Law, and focuses on the laws of hustling. The general philosophy behind it is that we’re entering a new world now, where, for better or for worse, it’s every man and woman for himself: people have turned into rabid hustlers, whether they know it or not.

It’s really a business book, and shows that 50 managed to learn business from dealing crack and drugs – not from an MBA, not from a position of privilege, not from working his way up in some company. Each story illustrates how he bridges the gap from his days working as a hustler to his dealings in the corporate realm.

When 50 was dealing drugs, it was all about saturating the market, monopolising his area, and making the drug addicts know he was the person to turn to. Then his world flipped, and he did the same thing with his mixtapes – saturated the market. And now he does this with his other products. The model is the same.

50’s entrepreneurial spirit is very much after my own mentality. This old American idea of selfreliance, which is very big in the African-American world, goes back to Malcolm X and the black Muslims. The idea is that black people should own their own businesses, and not rely on white people for charity. And that mentality is sort of what came about in the 80s in New York with the New Jack City thing; when crack exploded on the streets it broke up the gangs, and it was every man for himself.

Of course, crack was a terrible thing. 50 isn’t proud of what he did, it was an epidemic that nearly crushed black culture. But then again, when you live in a place like New York, where you see so much wealth around you and yet you’re totally kept away from it, then you find this one avenue of making money to explore… well naturally, anyone with any kind of ambition is going to gravitate towards it.

50 realised that selling crack was going to kill him and that he had to get out. Still, those entrepreneurial ideas and techniques he used with a destructive, murderous product are the same ideas he’s using with his other products today. When you’re an entrepreneur like that, there’s a certain way of thinking: it’s all up to you, and you have to take risks.

And 50 Cent is like that. He really doesn’t give a fuck – he’ll make decisions that no other white guy would make if he ran a company as large as his. I just admire that, it’s so refreshing. It’s the kind of attitude that existed in America in the 19th century, and 50 is almost a throwback to those Wild West days As told to Jack Roberts

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Sebastian Meyer & Jack Roberts

SWINE OF THE TIMES British Pig Farming’s Doomsday Moment

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he British pig industry is in meltdown. Over the past 12 months the cost of feed, which accounts for approximately 60% of a farmer’s production costs for a free-range pig, has doubled in Europe. These increased costs haven’t been mirrored by the prices paid by companies who buy pig meat however – processing companies such as the Danish giant Tulip, as well as the supermarkets they supply: Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and the Walmart owned Asda. Nine in 10 farmers polled by the National Pig Association (NPA) have said they plan to quit the industry within a year if the situation doesn’t change.

In Yorkshire, pig farmer and NPA member Richard Longthorpe tells me he’s losing between £15 and £25 per pig on his farms, which produce approximately 500 pigs a week.

“Feed costs are crippling the industry,” he says. “Not just here, but globally.

The Canadians, for example, are experiencing the exact same problems we are, and their government has just announced a programme where they will pay farmers to gas every 10th pig to reduce production.”

“One of the fundamental problems we have, which politicians and retailers haven’t got a grasp of, is that the only way farmers can get an increase in the prices we receive for our pigs is to reduce production capacity, create a shortage, and force the price up that way. And that’s just crap economics: food is in short supply, and yet we have to make that supply even shorter to get the money we need just to cover the cost of creating it? It’s crazy.”

The soaring price of feed is the result of a global shortage in wheat and soya, caused by several factors: increased consumption in emerging economies like China and India; poor global harvests thanks to two years of major droughts in Australia, North America, and South America; the significant, although frequently overestimated role of biofuels, as wheat and maize are used to create bio-ethanol, and soya for bio-diesel; and, Longthorpe says, the machinations of the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

“They’ve seen returns from stock markets falling, and so they create the volatility in soft commodity markets that fuels their profit taking. They love volatility, of course, but we hate it – it’s unmanageable.”

Feed prices are unlikely to fall anytime soon, so the only foreseeable solution to the crisis is for supermarkets to charge more for pork on the shelf and pass the money down the supply chain to the pig farmers. That, or the British pig industry will collapse, and larger, cheaper foreign pork producing markets – notably the US, Poland, Romania, and destinations further afield – will come to supply the vast majority of our pork products.

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90 percentage of British pig farmers thinking of quitting the industry in the next 12 months, according to the National Pig Association

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upermarkets are already charging their consumers more for pork, and 78% of the 2000 consumers questioned in a recent YouGov survey said they’d be happy to pay more for pork if it would help support British farmers. Why hasn’t this solved the problem? Because the increased takings haven’t made it down the supply chain – the supermarkets have been taking advantage of public sympathy for the pig farmers to leverage even more profit.

Longthorpe is less than impressed. “Every week I get reports from the Meat and Livestock Commission, a quasi-government organisation, and one of their jobs is to collect price statistics,” he says.

“If you compare July 2007 to the pig price in April 2008, it has risen by 7.5p per kilo, whereas the retail price has risen by 58p per kilo. So they’ve banged the price up to 58p in the supermarket, and yet only 7.5p makes it down the chain to us. And it’s not like they have any additional costs to cover either – all they have to do is buy it in. It’s disgraceful.”

On average, UK pig farmers currently receive £1.10 per kilo for pigs that cost them £1.44 per kilo to produce.

“The retailers will say to us, ‘Yep, that may be true, but we’ve given the processors X amount of money.’ And when I ask the processor, they say, ‘They haven’t given us X at all! The tight fisted buggers haven’t given us anything.’ It’s us farmers who are piggy in the middle, and it’s almost impossible to find out who’s responsible.”

Whichever side is culpable, Longthorpe has little doubt that ultimate power lies with the supermarket chains.

“What are they going to do about it? They’re the ones who have forced the welfare issue in this county, but when there are very few UK pigs available to supermarkets, where are they going to source their high welfare, outdoor bred, non-castrated pigs from? That product does not exist anywhere else in the world.”

High quality pork does, of course, exist in other countries, but British quality and welfare standards are widely accepted to go beyond those enforced in the EU (particularly Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Romania) and most other countries. Stocking densities are generally lower, the animals are less likely to be tethered, male castration – a technique that leads to pigs growing to a heavier weight – is uncommon, and 40% of all the pigs produced in the UK are free range – an exceptionally high proportion.

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percentage of consumers happy to pay more for pork to support British farmers (YouGov)

Previous page: Richard Longthorpe at his pig farm in Yorkshire

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11.9 Smithfield Foods’ 2007 worldwide sales in billions of dollars

Smithfield’s meat storage facility in Crick, Northampton

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ne company that stands to profit from the instability of the British pig farmers is the American agribusiness giant Smithfield Foods, whose UK wing is based in Norwich. Founded in 1936, Smithfield is the largest pig producer and processor in the world, producing 12.8 million pigs a year, processing well over 20 million, and employing more than 45,000 people worldwide.

Apart from the UK, Smithfield has expanded into European territories including Germany, Spain, Sweden, Romania, and Poland. Poland has been a particular preoccupation, and all the raw meat they import to the UK currently comes from their farms in this country. In 2000, Smithfield’s CEO Joe Luter went so far as to describe Poland as “the Iowa of Europe,” a reference to the factory farming of pigs that became prevalent in the US mid-west state in the 1980s, driving large numbers of independent farmers out of business. Such intensive farming methods, which have been common in most US states and many EU countries, are banned in Britain, and see pregnant sows confined to indoor ‘gestation crates’ where they have little space (approximately 7 ft. by 2 ft.) to move throughout their adult life.

Anticipating the trade benefits of Poland’s accession to the European Union (not to mention the cheap labour and production costs), Smithfield purchased a controlling interest in Animex, the country’s largest meat and poultry processor for $51.2 million in 1999.

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Smithfield’s involvement in Poland has caused some controversy though, and in 2004 the Helsinki Commission, a Finnish organisation dedicated to the environmental protection of the Baltic Sea, criticised the company for what it considered to be seriously lax industrial waste management. Although new to the Baltic, Smithfield’s massive waste holding ponds, referred to by the company as pig “lagoons”, which contain millions of gallons of liquid pig fecal matter, are well known in the US. In 1997 Smithfield was fined $12.6 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for violating the Federal Clean Water Act, one of the largest US environmental penalties levied on a company, for inadequate pollution control after liquid waste from a production facility contaminated the river Pagan in Smithfield, Virginia.

When we requested an interview with Smithfield, their UK office initially agreed, and permitted us to take photographs in their Crick warehouse. However, on the morning of the arranged interview, Smithfield’s representative Miguel de Mello cancelled, stating his superiors in the US had told him it was now company policy not to talk to UK journalists. Smithfield’s commercial director Ian Lindsay stated that if Smithfield were mentioned in this article, any negative “implications” would be viewed as “slanderous” and pursued with “appropriate action.”

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Previous page: Smithfield industrial strategy map, at their Crick facility in Northampton This page: John Stenton, at his butcher shop in Hammersmith

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ohn Stenton, whose ‘Stenton Family Butchers’ shop has just celebrated its 25th anniversary as a local fixture in Hammersmith, west London, has a more unequivocal view of imported meat.

“This is England, this is the greatest country in the world. How would I feel if I was selling this lady some of this Polish pork you’re talking about?” he says, gesturing at a bemused female customer. “I wouldn’t, I don’t have to. I’d close the door and go home. Simple as that.”

Stenton has no interest in selling cheap or imported meat, and only sells British produce in his shop (veal excepted, as he doesn’t believe British veal to be of a sufficient standard).

Over the years the other independent Hammersmith butchers have fallen by the wayside, and Stenton’s shop is the last left in the area. It has thrived by specialising in free range and organic meat. Stenton’s pork is expensive, but it has a hard won reputation for excellence, and trade remains brisk in an area where locals can afford it. Although the rise in feed prices is beginning to bite, none of Stenton’s farm suppliers have been driven out of business just yet.

“Everyone in England is aware that the grain prices will affect everything eventually. Our farmers put their price up, and most of those price rises I absorb.

I’ve got 68 different farms that I take from all over England, Wales, and Scotland, and these farmers are vitally important to me, because without our customers, our farmers, and our staff, I haven’t got a shop. I’ve got two brick walls and a piece of glass.”

While Stenton believes the supermarkets need to follow suit and start paying farmers a fair price, he also thinks consumers have a responsibility to pay more if they want to eat pork meeting the UK’s stringent welfare standards.

“In England we have to realise that we need to pay for good food.”

The crisis facing British pig producers is part of a wider reality check for the British consumer. There is now a global food shortage: over the past six months there have been food riots in Egypt (where the cost of food doubled in a year), Haiti, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Yemen, Bolivia, and India. The food crisis is beginning to affect more developed economies too, with rice riots feared in Thailand and Korea, and increased wheat and soya prices in Europe.

Compared to those who live in these countries, the British consumer has it relatively easy. If they wish to continue eating good meat though, they will have to put more of their disposable income towards their bacon, sausages and ham, and start asking the question of where it actually comes from

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1400 the number of pig farms in Britain

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‘Jasim’

Testimony of a Torturer Life Inside Saddam’s Secret Police

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ased in northern Iraq, The Iraq History Project (IHP) is one of the largest independent human rights projects in the world.

Evolving out of an oral history research programme started by the Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights in 2003, the IHP aims to gather and analyse the personal narratives of victims, families, witnesses and perpetrators of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

So far the project has gathered over 7,000 testimonies throughout Iraq, and at peak times has employed over 60 interviewers, supervisors, analysts, data-entry staff and administrators to help record and database the oral interviews.

By creating a victim-centred historical record of past human rights violations, the Iraq History Project hopes to provide insight into three decades of repression in Iraq, and help facilitate the process of national reconciliation.

Here, BAD IDEA proudly supports their work by exclusively publishing one of their most chilling and complex testimonies – that of ‘Jasim’, a deeply conflicted man who was forced to become a torturer in one of Saddam’s security agencies.

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cry when I speak about what I have done. I know that nothing I can do would be enough for me to deserve forgiveness; I only hope that my willingness to confess my crimes is proof that I am truly repentant. I used to live in a body of a criminal. I was a beast. I had a damaged soul in which everything beautiful had been destroyed. I killed the mercy and love within my heart and left, in its place, hatred and injustice.

I grew up in difficult circumstances. My father worshipped liquor – he couldn’t live without it, and whenever he got drunk he would beat my mother. My two sisters and I would search for a place to hide; if my father found us, he would tie us to a date palm and lash us with a leather whip, leaving us with scars on our bodies.

