For this month’s company newsletter I was asked to review a book I have read recently. I decided to review all of the wonderful Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child together as I honestly can’t separate out all the characters and plots.

I hope you enjoy.

from a Scholastic UK company newsletter

Book Talk by Peter Mahnke

Well, I was asked sort of last minute to do this and I cannot lie, I haven’t read a bit of proper literature since my degree back in the early 90’s. So I didn’t have time to read something uplifting or serious before I had to turn this in. My other problem is I tend to read every book my chosen author has written, sequentially and quickly. This means that about two weeks after completing the series, I cannot mentally separate the plots or similar characters. So, if you are still reading this, I am going to attempt to review the entire Jack Reacher series by Lee Child.

So over Christmas and January I read: Killing Floor, Die Trying, Tripwire, Echo Burning, Without Fail, Persuader, The Enemy, The Hard Way, On Shot and Bad Luck and Trouble, all by Lee Child and all with the hero Jack Reacher. All these novels follow a similar progression. Jack Reacher is a tall, strong, blonde, early 40 something, ex-Military Policeman who is travelling across America on randomly chosen Greyhound buses. He travels extremely lightly, just a folding toothbrush, not even toothpaste to weigh him down. He gets money wired to him occasionally and just buys new clothes every five days or so rather than having a small duffle or rolly suitcase. His goal is to drop out of society after spending a life in the military.

Every town he ends up in he is a) singled out as the only stranger in town immediately after something horrible happens b) gets chased down by someone related to this Army days to help out c) is randomly picked out as a potential knight in shinning armour. Naturally, because he must smell really bad or something, the police treat him poorly, thugs go after him or he is dropped into generally insane, well armed conflicts. These all happen with a mix of good and bad police, federal agencies and or military people so it is impossible to figure out who is good or bad. There are always attractive women around. They are always tall like Jack, with flat stomachs and are unmarried, except in Echo Burning where the tall attractive lawyer was a lesbian — but Jack was ok with that.

After the initial set-up of the situation, Jack decides the best course of action will be to solve the problem himself, even if he has the entire Secret Service, FBI or police at his disposal. This way the bad guys will not get away and Jack can kill dozens with no legal reprisals — like in real life.

The fight scenes, escapes from capture, etc are all really cool because Jack is good at maths and can explain that his extra long arm travels at 200,000 kph, faster than a speeding bullet or something. He also knows all the best places and ways to hit people to maximise damage. He is also a very good investigator and does quiet a bit of normal detective work. But he really understands how people think. In several books he not only could find people in a city he never been to, but even can guess what fake name they used to register at a hotel based on their musical preferences — its true — it happened like three times.

By the end of the book, not only are all the bad guys dead (no one EVER goes to jail) and most of the good guys free but nearly 100% of the bad guys property is destroyed, wiped off the map. Its excellent. Oh, and he never has to talk to the good people again, he just sleeps off his bullet wounds for one night and is off on a bus the next.

Now in reading this, you might think that I didn’t enjoy these book, but I did, a lot. The formula works. The books are a great escape.

So sad, but I think we will be leaving the UK in the next year or so, all because of Alistair Darling’s new “non-dom” tax changes. Even though the details have not been published and the IRS in the US hasn’t commented, it clearly is going to cost me and my family more money to be in the UK — and we believe unfairly.

Here is why…

Currently non-doms only pay tax on UK income. This is changing. The UK is going to move to world-wide taxation for non-doms living in the UK for seven out of the last ten years. However, there is a £30,000 a year levy that you can pay to remain taxed largely as we are now, on a remittance basis. Since this applies to all non-doms over 18, it means that my family would have to pay £60,000 to avoid paying worldwide taxes.

Since this is very near our combined pre-tax income its unlikely we will do this unless our tax bill from non-UK taxes ever approached £60k (say received income of £150,000).

• different ‘tax-free’ investments in the US and whether the UK will respect them.
• whether the payment of taxes in this ‘arising’ status will be allowed tax free from non-UK funds (imaging being taxed 40% on money brought to pay taxes!)
• difference in inheritance tax laws

Just to complicate matters more, the US tax year is January 1 and the UK’s is April 5, meaning that for two-thirds of the year you will have pre-paid your US taxes and then have to reconcile that with the UK later, and one-third will be paid in the UK first and have to be reconciled with the US! We might have to pay an accountant twice about £1,000 just to figure this out… that’s nearly 2% of our income!

