Lemur Life

If I told you...

If I told you I love you,
Would it make any difference?

When I go to bed at night,
Would it make you lie in my embrace?

When I wake up in the morning,
Would it make your face the morning sun?

When we walk under the moonlight,
Would you let me hold your hand?

When your dreams turn to nightmares,
Would you let me kill your monsters?

If I told you I love you,
Would it make any difference?

g 2.0

Conversion road works makers
Ocean and not worry
Anti-abortion myself in the about

Contact lenses worth anti-targeted
Is prepared is of children? An abortion.

Abortionists grasp the PR
Say her hurl on board
Extraordinary of America's reverse that law

The figurehead was wonderful
This change of heart
What caused tells film of having service

It improved movement to have
Yet now happily to prison forces?

Being to rents value inestimable help
To go than adverts for the to

The Real

There is something delicious about the way silence invades a big city at night. The power playground of the commercial world is strikingly hollow and maybe even more real with its emptiness revealed. Even in the suburbs the partial views into living rooms seem empty without the sounds and smells that make up family life. The buildings loom and bend into sight with a feeling of hyper-reality.

Maybe this is an echo of something inside me. I’ve come from down town where the people are spilling out of the clubs and pubs into the balmy summer air. Its midweek and they’re delaying returning to an empty bed for as long as possible. Maybe their avoiding their spouses. There’s an aversion to something and a tension in the empty searching look written on their faces.

It’s not about losing touch with reality, but something more post modern. Does reality even matter? Floating free from other people with no responsibility is lonely through its liberation. Disconnected and empty I see someone across the room. The search could be over. It’s too easy to pour my own desires into that empty vase, creating a reality for him. That very action makes him at once ideal and impossible. Flawed before even starting; every attraction is a projection creating cracks in the veneer like a cheap imitation.

Love has become trapped in fantasy. Brought to life for short encounters with such intensity it’s forced to burn out before it becomes real. He told me he loved me. Who can count the number of times they’ve been told that? I’m too old to believe any more. But in the fantasy it’s real.

Sputnik Sweetheart

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful travelling companions, but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."

Sputnik Sweatheart - H Murakami

Bunny Boy

We called him Electric Bunny Boy. It was a weak reference to the Energiser Bunny TV advertisements of the 1990s, and it nicely captured his dancing style. Yeah, I thought he was cute. But I also wondered if his non-stop high speed gyrating and vibrating dance style would translate well into the bedroom...

The bar closed and we straggled our way onto the street. Bunny Boy was hanging around with his friends. It turned out they were new to London and needed directions to Piccadilly Circus. That's how we got started talking.

The conversation quickly moved on to love, romance and finding a boyfriend. Bunny Boy lamented not having one and he wasn’t doing any more one night stands. This time he was looking for the real thing. I thought my chances of testing my theory were dwindling.

Unfortunately my drinking friend for the night was also new to London. After giving Bunny Boy directions to Piccadilly Circus, we headed off in the other direction to put my friend on a bus home. His bus came quite quickly, which left me the chance to wonder back up to Piccadilly Circus and see how Bunny Boy and friends were getting on.

They were still waiting for their bus! I had assumed they were all going together, to party on in Paddington at someone's flat. But instead, Bunny Boy lived in a different direction. After his friends got on the bus, we grabbed each other and kissed. There was a quiet desperation in his body as he drew me tighter against him. His passionate embrace forced him to step back, sandwiching himself against the wall.

"Do you mind if I join in?"

What the? It seemed a passing partygoer was tired of making his homeward trek alone and was looking for some distraction.

"You both look great. Could I?"

Admittedly, he looked harmless, but I wasn't in the mood for sharing nor starting an orgy adjacent to Piccadilly Circus.

"No. Sorry." I quickly snapped and dragged an incredulous Bunny Boy across the road to safety. It seemed he had made the choice to come home with me after all. We wound our way to the bus stop at Tottenham Court road, constantly interrupted with bouts of passionate kissing and groping...

Denial

I tell myself I'm not in love.

It's nothing really.

But when the phone rings and it's him, my heart races.

I try to answer the phone calmly, trying not to give anything away. When I hang up the phone, the conversation fades like a dream, as my mind rushes back over it looking for hidden meaning.

But I’m not in love.

Nothing is really going on, I tell myself...

Financial Crisis?

It is for thoughts like these that I read Prospect magazine. There is a small article on the bottom of page 16 this month that raises an interesting financial point that seems to have been forgotten; let me summarise.

You will all have seen the articles in the news over the years about unsustainable credit usage, usually with some statistic about credit card debt. For example, household debt in the UK has risen from £811bn in 2001 to £1,533bn in 2007. No one seems to point out an even bigger rise in financial assets, which would suggest responsible debt leveraging is going on. The table below shows these numbers for financial assets, and does not include property holdings.

It looks like we have all been responsible spenders after all. Maybe the current down turn is in reaction to an economic boom we are coming out of. Well, turns out that from 2001 to 2007 British GDP grew on average by 2.8% per annum with household consumption growing at 3.1% per annum. Not exactly high numbers and in fact pretty close to average growth rates in the UK for the last 25 years. Not much evidence there for an economic boom.

I guess you could argue that the property price bubble shows at time of economic boom and reckless investing. The rise in property prices seems to be correlated to an increase in the number of households as a whole, as well as an increase in the number of first time buyers, that is people moving into the property market. These sound like reasonable market responses to scarce resources rather than a bubble.

An interesting perspective to ponder...