When my mother tried to help us he would beat her. Then he would tear her clothes and whip her.

One day my mother took us and ran away to her family’s home. My uncles disliked my mother because she arrived with three children; their wives were cruel to us and treated my mother like a servant. I grew up full of suffering and anger.

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n 1977, Nazem, one of my mother’s relatives asked if I wanted to volunteer to work in the Security Directorate. With his help, I was appointed in a month. I was very happy.

I told my mother about my new job, saying, “We will rent a house and get out of here. I won’t let you work. From now on, you will have your own home. Then, no one will tell you what to do.” I had so many dreams, and I wanted to achieve them quickly, without considering the cost.

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Art by Gideon Baws

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On my first day of work, Nazem took me to the Security Directorate, which was in a large building with long halls and many rooms. Before we entered the main office, Nazem warned me, “Don’t ask questions, Jasim. And, don’t object to anything. Do you understand?” Nazem introduced me to Colonel Mohamed. He was a tall, well-built man with big eyes.

“This is Jasim, Sir. The one I told you about.”

“So, he’s just as you described him.”

“Yes, Sir.” The officer looked at me. “Since you’re tall and strong, I have decided to give you a proper job.”

I didn’t ask any questions. Then, Colonel Mohamed spoke with Nazem, “The Operations Room seems like a good place for him. He looks like a torturer.”

I was shocked when I heard that word. I knew what it meant. I didn’t say anything. I was afraid I would lose the job and return empty handed to my mother, without fulfilling any of my promises.

We left the officer’s room, and I asked Nazem, “Can I refuse this job? Or, choose another one?”

“What are you saying? You should thank God. Others dream of this opportunity. You will be punishing the criminals who threaten our security and stability. Don’t ask questions! Do you understand?”

I was quiet. Nazem took me to a small, windowless room with various instruments. There were blood stains on the walls, the floors were rough, and the room was lit by a single, yellow bulb; inside, there was a tall, heavily built man with a dark complexion and a thick moustache – his nickname was Abu Husam.

“This is the new employee. Officer Mohamed has ordered that you train him for three days. Is that clear? I won’t repeat it, ” said Nazem. Then he turned to me.

“Jasim, you’ll stay here to learn. After three days, you’ll start working. You are not to leave this room until 6 pm.”

When Nazem left me with Abu Husam, I was scared. I felt lost, and didn’t know what to do. While I stood there thinking, two men brought a young man into the room.

“Show no mercy until he confesses,” said one of the men.

Abu Husam beat the young man with heavy blows. He kicked him, and then started to undress him. He began to beat the man’s private parts with a cable. The man screamed and begged Abu Husam to leave him alone, but this only made Abu Husam increase the beating until the man’s skin was pierced and he started to bleed, until he fainted.

Abu Husam left the young man on the floor and called the two guards, who carried him back to his cell. Minutes later, they brought in another man who was in his 30s. Abu Husam hung him by his legs from the ceiling and beat him with a cable, until his shoulder was displaced. After he had fainted, Abu Husam let him down to the floor.

I felt ill as I watched Abu Husam torturing these people – it was hard for me to control myself. A short while later, they brought in a woman who refused to inform on her husband, who was a member of the Dawa Party [a Shi’ite Islamic group]. Abu Husam undressed her, made her sit on a chair, and tied her down. He connected electric wires to her hands, feet, and breasts, and then began to shock her. She was shaking and screaming before she started drooling, and then passed out. Abu Husam took her out of the chair, dressed her, and called the guards to take her away. At that moment, I hated myself. I knew that soon I would become like this man.

At the end of my training that day, Nazem came in and ordered me to go home. When he saw my condition, he took me home and we spoke.

“What happened to you, Jasim? This is only the first day. You were only watching. What would you be like if it were you that had been working?”

“What did those people do?” I asked.

“They did a terrible, unforgivable thing. They want to overthrow the 78

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10 thousand employees were rumoured to be working for the Iraqi Directorate of General Security in 2002

government. They want to destabilise the country. If that happened, there would be chaos, terror, killing, and looting. Don’t believe that any of them are innocent!

We are the innocent ones! You are an innocent man! You suffered tragic days with your evil father. You had to live dependent on your uncles. Forget what you’re thinking about. Prove that you’re capable in your new job. Don’t let yourself become weak before those traitors. Then, you’ll be able to settle down. Then, your mother who suffered for your sake for so long will finally rest.” He dropped me home and then left.

My mother saw I was sad and asked, “Is there something wrong, son?”

I looked in her eyes: they were shining with happiness having seen me return from my first day at work, and filled with the hope that we would soon have a better, more settled life.

I couldn’t tell her what happened that day.

“Nothing, mother, I am just not used to this new job.”

“Everybody finds things difficult at the beginning,” she said, “but they get used to it.”

I spent that night thinking about how I was supposed to hold the cable and beat people. It filled me with pain. Then, I remembered Nazem’s words, saying those people were criminals and traitors. I began to tell myself that they deserved what was happening to them because they had betrayed our nation, and I managed to convince myself that they must be punished.

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he three days of training were soon over and the day I was to start working had arrived. I didn’t sleep the night before. I knew that from then on I would be a torturer. In the morning, I went to the Security Directorate; Nazem was waiting for me.

“Don’t let me down,” he said.

I went to the Operations Room and found Abu Husam waiting to supervise my work and assess me.The first person I was to torture was a man in his 40s who was accused of joining the Dawa Party. I held the cable, but my hand was trembling.

How could I beat this man who was older than me and whose eyes were begging for mercy? Abu Husam shouted at me, “Don’t let your hands shake!

Don’t be a coward!”

I raised the cable to beat the man, but I couldn’t find the strength to hit him.

Then, Abu Husam slapped me hard in the face.

An officer who was in the room said, “You’re a soldier here. Those who volunteer to work in the Security Directorate are the servants of the government.

They follow orders. This time, I will have mercy on you. Your punishment will be minimal. If it wasn’t for Sergeant Nazem, who is dear to us, then I’d really hurt you.” He turned to Abu Husam and said, “Carry out the orders!”

Abu Husam tied my hand down and hit it with a metal pipe until it broke.

This was my punishment because I couldn’t carry out the orders. My hand was in a cast for three weeks.

After my hand healed, I returned to work. This time, the officer decided to supervise me personally. I was forced to torture a woman with electricity; I undressed her and connected her private parts to wires in the way Abu Husam had done. I shocked her until she fainted. I didn’t know how my heart could be filled with such cruelty.

“Well done,” said the officer. “That’s the way to do it. Those people are a plague. They’re trying to destroy our country. You must show them no mercy.”

His words filled me with complicated feelings. I wanted to pull myself together.

I wanted to have a merciless heart.

After that day, I committed many violations as a torturer. I began to fulfill my dreams and pursue my own needs; I rented a house for my family, I worked hard for the approval of the officers, and when they said, “Good job!” it meant a lot to me. One day, the officer ordered me to torture a man who was a member of the insurgents. The officer asked me to use electricity. I connected his penis to very high voltage. I was merciless. When he fainted, I disconnected the wires and he urinated. His urine was mixed with blood. Then, I broke one of his legs.

I raised the cable to beat the man, but I couldn’t find the strength to hit him

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e had an arrangement with a lieutenant colonel that whenever a beautiful girl was sent to our department, I was to beat her for a little while with a cable or stick. Then, I would take her to his room to spend the night. When I took a prisoner to his room, I would stand next to the door after he locked it and listen to the woman screaming or begging him to leave her alone. I could hear how he would beat them. He raped so many women.

At this time, I drank heavily. I tried not to think about all the things I was doing. It was my job. I once tortured a man who was held in an underground cell in solitary confinement. He was accused of being a Dawa Party activist. He was a very handsome man. I burned his skin with a hot metal bar and mutilated his body.

Some of the officers ordered a group of homosexuals who worked at the Security Directorate to rape him. Later, he was taken to a remote, uninhabited area where there is nothing but open sky and stars and he was executed.

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I continued to work. However, God would punish me by giving me a very beautiful wife. She was a very good woman with good manners, but I treated her badly. My job had affected my personality. At that time, the security officers used to come to my house to drink and have a good time with their girlfriends, who were often dancers they met in nightclubs.

My wife didn’t want the officers to visit our house; I beat her, and told her to shut up. I explained that our life depended on my obedience to the officers. I told her that it was impossible to refuse them, even if they asked for something terrible.

Still, I wouldn’t let these men see my wife. One day, one of the officers went to the central market in Amara with Nazem. My wife also happened to be at the market.

They passed by her and Nazem greeted her because we were relatives.

The officer asked Nazem, “Who is that woman?”

“She is Jasim’s wife, Sir.” “So, Jasim has such a beautiful wife, and he doesn’t tell me?” he said. “I’m going to punish that shit.”

Nazem came quickly to tell me about this, and warned me of the officer’s cruelty. When I finished work, I went straight home and beat my wife. Then, I sent her off to her family’s home, and asked her not to come back. In doing so, I destroyed my life and lost my children.

The officer called me back to the Security Directorate. When I arrived, he met me in his private office. He was drunk.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your wife, Jasim?”

“What wife?”

“Do you have more than one wife?”

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“No, Sir. I have only one wife, sir. She is at her family’s house. I divorced her at the cleric’s office.”

“You shit! You divorced her? Why did you do that? Why didn’t you leave her for me?!?”

“You are of a higher level, much better than this woman. She gave me a very hard time. It is not worth spending a moment of your time with her.”

“I want you to bring me the official divorce documents.”

Then, I was forced to go and formally divorce my wife. I thought this would help me save her. When the officer saw the official divorce documents, he asked me, “Now, how can I get her?”

“I don’t think that’s possible, sir. She has cancer. That was why I divorced her.

You shouldn’t get near her.”

“What a pity that this beauty carries such a terrible disease.”

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was torturing a detainee by removing his fingernails. He had been accused of smuggling arms to the opposition in the marshes. Even though he was tied down, he was screaming and fighting back. Without realising it, I scratched my hand with the metal instrument I used to remove prisoners’ fingernails. Gradually, the wound became worse. I went to a well-known surgeon. He conducted some tests and found out that I had become diabetic. I had gangrene due to my high blood sugar and he said that it would affect my entire body unless they removed the infected part, which was my right hand. This came as a terrible shock. Yet, I knew that it was God’s punishment since I used my right hand to hold the torture instruments.

My hand was amputated. I became useless to the Security Directorate and retired in 2001. Slowly, I began to look back at those bitter times and to think about the crimes I committed. My mother passed away. My sisters got married. I became very lonely.

When I was alone, I faced my thoughts, sorrows, and past crimes. They began to haunt me. It made me almost crazy to remember the voices of all the people I had tortured, screaming and begging. I spent my nights crying for what I did and for the injustice I committed by harming so many people. I saw myself as a monster. I went to the imam of Al-Hussein District Mosque to ask him for advice on how I could atone for my crimes. The imam told me to declare my true repentance to God. He said that only God was capable of forgiving my sins.

So, that is what I did. I began to ask God to forgive me for having done wrong and making so many people suffer. I believed that God’s will was stronger than man’s will and that God was punishing me for what I had done. I saw that I had become addicted to violence. My heart began to see clearly. I tried to cast away the darkness and seek truth as the way to salvation.

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he reason I am confessing all of this is out of the hope that God will forgive me. I decided to return to my former wife and children, and told her that I had declared my repentance. I explained that I had become a completely new person and that if she returned to me it would help me pass through my crisis. She returned, but I discovered that my children could not accept me. To this day, my children treat me with cruelty and hatred, and act as if I am a stranger who means nothing to them.

After the regime change, I was frequently harassed, despite the fact that the Sheikh talked to the community and explained that I had declared my repentance two years before the government fell. I saw contempt and hatred in their eyes, as if they were saying, “This is the one who tortured innocent people. This is one of the Security Directorate’s loyal servants.”

I decided to move far from the main city. I now spend most of my time at home, trying to be closer to God. I ask God to forgive me for my sins, to have mercy upon me, and to free my conscience from its suffering.

