Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Party conversation: Wrong snow and private equity....

I had two interesting conversations at parties over Christmas. (What do you mean I'm too unpopular to be invited to any parties!) One of them was with some rich geezer who owned a private equity company. He attempted to explain in the most simple terms what it was that his company actually did. Something about putting the money in a box to be released at a future date; quite frankly I'm still baffled and I'm sure it's not that difficult once you've grasped it. It's the sort of thing I wouldn't mind getting my head around as this guy was just about to jet off to Sidney for a few weeks to take in some opera and to stay at his "bolt hole" in Australia, as he put it! He also mentioned that they had a "pied de terre" in the West End of London somewhere exlusive and another in some art deco mansion near Sunningdale and those are just the properties he talked about. Sickening or what! The other conversation was on the entirely different topic of snow. Was it "the wrong kind of snow" that brought Tonbridge, and much of the South East to a standstill just before Christmas after all. According to the fella I was talking to last night, at party number two, yes it was. In other words not the Highways Department's fault afterall but the Allmighty's! A combination of the extremely cold temperature and, unusually alot of snow at the same time meant that the very cold snow would settle, causing the roads to freeze over. According to him this was a once in twenty years scenario so would have been impossible for the authorities to cope with (which is why presumably they just did what they could to keep only the main roads clear and bugger the side roads!) My friend at this party told me that, when he was growing up his family often spent holidays in the Alps and that the snow there is pretty much the same as the snow we had last week. Great for skiing, crap for driving on! So now you know the truth....

2 comments:

delia said...

Your rich geezer is simply showing off. It is sickening because so many people have made money out of those less fortunate. I know many of this ilk. Just feel fortunate that you don't have what he has and I don't mean the material things.

Paul Bailey said...

Won't even bother commenting on the "rich geezer", apart from agreeing with Delia that he is simply showing off!
Regarding the snow, I've just got back from a fantastic 4 day break in Prague (no I'm not showing off!). On the third evening of my stay it snowed really heavily, so much so that Wenceslas Square was soon covered with a carpet of the white stuff. I was on my way to a restaurant at the time, but by the time I left, to catch the tram back to the hotel, there was a whole army of local authority workers out clearing the streets. Not only were the roads rapidly being gritted, but the pavements were being cleared by people armed with snow-shovels, and push-along gitters. The snow was still falling, but these workers were valiantly clearing it away before it had achance to accumulate.
What a difference compared to Tonbridge's pathetic effort, when we had to endure treacherous, icy pavements and untreated side roads for days on end.