The very spirit of this feels very wrong. We already pay tax on the US our hard earned investments there. All we have are our retirement savings, money put away for our children’s education and a bit of savings. Since we have been in the UK we have paid taxes like any UK citizen, but not even been allowed all the benefits, like the child benefit for four years!

Why the Chancellor couldn’t just shut down the loop-holes (or ‘anomalies’ as he calls them) for bringing money into the UK and be done with it, I will never know. Instead he has made things so complicated and unsure that many of us ex-pats are thinking of leaving. We have attended a number of sessions with non-doms and tax advisors over all this and the level of anger and confusion is staggering. Anecdotally we have heard that around 4% of non-doms are going to be leaving this year, many ahead of April 5^th. Even worse, companies that bring ex-pats over are thinking of stopping any long-term moves!

I can only imagine that this will severely hurt the UK economy overall. Ex-pats spend a lot of money in the UK. Most are not avoiding tax. All bring a wealth of information and experience that helps UK corporations make money (and pay taxes). The complication alone will scare many off, the spirit of the law will offend all. Sad.

My wife used to be a “non-adventurous home eater”. The one thing we could always agree on was golden brown, or just brown meals were usually delicious. Over the years we have massively expanded that to other colours and flavours, but occasionally, often mistakenly, we have one of our old brown meals. And when we do, we almost always recognise it as the immediate comfort food that it is and make a joke.

The one pictured is Bubble ‘n’ Squeak and pork Schnitzel.

It was foolish of us really.

We went to the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2004, not intending to see Josh, but as these festivals go, you end up seeing a lot of people you don’t know.

Josh came on stage all by himself. He looked about 20. He had curly hair, a beat up guitar, a dark suit, shy on the mic … but played for an hour with the energy and sound of 10 people.

He blew us away.

I immediately bought all his cds and we listen to the often. But somehow we just don’t buy that many cds here and haven’t bought is last two albums. So we were more than a little surprised when we arrived the the Shepherd’s Bush Empire to see a setup for an eight piece band.

We were even more surprised to see him walk on stage. He cut his hair and looked a foot taller (impossible I know) and certainly wasn’t shy anymore. All the new songs and and many of the old ones where redone to fit the expanded band. But it was good — really good. He even added to Harrisburg an section of a Modest Mouse song that I love (Tiny Cities Made of Ashes) but is pretty obscure. He did play a few older tunes and a few with a smaller set of back-up.

Definitely catch him if you can.

How does a thing start?

I have always loved liquorice. I think it started with black jelly beans when I was four or five. When I lived in New York, I could always buy good liquorice whenever I wanted — which wasn’t that often. However, the English taste in liquorice, like most of their sweats is really too sweat and has no strong flavor.

But as luck would have it, I was working with a lovely dutch girl who told me about ‘drop’ and became my supplier of good quality candy from Holland. For those you know drop, I only like sweet, not salty and really mostly munten, honing and katjes. But I left Gartner and my contact with Marielle and inter-office mail.

A year in to a new job and I was buying the occasional bar of Panda for nearly £2 per bar and only at high end organic stores. So my mother bought me a bag of scotty dogs at Christmas. I took some to Leamington and the people loved them, so I requested some more. Mom sent 10lb! I gave away lots more and actually still have about 2lbs!

However, that amount of donation resulted in four more people getting and giving me candy. Andy in Leamington found some there, and has shared some with me. Denise found some very respectable New Zealand brand called RJs. Then Jane and Julie in London have been to Amsterdam a few times and bought be large amounts.

Back in St Margarets, Stephan, the father of a child in Ryan’s class is from Amsterdam and has shared some of his stash from his brother’s visits. And our good friends moved back to Finland where Ari grew up next to the Panda factory (I never knew where it was from) so they have been bringing us more on visits, and took me to the factory’s shop when we visited — I bought a lot for nearly nothing.

Clearly the generosity has been overwhelming, I must have nearly 3 lbs of liquorice still and seemingly little hope of getting rid of it. Nearly everyone I share it with offers to find me more. So now, for the time being, I have stopped sharing or mentioning liquorice at all, at least until I am down to my last bag.

We got off to a slow start this year. We dug and covered and dug and covered and dug and attempted to really get out as much of the bind weed and cooch grass that we could. We left our asparagus for another year’s root development. We weeded everything we could. And then planted.