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ranking of Rafi Abd al-Latif Tilfah (last director of Saddam’s Directorate of General Security) in US army’s ‘Iraq’s most wanted’ playing cards

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Zaida Cruz

Special Report: The Credit Crunch How American Home Owners Sent world Markets Plunging

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945 US dollar cost in billions of the credit crunch, as predicted by the IMF

Photography by Sebastian Meyer

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he expression ‘credit crunch’ has been blamed for the huge drop in stock markets worldwide, for losses at most of the world’s biggest banks, and also held responsible for the ominous spectre of a looming US recession. By a complex feat of financial alchemy, an increase in the number of payment defaults by American homeowners has triggered a worldwide financial crisis with a price tag running into the billions. Banks have stopped lending money and central banks are desperately injecting immense sums of cash into the financial system. In the UK, repossessions are expected to rise to 45,000 in 2008, up from 27,100 in 2007.

There have been high profile casualties as well: German lender IKB is currently being auctioned by the government, and leading US investment bank Bear Stearns was recently rescued by the New York Federal Reserve and peer JP Morgan. So how did the subprime hurricane sweep the financial system? Why has an increase in defaults in US subprime mortgages inflicted multibillion-dollar losses on markets worldwide? What has caused all the trouble, and when will the storm pass?

HOW IT STARTED Banks have increasingly been looking at ways of repackaging risk in the wake of recent financial crises, most recently the bursting of the dot-com bubble that culminated in the NASDAQ index crashing by around 10% in three days in March 2000. In the case of mortgages, the major risk faced is default. When a bank lends money to a company or a homeowner, often to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, it is assuming the risk that the borrower might be unable to pay back the loan. This is called risk exposure.

In order to reduce the potential damage from losses, banks have devised increasingly intricate ways of cutting exposure to risk through complex financial engineering, passing on the risk to other lenders willing to assume that risk – obviously at a cost. Risk exposure can be managed in a variety of ways, but the procedures are often clouded in impenetrable acronyms.

Most of the processes come under the umbrella term Asset Backed Security (ABS), a process by which a bank turns an illiquid asset, or a good that does not generate much revenue for the holder, into liquid assets. Other acronyms include: CMOs (Credit Mortgage Obligations), which repackage mortgages; CDOs (Credit Derivative Obligations), which repackage bonds; and CLOs (Credit Loan Obligations), which repackage loans. There are other acronyms, like Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) and Special Purpose Companies (SPCs), which are companies set up specifically to park risk during the process that creates Asset Backed Securities (ABS).

This array of credit polyps has seen a frantic growth rate over the past decade, as strong worldwide growth and benign economic conditions led to financial markets expanding at a fantastic rate. Still, as with most undesirable things, repackaging risk has not made it disappear: risk remains in the world’s financial Tell It Like A Story

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65 thousand finance jobs lost worldwide as a result of the credit crunch

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system, only in a much more dissipated and more difficult to identify form. Or as finance industry guru George Soros says, risk is transformed into an “alphabet soup of derivatives and synthetic financial instruments”.

THE SAUSAGE METAPHOR These acronyms describe but also, it can be argued, disguise risk products.

However, there is one metaphor often referred to in the market that proves useful in discussing the packaging of risk: the sausage process.

In the sausage metaphor, a set of mortgages of different quality (i.e. mortgages given to people with varying credit histories), are gathered by large banks and mixed together into a sausage. This sausage includes poor quality meat (a subprime mortgage), average and premium meat. From the bank’s point of view, the sausage helps combine dubious quality and high quality meat into a sausage or credit product that more people will want to buy.

HOW DOES THE SAUSAGE WORK? A credit product like a CMO is made up of varying quality mortgages. Different mortgages are gathered together in the CMO, and then divided into what are known as separate ‘traunches’, each containing a greater or lesser degree of high-quality mortgages. The process creates what we could call different quality sausages, each with a mixture of meats.

The top traunche, normally rated as AAA, will have a ratio of around 70/30 of A-rated and high B-rated mortgages with only a small exposure to subprime mortgages. The mix of assets and the guarantees offered by the insurer and the sausage producer worsen as you feed down the structure of your CMO, so that the bottom traunche could have a paltry ratio of 30/70. This traunche, containing the highest proportion of meat from subprime mortgages, is likely to be the first to default or be unable to meet repayments to the bank when the going gets tough.

This sausage pays the highest returns, since the consumer is assuming a greater risk of food poisoning, while the higher-end sausages pay fewer returns as the consumer incurs fewer risks. Most investment banks wheeled out the best quality traunches while retaining the lowest-quality for themselves, which meant they sat on greater risk but paid themselves handsomely as a reward.

Once the sausages are made, the bank takes them to a bond insurer to shop for an insurance policy for the top traunches, which effectively guarantee payments to investors.

Investors in a bonanza market are likely to be interested in investing in the apparently stable revenue generated by these sausages, but the final verdict on edibility for a prospective investor comes from a rating agency, which in effect gives the sausage a ‘fit for consumption’-style seal of quality.

HOW DO THE RATINGS WORK? A rating agency is a firm that evaluates and rates risk. Investors often need to be reassured about the strong quality of the vehicle they are putting their money into, and most financial outfits have restrictions on the quality of meat they can consume. In order to satisfy this investment condition, banks would look to acquire insurance for the highest-quality sausages, and would then ask a credit rating firm to assign a rating to that sausage.

The insurer is bound to honour the interest repayment schedule if the sausage maker is unable to do so (due to mortgages defaulting). Since the sausage is now backed by this insurance, its rating is basically comparable to that of the insurer, who as a building block of the financial market is required to retain a top notch rating. Sausages made of relatively high quality meat and with insurance from the likes of Ambac, FGIC and MBIA, were likely to receive a very strong rating denoting their strength and reliability.

Products rated BBB/Baa and above are considered investment grade, while anything rated BB/Ba and below is colloquially referred to as ‘junk’, in reference Bad Idea

to the increased possibility of default. Paper rated D by Standard & Poor’s (a rating agency) is officially considered to be distressed, or in default. See below: Investment Grade

“Junk”

Standard & Poor’s AAA AA A BBB B CCC CC C

In Default

Moody’s Aaa Aa A Baa Ba B Caa Ca C D

By a magical financial sleight of hand, banks managed to create investment grade-rated securities, or what were considered safely edible products, from a pool of mortgages that contained some very risky loans. The end product was a sausage that produced steady revenues from the scheduled repayments of the mortgages.

This was considered a rather stable investment as the flow of cash in the bullish market of mounting house prices seemed pretty much insured. But even though rating agencies have the ability to give a seal of quality to products, investors (the end consumers) may not be any wiser about what they are actually eating: the consumer could be forgiven for thinking they are eating organic lamb and mint bangers, when in fact they could be chomping on baloney.

TAKING THE SAUSAGES TO MARKET Credit risk, packaged into those neat sausage-like parcels, was bought and sold by banks, pension funds, hedge funds as well as unsuspecting local authorities, spreading opaquely throughout the financial system. Banks and investors carried home armfuls of securities and other engineered financial products they didn’t really understand. Ask the local authority of Narvik, a small city in Norway. The town admitted that it might have to borrow money to pay municipal wages ahead of Christmas last year after investing around 65 million euros in Asset Backed Securities (ABS) designed by Citigroup. Narvik is currently suing the investment arm of the leading Norwegian bank that sold them the products.

HOW IT BEGAN TO UNRAVEL Unfortunately Wall Street’s sausage machine based its assumptions on limited historical information, calculating the possibility of mortgage default on data derived from markets that had only witnessed appreciating house prices and economic growth. The banks reasoned that even if the homeowner were to default on mortgage payments, the bank could seize the assets, which due to the continuing growth in house prices, would be worth more than the mortgage.

Of course, house prices don’t always rise, and if they start to fall, and homeowners start defaulting on their mortgages, then the assets backing a product like a CMO no longer produce any returns, and the CMO drops dramatically in value. This is especially a risk where poor quality, or subprime, mortgages are involved.

HOW COME THERE ARE SO MANY SUBPRIME BORROWERS? In the US, we need to think back to the time following the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the late 90s, when the US central bank (the Federal Reserve) began to aggressively cut interest rates to stimulate economic growth. Widespread lower interest rates meant cheaper money was more readily available throughout the country, prompting an increase in borrowing among corporations, and also for consumers. Cheaper money meant consumers bought more goods, spurring Tell It Like A Story

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By a magic financial sleight of hand, banks managed to create investment graderated securities from a pool of mortgages that contained some very risky loans

15 percentage decline in value of the average US house since 2006

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consumption and economic growth, but it also encouraged many consumers to get a foot on the property ladder, which sent US house prices rocketing.

As consumers borrowed more, lenders felt confident that the strength of house prices would back up the money lent out. For banks, the opportunity to make more money out of lending money was irresistible. This widespread availability of inexpensive money is called a liquidity glut, and it allows the banks and investors’ appetite to grow with increasing voracity.

In order to maximise returns, banks started targeting a bigger customer base, looking to lend money even to those customers who had traditionally been spurned due to a suspect or unstable credit history. Bad credit histories often itemise missing credit card or mortgage repayments, and are seen as an indication of the borrower’s likely ability (or inability) to repay a loan. The ready availability of money saw a drop in lending standards, with less emphasis placed on the scrutiny of borrowers. This saw the birth of the subprime borrower, sometimes referred to as NINJAs: borrowers with No Income, No Job or Asset.

WHY ARE THEY DEFAULTING? Products targeting NINJAs have received disquieting names such as ‘Liars Loans’ or ‘Exploding ARM’ (Adjustable Rate Mortgage) loans. Liars Loans were extended to consumers whose employers were unwilling to verify their employee’s details. The borrower could in this instance self-declare their details such as employment and income, allowing for large discrepancies between their reported income and their real income.

An ARM loan first entices consumers in with unusually low interest rates, known as ‘teasers’. The consumer who buys into an ARM is usually OK so long as interest rates do not begin to rise too sharply, at which point repayments increase dramatically.

Unfortunately the growing pace of the economy began to worry economists at the Federal Reserve, who decided to start increasing interest rates to prevent the economy from overheating. As interest rates increased, many of those signed up to ARM loans and other variable rate mortgages were forced to declare themselves insolvent and vacate their homes. As mortgages defaulted, banks began reclaiming homes. With falling property prices, many of these homes were worth less than their mortgages. Can you see where this is going?

TOTAL FINANCIAL CHAOS The Federsl Reserve started tightening base interest rates from lows of 1% in May 2004 to highs of 5.25% in August 2007. For some consumers on variable rate mortgages, who suddenly found themselves unable to keep payments according to schedule, their last hope was to ask their bank to refinance their loan, but that would come at much higher rates than first considered. Indeed, as easy money disappeared, investors began to turn their noses up at some of the sausages they’d been sold, and the credit crunch began to hit, refinancing a mortgage became an increasingly difficult proposition, leading to more defaults and a dangerously circular escalation of the crisis.

In the past six months, and responding to the tidal wave of losses that have lashed banks and funds worldwide, the Federal Reserve has slashed interest rates.

They surprised the market in January this year with a 75 basis points emergency rate cut to 3.5% from 4.25%, and dropped them by another 75 basis points to 2.25% in March. As in May, rates stand at 2%.

The subprime crisis has had other, very negative knock-on effects, mainly manifested in the reluctance of banks to lend to each other over the past nine months, making it challenging even for banks to fund themselves. Although not all banks have been stung by subprime losses to the same tune, they have grown increasingly wary of lending to each other for fear there could be more skeletons in the closet than first suspected.

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jurisdictions have not helped the market feel confident that the extent of the losses is known, or that the assets contaminated have been ring-fenced.

Meanwhile, risk premiums associated with plenty of these instruments have increased sharply, and trading in some of these assets has pretty much ceased.

Those left with the rotting meat face the less than enticing prospect of holding on to the assets or liquidating them as prices drop. Both the financially literate investors, and other less sophisticated speculators who were merely riding the wave, have been caught in the middle of the crunch.

Some of the value of that money, value that was ascribed to assets that simply were not worth it, has been dissipated overnight while other assets in credit markets that have been affected by the crisis are still effectively performing, but are untradable, and therefore not generating value and difficult to price.

Estimates of subprime-related losses vary wildly, with a February estimate by the University of Brandeis pricing them at $400 billion, while the IMF believes the final cost will be a hefty $945 billion. To date, Thomson Reuters Pricing Service has recorded a total of $222 billion of credit crunch related global write-downs for major banks.

The Bank of England, however, surprised market watchers after it claimed losses are overstated. They say current market prices are based on poor assumptions, which would need 76% of US subprime mortgages sold during the first six months of 2007 to default, with a loss of 50% on each of these mortgages.

