Embrace randomness and come to terms with black swans

Got an email yesterday with the above title. Is there any any such thing as a black swan? Maybe that's the point.

So, back from a week in Greece and raring to go. Back to Greece, that is.

Today’s entry is brought to you courtesy of the Greek variety of the Hyundai Accent, a fine automobile that we had the pleasure of driving last week. Pity, though, that the doors were made from corrugated cardboard, and that it required two people’s grunting efforts to ram reverse gear into place. I guess that the Greek outpost of Europcar has been told that all English take pride in having terrible accents. Ah-ha.

Spent a happy week in a child-friendly holiday compound with a bunch of other London professionals who’ve waited until the brink of middle age to have children. It’s so unceasingly tiring to be a competitive middle class parent, what with proving one’s children’s running, throwing and swimming prowess, frantically singing nursery rhymes to them by way of making up for dumping them in the crèche for most of the day, and of course battle of the camcorders / digital cameras. The latter was a score draw – I counted four Canon EOSs and three Sony High Definition camcorders (including our own stolen one, of course).

Great to see that some clichés of the English abroad are timeless – the bar at the airport (which doubles up as a top secret military airfield and vegetable garden) was full of dozens of surly-looking middle-aged blokes angrily drinking litres of beer at 10am whilst waiting for their delayed flight back to Manchester.

It seems that most of the large accounting firms have been jumping around excitedly about their inclusion in a list of “Companies that count”, drawn up by the fine people at Business in the Community (a fine-sounding if ambiguous name – would drug dealing be classed as a community business?). I should blasted-well hope that accounting firms are companies that count – what the hell else would they spend their time doing?

Reminds me of a competition held at my school back in the ‘80s to devise a new motto. The winner was the memorable ‘Where everybody counts’, until someone helpfully pointed out that surprisingly few people could actually count. Deciding that ‘Where only a small minority counts’ didn’t quite hit the spot, the powers-that-be went for the much more ambiguous (and therefore more appealing) ‘Where everybody matters.’

It seems that Gordon Brown has started campaigning hard. The question is - for / against what? If he does absolutely nothing (or indeed slips away to Greece for a month), he'll still become Prime Minister without the bothersome task of asking the electorate about it, so why fly around the place making vapid speeches? So only a matter of weeks until Brown, Balls and Darling take over the country. My question is this - if the answer is 'Brown Balls, Darling' - what was the question?