• Peas are off to an anemic start, only 8 inches off the ground and flowering too soon.
• Corn, eggplant and tomatoes are only 6 inches high
• Red onions rotted and failed
• Only 50% of garlic and shallots survived
• 1 out of 6 courgette plants have survived
• Our 3 artichokes were devoured by black fly

However, all this might be fine, we just haven’t been doing this long enough to know. Because we still have:

• An amazing raspberry crop
• Huge promise with blackberries
• A good crop with blueberries
• Super lettuces
• Cucumbers that look healthy
• Beans are climbing or bushing out nicely
• Fabulous fennel

Fingers crossed for better weather this year.

“Roads will be icy, in particular … everywhere.”

— BBC 1

“Winds are going left across the North Sea then taking another left at the Bay of Biscay.”

— Sky News

I really want to know why the British are willing to settle for weather forecasts that are so vague as to be comical, if not dangerous?

Last year, the BBC spent millions on new computer animations that made the Scottish feel small and all others dizzy with a virtual flight around the isles looking at clouds. Even looking at a website, you can never know if its going to rain tomorrow, and certainly not when.

When we first moved to the UK, I used to think it must be me. That I didn’t fully understand what I was seeing or hearing. I used to listen to others tell me what they thought was going to happen — often with far more precision than I could ever glean from a forecast. They would say, “oh, its going to rain around 11 o’clock.” However, on pressing them, they were sort of making it up, based on their interpretation of the swirling BBC map.

When I was building the St Margarets Community Website, I found Met Check and thought they looked a little better; however, over time, I feel they are really just the same as the Met/BBC. (_Eventually, I ended up parsing the METAR aviation files for the current weather and linking to Met Check.)

When you compare the UK weather forecasts to the United States, you can see what I mean. Now, to be fair, the US seems almost a little weather crazy. The weather portion of the news in the US has grown incredibly. It has taken up larger and larger portions of news shows. There is even a cable television channel that is exclusively about weather, ironically called The Weather Channel. However, if you look at a typical forecast, it contains so much more detail, more detail and so many more radar images that it is perhaps too much for most people.

But its the accuracy, mixed with the detail that makes it better. You can search for your city or post code and get any level of detail that you could possibly want…

• hour by hour, 5 day, extend forecasts
• text summaries of the forecasts
• current radar images, often with local, regional, satellite details with animations
• information about air quality for allergy and asthma sufferers
• information about the sun’s power (UV index)
• loads of details on barometric pressure, humidity, dew points, visibility, wind speed, wind chill and direction

The best a UK site can muster is a tiny phrase like “Widespread frost overnight” and a few basic details:

• Temperature
• Wind-chill
• Barometric Pressure
• Rain amount
• Wind speed and direction
• Percent of Cloud

No maps, no air quality or sun level, no humidity.

Perhaps the UK forecasts are purposely hiding detail to make it easier to read, but this seems highly unlikely if you consider the level of detail you get get on trains, tubes, buses, etc…

When you think of bad weather its potentially dangerous to not have detailed forecasts. Famously Michael Fish failed to warn the nation of a hurricane in 1987. More recently a 100 mph gale hit the country causing an estimated £1 billion in damage. That morning I was travelling to the Midlands and tried in the evening and again in the morning to find out if I should travel. Not only did the weather sites fail to mention the storm, they only suggested winds of around 30 mph. Clearly even the regular news and transport sites didn’t pick up on it either, not a single site or paper recommended that I should not travel. I should say that I am not stupid enough to think that the government and transportation people didn’t think something might have happened, or that I shouldn’t have cancelled or packed my tooth bush, but it certainly wasn’t recommended anywhere publicly.

I think the UK government really needs to upgrade and invest providing better consumer weather forecasts to the public. Also, television broadcasters should stop making weather reporters do reports standing outside in the rain or in a garden and certainly not as part of a human interest story from a dog shows, county fair, school or do anything other than just report on the weather.UK Weather Forecasting

“Humm, what did you think Owen?”

“Well, he didn’t say ‘HO HO HO’”

“Is that what Santa does?”

“Yes and is fat with a white beard and he wants to make toys all the time…”

“So Santa has sudden urges to make toys?”

“Yes”

“Maybe that was just one of Santa’s helpers then”

“I think so”

Last night the wife and I attended a talk with Giorgio Locatelli at the Petersham Hotel in Richmond as part of the Richmond Book Now 2006 Festival.