Uncertainty about the future remains the only certainty for economists, who can only hope the crisis won’t spread to other related assets such as credit cards, or indeed to what they call ‘the real economy’: our salaries, consumption and other tangible, everyday things.

CAN WE LEARN ANYTHING FROM THIS? The market turbulence in recent months has shown that the many of the products insured and given credit ratings were grossly misevaluated.

Some bond insurers are now sailing perilous waters, hurt by losses related to subprime mortgages which could force them to the brink of bankruptcy. The mounting losses at insurers have even prompted credit rating agencies to threaten them with downgrades, in a vicious circle that would in turn spread and endanger the ratings of many of the instruments they insure.

Growing losses prompted market regulators to force insurers to put more money aside as collateral, to insure that banks will not be left with huge holes if those investments collapse. Under Basel II regulations, which aim to standardise banking regulations on an international level, banks and other financial institutions are required to ensure they allocate enough capital to contain potentially risky investments, so that if the institution was to incur losses through risky assets, those 92

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billions of pounds pledged by the Bank of England to keep the UK banking system afloat

losses would not threaten its own survival. But the lack of clarity is still spooking investors, and Ambac shares dropped by around 19% in a day after the bond insurer revealed in late April it had losses of $1.65 billion during the first quarter of this year, prompting New York’s insurance regulator to say the group may need to raise more capital.

The Federal Reserve has played an active role in helping to defuse the situation, attempting to drum up support for the bond insurers and working with JP Morgan to ensure the rescue of embattled US investment bank Bear Stearns.

In the UK, the Bank of England has also attempted to stabilise the market by offering to swap up to £50 billion of mortgage-backed securities, or assets that are crippling banks’ balance sheets as they are not tradeable at the moment, for government bonds. The measure is unprecedented in size and scale, and the central bank has taken extra steps to ensure the fees and conditions of the swap are punitive enough not to encourage banks to assume further risk on their balance sheet.

The credit agencies’ business model has also come under fire over the recent months, with many analysts decrying the objectivity of their system, as the rated companies have to pay for their own ratings. A large listed corporation might pay a substantial rolling fee for annual assessments while the issuance of structured credit products or offerings such as bonds normally attract a considerable one-off fee. Some have complained that a rating agency’s incentive to provide unprejudiced valuations has become vitiated by these payments, while many others have become suspect of their assessment methodology, as mounting losses show the reliability of a rating is not water-proof. And when the Wall Street agencies that rate bonds are the very same agencies that rate the bond insurers backing those bonds, a circularity is created that can cause huge problems.

These incestuous relationships go some way to explaining why many of the losses so far have been contained within the financial community, by institutions unsure of what they were really buying, selling, rating or insuring. As the world’s richest man, and widely revered investor, Warren Buffet has said: “It’s sort of a little poetic justice, in that the people that brewed this toxic KoolAid found themselves drinking a lot of it in the end”

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Confessions 3: Life & Death

Nifa McLaughlin Editor of baby networking site gurgle.com

Photography by Sebastian Meyer

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omen don’t live close to their parents now, so there’s often no family to fall back on for support with pregnancy and newborn babies. I hope people still visit baby groups, but I think people also like talking online because they can remain anonymous. Sometimes it’s hard to admit you’re having a problem with your baby. So people can come on our site and say, “look, I’m struggling”, and they’ll find someone in the same situation.

Our typical member is a female, aged between about 18 and 30 – basically childbearing age. But there are teenage mums as well as older mums, some dads, childminders and grandparents. Most of our users are UK based, but we’re growing and now have members from other parts of the world. I think people use us instead of a social network like Facebook because we’re quite niche. There’s no old school friend trying to contact you that you’d rather have left behind. And we don’t harass you.

Users sign up for a newsletter, which is tailored to their needs – so its content is dependent on what stage they’re at with their child. You get a personalised home page, and there’s groups you can join for people who live near each other, and also one for mums with the same due date. People create their own groups as well; there’s one for mothers expecting their fifth baby, which is mad. Someone even became pregnant after using our ovulation calendar – our first gurgle conception.

We’ve also got a ‘Baby Namer’. Although other baby sites have naming search engines, ours is more personalised because the names are indexed. So you can search names by origin, meaning, or country, or choose a category such as cool, classic, celebrity or geek. It’s a massive database, and members can add their own names, so it’s growing all the time. There’s a ‘Linker’ option, so if you called your first child Lily, but you’re stuck on the name of your second child you can look at other members who called their child Lily and see what they called their other children – so

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you get an idea of what goes together. It’s a bit of fun really, but it can be helpful.

We recently added a ‘Geek’ section, with the geekiest names we could think of, which I think has been popular because people make links between geeky names and success. The sort of names that get hits are Willow, Ned, Zak, Alan and Leon. People vote for their favourite names and it’s surprising what people pick – nearly 2000 people have voted Aiden as the coolest name for some reason.

The business itself is a joint venture between global childcare retailer Mothercare and Fleming Media, but it was Tom Wright, online managing director at Fleming Media, who had the idea. He identified this huge need for mums to go online for advice, and Mothercare provided the funding. There were already other baby websites, but each only had one real function, and we wanted to combine these different functions.

It was just me on the editorial team at the beginning. Before gurgle I was a journalist working for glossies like Elle and Glamour, writing features on relationships and sexual health. We’re still quite a small team of seven: an editorial team of three and a technical team of two. We also work with freelance journalists.

We’ve just signed a three-book deal with HarperCollins. The first one will come out in about a year’s time. They’ll be called Feeding Solved, Sleeping Solved and Pregnancy Solved. All of it will be based on gurgle content, with case studies of real life situations.

Otherwise the site makes money through advertising – our main advertisers at the moment are Persil, Huggies and Comfort Pure. I don’t think we’re the market leader but considering how long we’ve been going we’re up there – since we launched in October we’ve gained over 40,000 users As told to Ruth Stokes

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David Foster

Left to Care for Themselves Britain’s Foreign Health Workers Band Together

Mae Almonicar, Senior Care Worker, Hamilton, Glasgow

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taring out of the window it seems there’s as much water in the sky as air: I’ve almost forgotten what a northern rainstorm looks like. Marjorie calls me: they are on their way but “it’s blowing a gale so we might be a wee bit late.” She and Alex live 20 miles up the river Clyde in Helensburgh and they’re travelling a long distance to talk with me on their afternoon off.

When they arrive they are wrapped up in fleeces, raincoats and hats, looking glad to have survived the storm “I never understood why British tourists take off their clothes and lie on the beach until I came here,” Marjorie jokes.

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Marjorie and Alex are two of around 80,000 Filipino nurses and health staff working in the UK. Until 2006, senior carers were on the government list of occupations suffering a labour shortage, and although Marjorie is a trained midwife, and Alex has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, they made a decision as a young couple to migrate to the UK and work as carers. Senior carers work with and manage the entry-level caring staff in homes for the elderly: they wash and bathe clients, help with mobility and at meal times. Unlike nurses, who hold degrees, carers require minimal qualifications, and are often poorly paid, which frequently fails to attract local residents. They saw the opportunity as a bridge to greater things: Alex hoped to train in child psychology, and Marjorie was excited by the prospect of gaining UK residency. New beginnings aren’t always what they seem though.

Alex leans forward and pretends to wave a wad of cash in front of me, a gesture that reminds me of working behind crowded bars where punters try and get you to serve them by shoving £20 notes in your face.

“Sometimes your employers will do this: they will bully you and say that if you don’t do an extra shift you might not get your annual leave or you’re letting them down. Of course everybody needs money but when they do this to your face – you feel down.”

Marjorie has suffered similar coercion.

“When management saw us willing to work because we sent money back home I think they took advantage of it. Very often during my day off they will ask me to do something. I’ll be asked to do a shift three hours away from Helensburgh. I have to wait for a bus on the highway and I don’t feel safe. Especially in weather like this when it’s winter. We were not allowed to switch off our mobiles, even on our day off !”

She gives a little smile. “Sometimes I pity myself.”

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n 2003 the Overseas Nurses Network (ONN) was set up as a response to the exploitation and difficulties faced by workers particularly in the private healthcare sector. Led by Sofi Taylor, a Malaysian born nurse who moved to the UK in 1973, it’s the first healthcare network of its kind in Britain, a collective of economic migrants working together to grapple with foreign legal procedures and campaign against the injustices they have experienced.

Unlike a trade union there is no need for membership to the ONN and no stated political affiliation. Friends and family members are invited to events, and there are currently about 600 people on its contact list.

Professor Helen Crowley, of the social policy research group Joseph Roundtree Foundation, has studied the ONN in detail.

“It’s an interesting combination, providing information and socialising, piggybacking on the unions movement but doing something quite unique at the same time: it comes much more out of a feminist tradition than a trade union tradition.”

The network hosts informal events where people speak on awareness of immigration and employment rights, and helps its mainly female members, as Sofi Taylor says, to deal with “the loneliness when you leave home and family structure behind.”

Peggy Malenya, a Kenyan Student nurse I chat to in the buzzing canteen of Glasgow Caledonian University, is one of the ONN’s members, and like many migrants has a variety of problems she only feels safe sharing with other foreign nurses.

“If the employers see you have been giving interviews they don’t want to employ you because you might do it again,” she says nervously.

Peggy’s employers previously refused to pay her statutory maternity pay, and only complied following threats from the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. She’s also worried about the distance between her and her family at a time of national insecurity.

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percentage of care workers in the UK that are from overseas

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Laura Iyolangomo, NHS Staff Nurse, Cardiff

“I am from the rift valley in Kenya where some of the worst problems are.

Some of my relatives have had to leave their homes. I cannot go back at the moment and I don’t know what’s happening. I wrote a letter to some people a month ago and I haven’t heard anything back from them.”

Mae, a Filipino who arrived in Scotland for the first time in 2001 to work as a Senior Carer in private nursing homes is another attendee of the ONN. If you spoke to her on the phone then you’d simply assume she was Scottish. Her vowels are rounded with a familiar warm tonality. Any language learner knows that tonal acquisition doesn’t happen by accident – it’s a sign of her deep-seated desire to integrate with the surrounding culture.

“When I went to sleep I had nightmares. Crying all the time. Just the thought of losing my nursing registration, losing my job. 2007 was the worst, worst year of my life,” she says.

“I worked in this nursing home in Hamilton for over two years. Everything was fine until at one point in summer last year there were three new staff who, how do you say it, made stories about me, about things I haven’t done.”

One morning, after working six night shifts in a row as senior sister, Mae was called in to defend herself in front of management at her care home.

“There was a major complaint against me. And it was about abuse. They 106

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accused me of twisting this man’s hand on a regular basis. This man is a very physically aggressive man but he never had any bruises. It took two or three staff just to get him ready for bed, just to put on his pyjamas, you know, and seemingly it was me who was abusing this man. There was no report of any injury but the management threatened me saying that it was a police matter. I never got any support from them, I was guilty in their eyes.”

Mae received a letter of dismissal, was threatened with the loss of her UK nursing registration for gross misconduct and was told she would not be paid.

At no point was she advised that she needed representation or told about the procedure for appeal. Through the ONN, she was steered towards a relevant union representative.

“During the accusation, another staff member from the nursing home phoned me. It went through to my voicemail: there were racist remarks. My managers said she couldn’t help me so we went to the police with the concrete evidence that it was all about racism.”

It was only at this point that the nursing home reluctantly started to pay Mae again. Mae tells me that the man in question was taken to court and found guilty of racial aggravation. He was sentenced to a fine of £400 by Hamilton Sheriff Court.

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Sofi Taylor, head of the ONN

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esentment to economic migrants runs deep in the UK. But for many of the foreign carers I speak to, what motivates them through all their troubles is what also unsettles Daily Mail readers and has made Gordon Brown call immigration “the vortex issue.” They send a large portion of their income home.

Marjorie and Alex send money to their parents, and Mae has helped pay for a niece to get university education.

Laura, a Zimbabwean NHS nurse I speak with, says, “Many people i n Zimbabwe are surviving because somebody is over here or in South Africa, sending money to get food.”

Supporting relatives abroad, although a natural human desire, also contributes to the distrust many Britons feel towards the migrants their care industries depend on. And without trust, fairness also disappears.

In 2006 the Home Office changed visa regulations, resulting in many previously successful work permit holders having their visa extensions or residence applications refused. The promise such care staff had been offered on arrival in the country was four years of work to gain a leave to remain (which makes a migrant eligible for citizenship). However, changes in governmental policy meant the number of years required rose to five, and a points based assessment, requiring workers to meet age, education and income requirements made visa renewal or permanent residency doubtful. This instantly became the ONN’s most pressing issue, and Taylor suggests that about 22,000 workers were affected.

“The difficulty for our people is the income group,” says Taylor. “When the points based system was changed these workers did not come under the skills based worker category. The Home Office wrote to Southern Cross, one of the biggest private sector nursing homes and told them they would not renew any of their senior care worker visas: this group of people were going to be deported. Between November 2006 and August 2007 this was the stand off between the Home Office and UK care homes. During this period several hundred overseas care workers who applied for visa renewal under the new system were turned down.”

Eventually the Home Office caved in, realising its policy was about to create a massive labour shortage in the caring industries, stating in bureaucratic speak that they were: “prepared to make an exception... owing to the vulnerability of the client groups this sector provides care for.”

There would be a temporary waiver of the new visa conditions for those senior care workers issued with visas in the past, and after that their jobs would be filled

by British and EU workers.

When the Home Office granted exceptions there was an extra condition though: they would only apply to workers earning over £7.02 an hour. The many foreign carers who had been working on minimum wage for years, on the promise of being granted a leave to remain in the UK, suddenly became illegal workers.

“The nursing home would not reapply for a work permit and just told them to carry on working, that they would deal with it,” Taylor tells me.

Such workers were caught between the exploitation of their employers and the intransigence of the Home Office’s rough justice to raise salary levels.

“In that sort of situation the one who gets it in the neck is the immigrant.”

With changing visa conditions and an uncertain attitude to foreign labour, care workers represent just one part of the workforce caught in the transitional period that immigration law has been in since 2006. Taylor suggests I look at London’s street cleaners as another workforce caught in the same crisis. The phrase Taylor uses to describe these policies and immigrant experience is “shifting sands,” a sense of insecurity with both employer and government.

The future for workers like Alex and Marjorie remains uncertain. Despite spending four years working towards receiving a permanent leave to remain, changes in the law have left them feeling insecure.

“Our status is not as complicated here as others, but then we don’t trust the law anymore. We might get our residency next year, but then it might change to six years. Later on you don’t know if it’s going to change again,” she says.

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A leave to remain is not even the end of the journey. To reach a point where they have access to the same rights and benefits as British citizens overseas workers need to gain citizenship, which takes a further year. A recent governmental green paper suggested the inclusion of up to a further three years of probationary citizenship with a possible citizenship tax before full citizenship is achieved. The current costs for the different stages of residency application depend on certain circumstances but for a standard case are as follows: points based visa application £750, visa extension £395 or £595, permanent residency £750 or £950, naturalisation excluding exam £655: at the very least £2500 of a worker’s wages.

On the Borders and Immigration website a press release announcing the introduction of the new points based visa system is accompanied by an image of a running track with a series of hurdles laid out disappearing into the distance. The metaphor is only too clear: an endless series of obstacles will be put in front of you.

The end is not in sight.

As Professor Crowley says, “Adaptation is a power relationship in which there is certainly a space for dubious practices.”

The Overseas Nurses Network symbolises the double-edged sword of the British migrant experience: it represents the right to free speech and collective activism, but also exists only because of the ubiquitous disappointment felt by foreign carers. For some carers, the instability and mistreatment become too much. Maria Zuniga, a Filipino nurse who used to work for the NHS in Cardiff, now nurses in Saudi Arabia, after she was told she could not transfer departments – following a failed malpractice suit against her – because she was Filipino.

“I contacted the council for racial discrimination,” she says down the line from Saudi Arabia. “They phoned me and said this thing which happened to me it was indirect discrimination. They said I could file a case against these people, but I didn’t do it. I was no longer confident. I had the feeling I wanted to go home.”

While the current government believes staffing problems in the private care and public nursing system can be resolved, there is significant evidence from bodies such as the Royal College of Nursing that Britain may again face nursing shortages as a result of ageing staff in the NHS system.

As baby boomers across the developed world begin to swell the populations at care homes, and the first world cries out for caring staff, the question may be not whether we want Alex, Marjorie, Penny and Mae, but whether, given Britain’s strange approach to economic migrants, they want us

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Cultural Revelations

Specialise In Something Until It Specialises In You Emerging Art Markets ◆ Decline of the British Public Toilet BAD IDEA Redesign ◆ Hiponomics ◆ Politics of Drowning

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Oliver Harris

modern art takeaway The science of emerging art markets

Art by AARON, a cybernetic artist developed by Harold Cohen

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’ve just watched eight grand become 16 in less than a minute, with no risk involved and no crime.

The tool is a Frank Stella print changing hands in a boutique gallery on Cork Street, home of London’s art dealing elite. The lucky beneficiary is the son of a South East Asian industrialist, here in London on a spending spree.

“I promise you,” the dealer explains, “I could sell this at auction tomorrow for twice the price but I’m giving it to you because I want this to be the start of a long relationship.”

And he means it. Like any good dealer, he knows how to hook his clients. The Stella is a sideline: the son is really here with his father’s millions, hunting bigger game.

“What do you think?” he asks me, gesturing towards the abstract print.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

I’m here because I want to know what the catch is; what makes art so valuable and why isn’t everyone in on the game? Contemporary art rises 20% year on year. Over 12 months in 1999 an Andreas Gursky photograph rose in value 3000%; the works of Gerhardt Richter quadrupled in value in four years. Websites track contemporary art prices with all the cool data-provision of a spread-betting site: ArtTactic.com offers those who pay its considerable subscription fee ‘Individual Artist Confidence Graphs’, a ‘Risk & Speculation Barometer’ and ‘rundowns of the most undervalued artists of the moment’. Art Investor magazine proudly declares that art ‘can indeed be a genuine alternative to capital and real estate’. And like real estate, if you want to 112

get ahead of the curve these days you need to set your sights abroad.

I’m in a cafe opposite Christie’s, Old Brompton Rd, when a woman gets her bag snatched. A financial trader sees it happen. He gets talking to the husband while she phones the police and when it turns out we’re all attending the modern art auction across the road, conversation turns to prices.

“They say the art market’s due a correction, like all the others,” the trader says. “But it won’t happen.

You know why? India, Russia and China. They’re pouring so much money in. They buy at any price.

They don’t care. It’s a hyper-market and they’re going crazy for it.”

I cross the road to the auction house. The atmosphere in the auction room itself is a cross between the Saatchi Gallery and the shopping channel; the auctioneer brazenly stirs the crowd’s plump wallets, while there is a muted sense that most of the action is going on far away. An in-house crew work telephones along the side of the room, conversing in Italian, French and Russian. Two staff members glued to PCs call out internet bids as they come in. As one particular bid ascends into the tens of thousands, a phone dealer panics, realising he’s competing with his own pre-auction offer.

“Am I bidding against myself ?” he asks, flapping his papers and chewing his hands-free microphone.

The crowd is motley. There are some glances at my trainers, but no one, these days, dares second guess who has the millions. I watch a middle aged man in a dirty fleece and old Adidas raise his numbered sheet to spend 17 grand on a non-descript Bad Idea

German print. And I realise this is part of it. As with poker and lap dancing, the thrill is the play of money itself, and an exploration of its meaning. To throw two million at an abstract canvas with three lines on suggest you are holding knowledge of some secret, almost inexpressible value. Or it is a gigantic bluff.

The Damien Hirst spot paintings that surround us reflect this attitude, unashamed at being studio-produced and designed for generating value. ‘Diacetoxyscirpenol’ (black, white and grey dots) is estimated at £7000 to £9000. ‘Tetrahydrocannabinol’ (identical, but with coloured dots) will set you back three times as much.

‘Ciclopirox Olamine’, (coloured dots, some filled in with smiley faces, and bearing the scrawled message ‘Cheer up ya miserable cunts’): £15,000 to £20,000.

A young couple consider the annotation, straightfaced, huddled secretively around the print with a Christie’s specialist.

“People always like things with the real touch of the artist,” the specialist explains. “They have become unique. They’re not going to come up again like this.”

We all stand in awe.

“If we were looking in terms of investment,” the couple ask, “Would the Mark Quinns appreciate more than the Hirsts?”

It is hard, in all of this, not to sense a final vengeance of the unimaginative against the artist – of business against the arts generally. When did modern art become such a commodity? Dealers at the start of the 20th century could buy Picassos for 30 francs – not because he was unknown, but because this was the price of art. A Cold War United States had its own political (and tax) motivations for grandly supporting its home-grown abstract expressionists, but the boom that sent modern art prices stratospheric occurred in the late 1980s and centred on Impressionism. I’d always wondered why Japanese businessmen suddenly found an insatiable appetite for Monet; journalist Ben Lewis suggests one attraction.

He describes how taxes on premium property sales meant canny buyers would often pay under the odds and throw in a couple of poppy fields to make up the difference. Likewise, one of the biggest signs of faith in the enduring monetary value of art is the continuing popularity of stolen works as collateral in underworld deals.

The beauty of art as an investment, it seems, is precisely that it is meaningless, and so cannot be affected by, say, the price of steel, or the state of American mortgages. It is pure value, a free floating price tag, immune to circumstance. Don Thompson, in his book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, uses the economic term ‘Ratchet Effect’: ‘A ratchet turns in only one direction, and then locks in place. A price ratchet means that prices are sticky in a downward direction but free to move up.’

080205.135 by AARON

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080201.15 by AARON

Jesse Jacobson, of London’s Bernard Jacobson gallery, is all too aware of the market’s perverse durability: “Right now, most markets are dropping, but what happens is people sell their shares and use the cash to buy art.”

The early noughties boom for contemporary art followed the dotcom burst. Contemporary art, with its potential for infinite expansion, becomes popular because more people need to buy into this phenomenon, yet can’t afford any of the genuinely finite group of Old Masters available. So dealers find new markets for them. It’s like printing money without the risk of inflation.

On the day I visit Christies, Ed Dolman appears in The Sunday Times agreeing with the trader’s optimism. The present situation is defined by ‘30 or 40 individuals who have come into the market from Russia, Asia and the Middle East.’ He predicts that in the future, 30-35% of the market will be Asian. ‘We have huge buyers of contemporary art in Asia. Enormous buyers of contemporary art in Russia… The great works of this century and the 20th century will be more and more expensive.

That’s an unstoppable trend. When we look at the accumulation of capital all over the world, and the decreasing number of great works of art, there’s your equation!’

When Rothko’s ‘White Center’ established a world record for post-war art last year, going for $72.8 million at NY Sotheby’s, witnesses described the bidder as a ‘bearded Russian collector’. The most expensive painting on display the day I visit Christie’s is by the Russian abstract master, Serge Poliakoff (£200,000 for a small, untitled green and cream canvas). When I ask Darren Leak, their specialist on hand, why it is going for that sum he looks worried and asks if I think it’s undervalued. Eventually he suggests that the unusual colour scheme places it firmly in the six figure bracket. Most Poliakoffs are maroon.

Russian money is no longer a surprise but the effect of other areas of new wealth, particularly India’s exploding entrepreneurial class, is still being 114

gauged. As in Russia, the first buyers to boost the market were non-resident, mainly Indian ex-pats in New York, and they bought mostly older works. But if the first wave sees a savvy diaspora buying back their heritage, the next sees an assertion of modernity.

“The people buying contemporary art now are increasingly rich Indian business people,” says Frances Fogel, an in-house art historian at AXA Art Insurance. “And they are buying into a Western mindset and values.”

Last year one Mumbai auction house sold an abstract work by VS Gaitonde for nine million rupees ($215,000) to a collector in Dubai. It looks, somewhat disappointingly, rather like a late Rothko. In 2005, Christie’s auctioned Tyeb Mehta’s ‘Mahisasura’ for nearly $1.6 million, the first time an Indian contemporary painting crossed the million barrier.

Penny Bingham has experience running an auction house in Mumbai. She explains the development, and contrasts it with another emerging market: “The real growth and switch from traditional art to modern was not until 2002. This coincided with the Indian economy expanding. The market in India was underpinned by the new wealthy entrepreneurs and Non Resident Indians (NRI’s) based in New York & Dubai. This group of people, whose wealth was based on new technology and films, were drawn to new art rather than traditional art and its close association with the colonial era. In China this has not been the case. The contemporary art market is essentially driven by European money, as all the galleries are owned by Europeans and most of the clients live abroad. The Chinese market is therefore more volatile and regarded from an investment stand point as less mature.”