The event was lovely. Served champagne and canapés before the talk. Giorgio was also mingling with people, which was unexpected. The talk was very intimate, about 50 people only. Giorgio talked about his book, his views on artists vs. artisans, sourcing, his life and more. It was very informal with the audience asking loads of questions and guiding the talk.

At the end, Giorgio signed copies of the book and chatted some more. We got a copy and I have to say, its huge and looks wonderful.

Last year we barely got the allotment going since we received it so late in the season. So this year, we really had our hope up, specially with the early success or lettuces; however, this entire season London has been under a hosepipe ban and drought have nearly ruined us.

We have been pouring bucket and buckets of water about, but realise that it only sinks in a few inches at most. Only the weeds appear to have benefited. However, in the past week it has rained on and off for few days and amazingly everything except the corn, has sprung back into life.

This is the thrid large haul of plum tomatoes in about two weeks along with many cougettes, beans, rasberries, blackberries and basil.

If only we had more rain all year…

However, our evil neighbors, two allotments over think the closest stand is theirs and yelled at us for using it — at length. Clearly they were bothered that we were using it, but came up with some story that we were breaking the law, even though we told them the head of our allotment group has gone to two Thames Water meetings and told us what we should do and to use that specific stand!

Conversely, our neighbor has deceided to completely ignor the hosepipe ban and waters her garden at length. Just yesterday, after about an hour of listening to her water with more watering cans full than we have been able to put on our allotment and garden all summer, I finally lost it and asked her if she knew about the ban. She, a woman in her late 70’s, said in a wimper, “but I love my garden so much.” I basically said that I loved my garden and allotment, but was allowing it to die, like I have been asked and she should as well.

Argh… can’t win.

Usually I like my comedy dark & twisted, but adult & irreverent works too. Avenue Q has it nailed. Wrapped up as a sort of Sesame Street for adults — a musical with puppets — it is actually a far more interesting guide to starting out in life having coming from a largely useless liberal arts university (something I know a lot about).

The songs are hilarious, the puppets add a visual humour that actors probably couldn’t get away with. My favourite songs had to be Schadenfreude, sung by Gary Coleman (really!) about why being a bum or a washed up child actor was good for hummanity, We Are All a Little Bit Racist and of course, The Internet was Made for Porn.

If you can see this, I really recommend that you do.

[ UK | US ]

Doctored Evidence

By by Donna Leon

Rating: ★★★★

Again, an excellent Guido Brunetti mystery. This one is about a old widow found murdered. Nearly everyone who knew the lady wished her dead. Too many false trails nearly distract Guido from solving the case, but he gets there in the end. About three quarters of the way through I figured out where the solution lay, buy didn’t know until the final twenty pages. Very exciting.

[ UK | US ]

Death at La Fenice

By by Donna Leon

Rating: ★★★★½

This is my second Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery. I liked it better than the first one I read, Uniform Justice as it didn’t really have the same strange passive acceptance of corruption at the end. Perhaps Italians laugh that non-Italians like these books because they are romantic in their own way, but I admit, I loved Venice and the setting of these stories does add to how much I like them.

Brunetti is an interesting complex and human character. The whole setting is believable. A famous conductor doesn’t appear for the third act of an opera and is found poisoned in his dressing room. Who did it, an old flame, a young wife, a singer in the troupe or the producer? Interesting to the end, even if you know who, you don’t really know why.

If you like mysteries, I recommend reading these.

[ UK | US ]

Uniform Justice

By by Donna Leon

Rating: ★★★★

A good friend loaned me this book. Something I would never have picked up on my own. However, I read it and really liked it. Its sort of a cross between a crime/detective story and a travelogue. You get a decent crime to be solved, but in Venice and learn about the life of a family there.

While the characters are well done, the morality play is a little hard to ponder in this one, where coruption wins the day. Perhaps this is reality, but it sort of feels pathetic at the same time. I am now well on my way to reading the rest of the series.

[ UK | US]

Gods in Alabama

By by Joshilyn Jackson

Rating: ★★★★½

As you can tell by the rating, I really liked this book. Its the story of a young woman forced to face her past and go back on her three promises to God. The characters are really well written and the mystery is carefully revealed in a quick paced narrative with detailed flashbacks. It is not until the very end that you understand the whole picture and only then can you think back to several hints that were there along the way, but you might have missed.

Joshilyn Jackson’s characters are well written and the sub-plots all work and distract only as required. I am hugely impressed with this as her first major work.