According to a ‘Confidence Survey’ by ArtTactic. com, there is ‘a significant level of optimism in the current Indian contemporary art market, and also in the short term outlook’. You can even put your rupees into one of several investment funds devoted solely to Indian art, such Copal Art and Ossians, ‘a natural outcome of any market maturing’ according to Arun Vadehra of Delhi gallery, Vadehra Art. And the future? Bingham predicts “the rapid rise in the more established Indian artists will probably plateau, but there is still some growth in the new artists of today.”

As the excited trader in Café Nero suggests, this situation incorporates two intoxicating dreams in one: the endless emergence of the new economies and the endless rising value of art. The Sunday Times notes that ‘a worldwide, decade-long fever of museumbuilding has been vacuuming up work in traditional collecting fields.’ Now less traditional collecting fields are appearing. Where there is demand, dealers will find a supply.

‘Museum quality’ is the phrase that adds noughts

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to the value of any piece. Bingham tells me that the Modern Art Museum in Delhi has in recent years been augmented with a couple of private collections in Mumbai and Delhi, “thus giving the market more international credibility.” Before museums get in on the action, a big-name collector – or a dealer established enough to place an artist’s work with big collectors – provides an equivalent stamp of financial worth. Supply and demand is all. In terms of the value of their oeuvre, one Christie’s employee tells me the best thing an artist can do is die. While you’re living, however, it is the role of the dealer to act as the tap controlling the flow. The independent galleries ensure there’s always slightly fewer works available than there are punters willing to buy in. For this reason artists and dealers dislike auctions. Auctions are like floating a company: price is no longer tied to the work itself, but to the supposed value of the artist’s stock in the future.

“The hype they bring is bad for art,” says Jesse Jacobson.

Examples abound of artists bought for millions by one dealer, then dumped on the market in one go and massively devalued. Saatchi himself has been criticised for buying up works by a particular artist, storing them as the price rises and then flooding the

market at auction.

So what’s the next market to explode? Where will we need to expand so that everyone can have their slice of the art cake? Poland? Turkey? Romania? Ask those in the industry and the uniform response is: if I knew that I wouldn’t be sitting here. Ask the right collector and it would be: wherever I choose.

Only Jesse Jacobson responds with confidence.

When I ask after the next big thing, he and his gallery assistant bring out a vast, semi-abstract diptych by an artist called Aaron. Aaron is a computer. He was created by the British artist Harold Cohen when Cohen felt his own career had reached a natural conclusion. Aaron has been teaching itself to paint for the last three decades.

Jacobson arranges the two tall panels against the gallery wall. It is bright and explosive but gracefully proportioned. It looks like a photograph of flowers blown up to room height and put through intense, multicoloured filters.

‘What do you think?’ Jacobson asks.

‘It’s strangely soulful,’ I say.

Current asking price is £12,500

080319.3 by AARON

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Alastair Harper

Hiponomics The Cost of Cool in New York City

Photography by Sebastian Meyer

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t is roughly 7 am EST, not far from Bedford Station in Brooklyn. Fresh off a plane, I slump at a bar, nursing a beer and my jet-lag. I have managed to make friends with the barman so that he will let me stay for the lock-in they’re having.

“You ever heard of the Klaxons?” he asks me.

I nod. “My band toured with them last summer.

They’re good guys.”

I will soon learn that most barmen in Brooklyn and the East Village have bands that have or are about to tour the UK. “We get to play a lot of parties in the city, you know? And people think we’re cool in your country, I guess.” He pours me another Sam Adams and shakes his head at the offer of money.

A man from the band playing earlier sits next to me. He explains loudly that it’s the bassist’s 24th birthday.

“And he’s going to get diabetes,” he says with what can only be called a bizarre enthusiasm. He turns to the birthday boy. “I don’t want you with diabetes, man! You’re getting diabetes because you drink too much.”

On the table are two bottles of whiskey, both only a third full. The rest of the bottles’ contents are in the four remaining band members’ beer glasses.

“That’s it, man. I swear that’s it! I love you too much to watch you die of drink. 24, man! No, I’m going on a fast. I won’t eat or drink until you stop drinking. You guys hear me? Nothing goes through my lips until he stops drinking!”

He nods with the solemnity of someone who has just made a true commitment and looks down at his glass. I am offered a wink before he downs the halfpint in one go.

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Next to me is a middle-aged man wearing a wedding ring. He has been keeping quiet since I arrived. Now he tells me, like a resigned father, that he manages the band. A girl on his other side is drunkenly interested in this. She is young and attractive, while he is not. Nevertheless, she attempts to flirt with him. In contravention of all the acknowledged laws of the world, he ignores her. She offers him a drag on the joint she is casually enjoying.

“I don’t smoke,” he responds, chillingly.

She nods, sighs, and looks down at her beer.

Suddenly one of the band members exclaims: “I love cocaine!” The girls spins around on her stool, startled by the voice of a kindred spirit.

“I love cocaine too,” she informs him in surprise.

“Amazing! I just live across the street. We could both go do stuff now!” She leaps up and takes him by the hand. “But only for a couple of hours,” he adds.

“My shift at MOMA starts at 10.”

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wiftly defined, stereotypical hipsters are people who enjoy the lifestyles and affect the attitudes of the famous without actually going to the trouble of achieving fame. Bear in mind that this makes them even lazier than Jodie Marsh. You can also see why dressing up in a shell suit, wearing Mickey Mouse glasses and spray-painting a baseball cap yellow doesn’t necessarily make you liked by those around you.

The central hub for such people, where their kings and queens lay down the law about whether a band is over yet, will always be New York City. Within New York there’s a central circle of the coolest, those who practice a religion of hipness. I remember

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living here a few years ago and brushing against the exhausting, all-night, all-week dedication people put into simply hanging out and being cool. What I wanted to know, and what I asked the barman on my first night in the town – “How do people afford to live like this? It’s Tuesday night. These folks were out yesterday. They’ll be out tomorrow. Never mind the energy, how do they afford it?”

“I dunno man. I guess they saved or something?

You want to go to a cool party I’m going to tomorrow and find out? It’s meant to be pretty wild, and they like British kids.”

He pours me another free drink I didn’t ask or have to pay for.

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hough I’m terribly uncool, and most of my jackets are in tweed, I have the advantage of being foreign and not looking very sporty. In the right light this can create the illusion of being cool.

The next night in the Lower East Side, I don’t see my new barman friend but where he told me to go is busy. I meet David, a demi-poet, journalist and, ultimately, professional hipster. He dated Allen Ginsberg in his first year at college. Now every night he hangs out in lower Manhattan, he and his friends circling actors from Larry Clark films like courtiers jostling for the attention of Marie Antoinette. He is constantly poised to tell stories. When I ask him about what life is like amongst his fellow artists in New York (most of whom don’t seem to make any art) he smiles 118

like a predator and tells me: “It’s nothing you could imagine. Every night I do whatever you imagine.”

Ambiguous nonsense is a common trait around here. I ask him how people afford to go out and he offers the same shark smile: “Some things are more important than eating.”

David makes very little money from the work he does for minority interest magazines like Fader.

Instead, he claims, his real income comes from writing hugely popular ballad songs for boy bands. It seems unlikely. But then, so do most of the things he says that turn out to be true.

At a bar around the corner David introduces me to one of Warhol’s superstars, Taylor Mead. Mr. Mead happily discusses with me forty years of going out and being cool. All I have to do is get him a beer.

He can still be seen around the Lower East Side, wandering from hip bar to hip bar and having drinks bought for him before stopping off to feed and talk to the stray cats that linger outside his tiny, run-down apartment.

Somewhere along the way I pass from David to Mead to Matt, who I learn is another out-all-nighter, and ask him how people afford it. He doesn’t know.

He’s always broke. A neurotic computer expert, he quit his job for a technology firm some time back and went freelance, but the work hasn’t been flying in. This isn’t helped by the fact that he never gets up before 2 pm, rarely checks his phone messages and doesn’t really do email. He doesn’t understand why

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people don’t want him to come round and fix their computers between 10 pm and 2 am. This would suit him, as it’s just before he usually goes out.

Matt survives, he tells me, largely on the parties he attends; there’s usually free food and beer provided by a gallery or magazine wishing to cash in on the hip scene. He introduces me to a girl (who works in an office reception by day) who lives with some male friends in a huge loft space in Soho, paid for by a publisher whose only apparent benefit from the arrangement is to look good by proxy. Someone mentions to me later that he also sleeps with the boys when his wife is away.

The night ends, but only briefly for I am invited by the girl to a party the following night, somewhere on the Upper East Side. It’s rare for these events to occur above Fourteenth Street, and this one is in a large and expensive-looking hotel, spanning several floors. The booze is free and plentiful but I have no idea who is footing the bill. I wander around and find a small room in which a transvestite is expertly stripping and singing her own songs. People whoop excitedly and a dozen or so phone cameras capture the moment when testicles are finally revealed.

On the stairs between floors, although they’re richly carpeted, and although the laws banning smoking in public places are still in full force, people light up and converse on cramped landings. As I walk up I am overtaken by a man mumbling “monsters” repeatedly to himself. He is wearing only a pink leotard.

“He lost his mind to drugs,” an unknown girl with an Australian accent tells me. “He used to be in a wonderful band, but now he’s dead.” Bored, she flicks ash onto the cream-coloured carpet.

I ask her if this is a common thing to have happen

to one’s self in this city. She shrugs and asks her friend what happened to a boy they both knew who was having some problems.

“He picked his own psychiatrist. She’s a hippy so she keeps bursting into tears when he talks.

Sometimes she falls asleep.” She falls asleep?

“Yeah, but he keeps talking. He figures it’ll sink in somewhere. Plus he uses her because she’s so weak.

He researches his own drugs and she’ll order them in for him. He orders twice as much so he can keep a bunch back in case he ever has to pay for his own medication. Y’know, if he gets a job or something?

And the best bit she just leaves everyone’s meds taped to her front door. If he fancies a little something extra he just takes it from someone else.” The conversation moves on to the magazine party they are planning on going to; it is all-week-long with free beer.

There is a sense of self-preservation when discussing the fallen. As if to turn round and see what happened to the people before you would be to betray the whole enterprise. On my last night I encounter a much-hyped young photographer to whom David had introduced me. When I ask where David is, I’m told he’s moved to Jersey. Well, that isn’t far away.

“No, he’s in Jersey. You know? Too much.”

It transpires that the man is immured in a New Jersey mental hospital; such trips are so common for the older party-goers that a wry euphemism has sprung up to document the fact. When I try to wring more out of him, the photographer gets snappy, telling me he’ll be back in a few days, and closes down the conversation. There is a silence, then he reaches for his cigarettes and asks me if I’ll be around the next day. There’s a gallery opening followed by an after party that he thinks will be really wild. And on it goes

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Chris Flynn

Life Lessons Of A Persistent Drowner Underwater Politics in Ko L anta

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I

can’t swim.

I had ten weeks of swimming lessons as a child in Belfast, during which time I almost drowned twice and was eventually told by the lifeguard never to return to the local swimming pool (for my own safety and his insurance premium). I also undertook four weeks of adult swimming lessons, one on one with a qualified instructor who, at the end of the month, shook her head in confusion, claiming she had never encountered the like before, but at least diagnosing the problem. I am afflicted with a greater than average density for a human being, the Macquarie Dictionary defining the term as ‘a closely set or crowded condition’.

It’s not that I don’t float. Oh no, I’ve certainly got that one licked. Floating is my forte. It’s just that I float roughly two metres below the surface.

Therefore my rule of thumb is that until I grow a set of gills, I simply stay out of the water in every circumstance, the only exception being if an attractive woman persuades me to do otherwise.

Sigh. You know what’s coming next, right?

Thailand. Land of fake smiles, Red Bull T-shirts and sexually transmitted diseases, all of which were given to me at some point or another by kindly strangers. The dingy island of Ko Lanta was my temporary home, championed by those staying there as less commercial and more off-the-beaten-track than the ones you may have heard of, you know, the ones where beautiful people dance in the full moon, make passionate love and are shaken down by corrupt policemen. Fact of the matter is, it was simply the cheap option.

For my sins I had the cheapest hut on the cheapest beach on the island. A squat toilet, cold shower, mostly intact mosquito net, hammock and curiously stained pillow were my fixtures, and my sole companions were 2000 plastic-eating ants (scratch one camera and one tape Walkman) and the owner’s 10 year-old son, who admittedly was not in the actual hut with me but restricted himself to watching me perform (badly and drunkenly) with a series of backpacker girls through the gaping slats in the wooden walls. I may not have been the most inspiring of sexual role models for the lad. Had I known he (and the other kids for that matter) was watching before my last day there, I might have made more of an effort, which I daresay the ladies would have appreciated also. I loved every one of them, Mum. My days were spent wiling away the hours sitting at Moose’s bar with my bodyguard Duke, whose main duties involved threatening English male backpackers with broken limbs if they requested Robbie Williams.

She was a kickboxer from Indiana, and even the Thais feared her. God alone knows what would have happened if she ever bumped into Robbie Williams.

I daresay with one snap of a neck, the world would quickly become a better place. I was permitted the pleasure of telling the furrow-browed Williams fans: “That’s little girl’s music, and you better sit down before the Duke here embarrasses you in front of everyone. The interior of her hut is just like Predator’s spaceship – she has a trophy wall of spinal columns.”

The Duke would glance up from her drink and it would all be over.

With the ants having consumed the innards of my Walkman, I was reduced to reading whatever books I could get my hands on. All the titles Moose had were what passers-through had left behind. There were some great books, unfortunately all in German, and so I struggled along, translating historical adventure novels and skipping over the words greater than 12 syllables in length.

Fortunately help was soon at hand. I fell into talking with a raven-haired German beauty one lonely evening. She had come down to Ko Lanta with her boyfriend (boo, hiss!) so he could go diving, which she was not interested in. In fact he was going away all the following day, so she kindly volunteered her services in helping me translate the book, an epic set in the 14th century.

Kirstin’s English was impeccable. She corrected my grammar a few times, and on each occasion she was right. Remarkably forthright and unselfconscious too. We walked along the beach to a quieter spot for a little sunbathing and translation, the boyfriend safely under the waves on the other side of the island. After half an hour tittering at my pitiful attempts to learn German by sheer osmosis, she changed into her bikini to go for a swim, modesty not being a word in her extensive vocabulary.

At this point I was compelled to confess my dense nature and reluctance to join her frolicking betwixt the waves. Being of logical mind, she proposed a very sensible solution, loaning me her snorkel mask and instructing me to stay in the shallows in order to gain confidence. Finally, a swimming instructor with some sense! Where had she been all my aquatic life?

For the first time, I was able to perform something akin to swimming, face submerged under the surface of the clear water, legs kicking away, arms rotating in an awkward flap, air flowing into my lungs smoothly.

It was a revelation. For 10 minutes I paddled along, standing up occasionally to wave to the impressive Kirstin, then resuming my stroke happily, confidence increasing exponentially, fear slipping away.

A little fishy darted past, oh look a little fishy, and wow how clear is that water, there are shells and wee floaty things and the sand I can reach down and touch it, that’s so cool and look, now the sands gone all black and I can’t see it anymore, that’s a bit odd I wonder what happened there, hmm, where’s the

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bottom gone, I hope I haven’t…

Fuck. Oh fuck. Oh Jesus fucking Christ. Oh shit, oh fuck, I’m..

I tried to turn, my head above water for an instant. I saw the shore too far back and steeled myself. I went under.

Panic will make a person do the opposite to what they’re supposed to do. I breathed in and took a lungful of water through the snorkel, which was by now submerged like the rest of me. I kicked uselessly, clawing at the mask in a frantic effort to get it off me.

I came up to the surface, coughing and gasping for breath. My body went rigid, like an anchor. I could see Kirstin swimming 20 metres away. I called to her for help, my words garbled as I went under again.

I knew I had it in me to get back up again for air and I flailed my way to the surface once more. Kirstin was powering through the gentle waves towards me.

My lips snatched some oxygen briefly and then I went under again, no time for talk or opportunity to call for succour.

The lack of fear could have been related to the fact that I had almost drowned twice before as a child, and almost been killed on three other occasions. Or it could be related to the

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fact that I grew up in Northern Ireland My mind was running at light speed. There is a polarisation of emotion and sensation in moments such as these and the brain shuts out all input in order to arrive at a set of certainties. Helpless, suspended and surrounded by fluid, I knew without doubt that I faced two possible futures, and only two.

Either I would die in the next five to 10 seconds, or a complete stranger would bring me back up to the light and air and I would live. I had no control over either outcome. It was as stark and simple as that.

I can remember thinking, ‘so, it comes down to this’, and waiting to see what would happen.

Contrary to popular belief, one’s life does not flash before the eyes, or at least mine did not. In fact something unusual happened in those long, stretched out seconds before Kirstin’s strong arms reached below mine and dragged my compliant form back as 122

far as the sand bank, where I could stand on tiptoes to keep my nose and mouth above water, gingerly wading back to the shallows.

An incredible sense of peace descended upon me. I felt safe, warm and comfortable. The seawater stuck to my skin, caressing and soothing me, flowing through my pores and into my nose and mouth, my eyes: the only sound the beating of my own heart. I was not afraid.

The lack of fear could have been related to the fact that I had almost drowned twice before as a child, and almost been killed on three other occasions. Or it could be related to the fact that I grew up in Northern Ireland, where one becomes inured to death and immune to horror at a young age, otherwise you’ll never make it. Or it could simply be that I remembered what it was like being in the womb, suspended in sweet, life-giving amniotic fluid, untainted by the fears of mortal men.

In any case, I have never dwelled on the moment too long. As Kirstin’s famous countryman Freud once said, ‘Psychoanalysis works on everyone, except the Irish, who don’t seem to need it.’

In what seems an astonishing turn now, once safely ashore I put the snorkel back on and went out again, careful to stay in the shallows but not really bothered by the incident. Kirstin swam a little longer and then we both went back to Moose’s bar for lemonade. We stared at each other across straws, the realisation of what had happened sinking in a little.

I thanked her politely for saving me from certain death but she merely shrugged, telling me to keep practicing, her logical Germanic spirit comforting and at the same time a little frightening.

hat evening I finally met her boyfriend, who struggled to believe in the existence of a human who could not swim. I assured him I had indeed been in difficulty and had it not been for Kirstin I would not have been enjoying an amphetamine-filled Thai beer with my dinner that evening.

His English was only fractionally as good as hers, but there was no doubting his ability to consume alcohol and be obnoxious. I tried my best to decipher his increasingly drunken sentences, mostly in German with English words peppered throughout. He did however succeed in making one point abundantly clear.

“You not black is good,” he mumbled.

“Pardon me?”

“He says it’s good that you’re not black,” Kirstin helpfully added.

“Yeah, I got that. What do you mean?”

“White skin, eyes blue, not Turkish or Jew.” “Is that some kind of sick Haiku?” I raised my voice a little, fuelled by Chang beer.

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Kirstin did not know what a Haiku was, but launched freely into an explanation of her boyfriend’s drunken drivel, which was all the more alarming for her completely sincere tone and beautiful smile.

“Sorry, I didn’t mention it earlier, but we’re National Socialists. We believe Germany should just be for pure Aryan Germans. The immigrants should go back to their own countries.” Big smile.

Placing my beer carefully on the bar and turning around in my stool, I spoke slowly and deliberately.

“You’re Nazis.”

“Well, we don’t really use that term,” Kirstin explained. “It’s outdated and reminiscent of an unpleasant past. The party has moved on since then.”

“An ‘unpleasant past’? Is that what you call it? I see.” I took a hit from my Chang. “Sounds like you’ve got some fresh new policies though.”

Her boyfriend grabbed my arm, his face a sickening leer.

“Jews, yeuch,” he made a face of distaste.

“Get your fucking hand off me,” I told him sternly, my booze-addled mind toying with the idea of having the Duke beat the living shit out of him just on principle.

Kirstin’s brow furrowed as she tried to work out what to say to me to get back in my good books.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong impression of us,” she protested, any beauty she possessed falling away like loose roof tiles in a storm.

I stood up, staggering only slightly. The boyfriend was almost comatose, but Kirstin still had her wits about her and there was something I needed to know.

I composed myself, speaking softly and succinctly.

“So what would have happened today if I was black, or Jewish?”

She pursed her lips and stared me in the eye. Her silence was absolutely horrifying

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Sam Jordison

no pot to piss in The Disappearance of the British Public Toilet Art by Louis T. Fowler

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he need to earn a living takes me to London more often than I’d like. As a typically desperate journalist, writer and occasional critic it frequently behoves me to visit important people, attend screenings, chat to publishers and (most degrading of all) network. And in order to do all that, I have to go to the Great Wen. My objections to these regular trips out from my cosy lair in Oxford are, I admit, mostly selfish. Aside from the obvious drawbacks of doing a day’s work as opposed to staying in bed, London presents many disadvantages when compared to my house. Let me just select a few.

Puke on the pavements. Slack jawed shopping drones on Oxford Street. Taxi drivers. BMW drivers.

Property speculators careering round in Foxton’s minis (who will, come the Glorious Day, have some serious talking to do). Notting Hill. Soho. Camden.

Coked-up management consultants. Representatives of the Hare Krishna faith banging their cymbals right in my ear. Millions of other people, not one of whom is my girlfriend.

But worst of all the inconveniences of visiting London is the literal lack of conveniences. In the 21st century, the capital has become a city almost entirely devoid of public toilets.

Consequently, taking a shit in London involves almost military planning. If you don’t live there, or work in an office there, finding an accessible loo involves skill and luck. The chances of actually stumbling across a functioning public poo place are minimal, so you have to think laterally and plan ahead.

The first option must and always shall be McDonald’s or similar bad food giants. I regard using the bathroom facilities of evil corporations as something of a moral obligation – so long as you don’t buy anything when you’re on the premises.

There’s considerable satisfaction to be taken from the knowledge that by thus costing the fast food chains money, your bowel movements are playing a small part in the fight against mass obesity, corporate blandness, the destruction of rainforests and global warming.

Otherwise, the options are limited. Over time, I’ve built up a small mental map of places in London where you can go about your business undisturbed by the callings of mammon and the watchful eyes of shop assistants (Gray’s Antique Centre near Bond Street, for instance, offers some very nice 1930s era toilets next to a side door that you can enter and leave without even pretending you’re there to shop).

However, all of that is reliant on local knowledge and remains limited to the areas I most often haunt.

When outside such comfort zones, and the orbit of chain stores and McDonald’s, the best option is to nip into a café or bar. In small cafés (no doubt struggling

with the extortionate London rents and set up after some crazy idealistic dream about bringing people together and spreading a little caffeinated happiness) you ought to feel honour bound to buy something.

What then if you don’t have the money for a cup of tea?

The complex reasoning involved in taking a crap beyond the confines of your own house, offers a discreet case study for the decline in our city spaces: where growth in private wealth and public squalor progress hand in hand. The loss of decent public toilets is another factor in the alienation of our citizens from their environment. If we treat people like animals and can’t even afford them the dignity of a clean and private place to relieve their bowels, how can we expect them to behave as anything other than beasts?

Over the last 10 years, the number of public toilets in the UK has been more than halved by local authorities, according to the British Toilet Association, an organisation dedicated to ensuring that the last of our public conveniences don’t get flushed away. In the middle of the 20th century, there were 15,000 public loos. In 1998, there were still more than 10,000. Now there are less than 5,500 and many of those are in an appalling state of disrepair.

The most frequent excuses for closure centre around those traditional social pariahs: junkies, vandals and cottagers. But as Richard Chisnell, the director of the British Toilet Association points out, when such anti-social behaviour does occur it’s generally because the toilet has already been neglected.

“It’s because a decision has already been made not to allocate sufficient funding,” he told me.

“Once you take the attendants away, there’s a vicious downward spiral. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in libraries or other public services, because there are people there to look after them. It’s negligence, there’s no other word for it.”

An informal online survey I conducted when I wrote about the loss of toilet provision in The Guardian also suggested councils tended to blame toilet closure on vandalism when none had occurred. Certainly that fits in with the explanation offered by the shadow Local Government minister Eric Pickles, who claimed recently that public loos were victims of “fiddled funding.” The provision of toilets is discretionary and since authorities have been required for a number of years to make year on year reductions in costs, it’s been squeezed. Even if the latest government survey showed that 84% of people want more of them and want those that exist to be improved, the bottom line (forgive me) is that shutting a toilet is an easy economy to make.

It is, however, a false one. It’s easy to blame the fact that so many of our streets now stink of urine

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(and worse) on the anti-social habits of our citizens.

It’s simple logic that as toilets disappear, people do their business in the street instead. If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, after all. And who has to pay to clean it up? The same councils that failed to maintain the toilets in the first place. Or, more to the point, us taxpayers.

Not only is shutting toilets foolish. It strikes me as immoral. What happens to the incontinent? Where can parents change their babies’ nappies? How do people even get a drink of water without having to buy it (in an environmentally unfriendly plastic bottle) since the water fountains in public facilities inevitably disappear as well?

While I’m asking questions: what does it say about society that we cannot provide our citizens the dignity of a place to relieve themselves without paying for it? What does it say about social progress, given that our Victorian city fathers (whom we so often sneer at as cruel and illiberal) were so much more effective in providing for the needs of their citizens? What, indeed, are we to make of the fact that we have allowed our ancestors’ gifts for the public good to be sold off into private hands – or simply torn down?

“In the past, there was women’s liberation, leprosy, Aids, the sexual revolution.

All these are taboos that have been broken.

The toilet problem is probably the last one” Perhaps it’s worth noting that, historically, highs and lows of human civilisation are often paralleled by the availability of public conveniences. Certainly, the Romans excelled in the creation and maintenance of widely available latrines. Archaeologists have calculated that in Rome in 315 AD there were over 150 large capacity public loos. These were often flushable or made clever use of river water to wash away effluent. In the fairly typically Roman town of Timgad in North Africa, it’s been discovered that there was one public lavatory for every 28 people.

As reading, writing, road-building, legal systems, the ability to talk Latin and all those other markers of sophistication declined during the Dark Ages, so too did toilet provision. In 1358, there were only four 126

public toilets in London. A few years later, during the brief golden age of Dick Whittington, an impressive 128 seater was installed by the Thames, but by 1667 the problem was pressing again. Samuel Pepys writes movingly of the time his wife was inconvenienced at the theatre and they were unable to find a suitable place for her to find relief.

“I was forced to go out of the house with her to Lincoln’s Inn walks,” he noted on 5th September.

“And there in a corner she did her business.”

More recently, China’s spectacular economic growth has also seen giant leaps forward in sanitary provision. The beautifully named minister Lou Xiaoqi recognised the importance of this link when instituting a toilet-building programme in 1995, saying that the free availability of good rest rooms is “a sign that people’s level of civilisation is rising.”

Of course, it’s possible to take this equating of quality public toilet provision with a happy society too far. China’s human rights record is still abominable, and Victorian England was hardly a barrel of laughs for most of the downtrodden poor.

Rome was undoubtedly miserable for all but the wealthiest. What’s more, the best toilets on earth at the moment are reputedly in Singapore; a place where you can be fined for chewing gum or farting in a lift. The government there has declared that clean public toilets are the hallmark of a gracious society and regularly levies charges on people who don’t flush. As if that weren’t enough, the hygiene obsessed island state is also the home to the World Toilet Organisation and hosted the world’s first toilet summit in 2001.

“In the past, there was women’s liberation, leprosy, Aids, the sexual revolution. All these are taboos that have been broken. The toilet problem is probably the last one,” says Jack Sim, the president of the WTO. It makes me wonder if I might not be blowing this whole loo-thing slightly out of proportion.

Meanwhile, the finest public toilet that I personally have ever visited is in Hull. This small Edwardian palace of poo sits by the waterfront in the disused docklands of the smelly former home of Philip Larkin. Inside, there are beautifully polished wooden fittings, gleaming, scrupulously clean tiles, and a riot of potted plants and foliage. These facilities are such a pleasure to visit that coach parties from all over the North East regularly make special trips to see them. Hull is one of the poorest cities in the UK, its council is perpetually cash-strapped and, tragically, last time I was there the place was crawling with junkies. Even so, Hull has managed to provide splendid toilets, complete with attendants and thriving plant life.

So why can’t they do the same in London, one of the world’s wealthiest cities? Why can’t they in most

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other towns in the UK also? The answer is, of course, that nearly all local politicians are stupid fools and more than a little evil. So too are the government.

In March, Communities minister Baroness Andrews at least acknowledged that the decline in the British public loo is a problem, and even released an action plan with the jaunty title ‘All cisterns go.’ But even then, the document’s major suggestions were that people might be encouraged to go in cafés and restaurants instead and that councils start charging people to use the loos that are already there.

Don’t let these facts lead you to despair, however. As Richard Chisnell from the BTA points out, “If we want decent toilets, we’ve got to make a noise.” Together we can change things! A serious letter writing campaign could make a world of difference. Failing that, next time you find yourself in need but with nowhere to go, take your problem straight to the relevant authorities. If everyone in need of a place to crap does it at the entrance to their local town hall, it will bring politicians to their senses in no time

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BAD IDEA

magazine makeover the bad idea redesign

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was sitting on the windowsill of our Event Manager’s apartment, smoking Moldovan Lucky Strikes with a disillusioned former advertising executive from Fallon (think those irritating ads for Cadbury’s with the gorilla drumming to Phil Collins), when I mentioned to him that we were launching our first anthology this year.

“Euuchh!” he said, grimacing. “You’re creating your OWN history.”

You’re goddamn right. And we’ve got a slick new look too.

Issue six marks a new beginning for BAD IDEA, after we sat down one night, and, flushed with wine and ambition, decided Graydon Carter was a genius.

We’ve sexed up, launched a new content-rich website, and brought in as much photography as possible so that everyone understands just exactly what it is that we are: the only British youth magazine that actually commissions quality journalists to go out and write serious, substantial features. Our old strap line, ‘Modern Storytelling’, has also been quietly put to pasture. Although we loved it, even the Guardian Review became confused and thought we were publishing fiction.

Our new logo was created by Rob Lowe, a British graphic designer and illustrator whose body of considered, diverse work, created under the 128

moniker of Supermundane, has seen him complete major projects for Penguin and the New York Times.

Beginning with BAD IDEA’s original logo, Lowe reduced the modular design down to its most basic elements, inverted the pyramid used in the title’s ‘A’, and worked towards creating a typeface that expressed the essence of the editorial: a young, sophisticated features magazine.

On our cover, a new typeface by Hudson-Powell has been used in two different variations, creating two slightly different covers (for manic collectors out there). The font is part of the Responsive Type program, which when used in online environments and other computer applications, renders letter forms in real-time that adapt and respond to context. Hudson-Powell’s two font variations demonstrate the kind of changes the typeface can undergo: pretty cool no?

Further developments to interior grid systems, fonts, use of colour and imagery, were curated by design duo Oscar & Ewan, whose brief was to discover ways to unify and simplify the reading experience.

And of course, all was overseen by the loving and attentive gaze of Steve Sawyer, our longstanding Art Director

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CONTRIBUTORS Chris Flynn (Pg 118) is the editor of fiction quarterly Torpedo (falconvsmonkey. com) and writes for magazines such as The Believer, Swindle and Nuke. Born in Belfast, he now lives in Melbourne.

Alastair Harper (Pg 114) is a freelance journalist, who writes regularly for the Guardian’s Comment is Free website. His interests span from the House of the Lords to Alan Lomax field recordings.

Edward Hogan (Pg 28) was born in Derby, in 1980.

He won the David Higham Award in 2003, and Simon & Schuster/Scribner published his first novel, Blackmoor, in May 2008.

Leon Neal (Pg 21) is formerly a photographer for the London Times, now a staff photographer with worldwide news agency Agence France-Presse, with work published in media ranging from Private Eye to the BBC. Joe Stretch (Pg 29) is a Manchester musicianturned-novelist. While studying politics at Manchester University he joined the eclectic electropop quartet Performance as vocalist and lyricist. His debut novel, Friction, was published by this year by Vintage.

Sebastian Tellier (Pg 40) is the musician behind three eclectic albums L’incroyable Vérité, Politics and Sexuality. His song, ‘Divine’, will represent France at Eurovision 2008, which has caused controversy as it is the first time the French entry will be sung in English.

Sam Jordison (Pg 122) is the author of the bestselling Crap Towns, and also Crap Towns II, The Joy Of Sects and Bad Dates. He lives in Oxford with his girlfriend, the novelist Eloise Millar.

Rory Kinsella (Pg 20) is the sub-editor of channel4. com/music, as well as writing for celebrity blog Holy Moly! In his own words: “I wanted to be a rock star.

Now I’m just a tortured soul who has to write about them instead. Rubbish.”

Tat Usher (Pg 26) recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and is working on her novel, Goatman.

Rebecca Miller (Pg 32) is a freelance photographer from Novato, California. She works for a variety of clients, including the Telegraph, recently shooting the campaign for Mischa Barton’s new handbag range.

Special thanks to Ben, Michael and Hetty, James Ashworth, Leona Baker, Polly Barker, Natalie Brady, Tom Bromley, The Brian Jacket Letdown, Sarah Broom, Charlie Campbell, Julian Carrera, Ben Caulfield, Bob Ciano, Harry, Richard & Sarah C-T, Malcolm Croft, David Cross, Harry Deansway, Ed deVroome, Henry deVroome, Helen Donohue, Clay Felker, Paul Gravett, Rebecca Gray, Green Gartside & Scritti Politti, Robert Greene, Amy Hall, Nancy Harrison, Sharon Hemans, Chris Houghton, Andy Hounslow, Ruth Killick, Lydia Lewis, Maxine Lister, Chloe Longstaff, Gavin MacFadyen, James McDonald, Lou McLeod, Madeleine McLeod, Danny Miller, Nick Mills, Iain Mitchell, The Moore Family, Philip Moore, Patrick Neate, David Peace, Lally Pearson, Charlie Phillips, Helen Ponting, Polly Powell, Heydon Prowse, Dan Radclyffe, Andrea Marchesini Reggiani, Troy Rice, Steve Richards & Lucky Number, Naomi RichmondSwift, Gwynne Roberts, Tom Roberts, Alex Robinson, Francesca Sears, Gail Sheehy, Anushka Sinha, Wesley Stace, The Staceys, Federica Tagliani, Sebastien Tellier, Daniel Trilling, Günter Wallraff, Simon Wheatley, Max Wheeler, Zoe Whitley, Dom Williams, Oliver Winchester, Joel Wykeham, Sadie Wykeham 130

Special Mentions Arts Council England www.artscouncil.org.uk The Fix magazine www.thefixonline.com Foto 8 magazine www.foto8.com FourDocs www.channel4.com/fourdocs Friday Late at the V&A www.vam.ac.uk/fcfridaylate Le Book www.lebook.com Little White Lies magazine www.littlewhitelies.co.uk Multilink magazine www.multilinkmagazine.com Penpusher magazine www.penpushermagazine.co.uk Plan B magazine www.planbmag.com Portico Books www.porticobooks.co.uk Stones Throw Records www.stonesthrow.com Super Super magazine www.thesupersuper.com Team Diageo www.teamdiageo.com Vertigo magazine www.vertigomagazine.co.uk Warchild www.warchild.org.uk

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Out Of The Ordinary

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Back Story: Sebastian Meyer

MILLIONAIRE GYPSIES

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oroca is a city in north-east Moldova, three hours drive on poor roads from Chisinau, the capital.

It’s home to the Bessarabian gypsies, and is where their king lives – Baronul Artur Din Soroca.

Many of the gypsies there are very wealthy, and sedentary. Soroca has a hill, and in the mid 50s the gypsies decided to ghettoise it and build their mansions there. They call it ‘Gypsy Hill’.

In the 1950s the Sorocan gypsies started a capitalist cooperative making textiles and exporting them out of Moldova towards Russia. A lot of them moved to Moscow as black market traders – the Soviet government largely turned a blind eye.

Because of the way business was done in that period, many of the traders spent a lot of time in Moscow and established business networks there. They

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became quite wealthy. Now many of them live and work there, and only come back to Soroca to their mansions in the holidays. That’s not unusual for a country where about 10% of the total population of 4.1 million is working abroad at any one time.

The architecture is inspired by their trips to Moscow and St Petersberg. The mansions are made of cement and breezeblock, but then covered in ornate plasterwork and tiling. Valeria Preda, an agribusiness entrepreneur who lives most of the year in Soroca, owned this particular house. It cost him over $1 million US to buy and decorate – a huge sum in Moldova.

We were going to go and talk with Baronul Artur the gypsy king at his mansion, but unfortunately he demanded 1000 euros for an interview Bad Idea