Grombles

Following the overwhelming response to my post about advice for golf hackers , the one comment it received suggested I offer similar advice for tennis players. So here are some ideas to get it started. Whackers... players who aspire to be Rafa, Roger or Serena but remain perspiring, awkward dreamers probably nursing tennis elbows, dodgy knees and arthritic hips, and regularly deflated egos. Grunt. All top players expel a noisy grunt after every shot to prove to spectators, opponents and coaches that a maximum amount of effort has been expended to serve or return a shot. Failure to grunt proves a lack of effort and commitment even if the ball is out or the point lost. At least he/she tried hard to win it. Whackers, on the other hand, have neither spectators (other than those patiently waiting to use the court) or coaches to worry about. So the grunt is solely intended to scare the opponent, to disguise the sound of ball on frame, or it's actually a squeal of pain rather than the sig...

Social media is awash with professional golfers selling video training courses to help you perfect your swing, gain 50 yards on your drive and cut your handicap. They might help a few desperate souls, but the rest of us hackers already know everything we need to complete a round of golf without worrying the handicap committee or appearing on a competition winner's list. What those pros don't realise is that for us hacking golfers who very occasionally hit shots that if you hadn't seen how they were hit, end up where the pros might have put them, we already know everything we need to know - and more. Unlike pros who know how to time the perfect swing in order to caress a ball 350 yards down the centre of a fairway, we hackers need to assemble a far wider set of skills and know-how to complete 18 holes, about which pros have no comprehension, need, or desire to learn. Here are some of them: Never select your shot until after you've hit it. A variation on this is to alway...

About 4 years ago I was contacted out of the blue by a chap called Bob who lives in Western Australia. He'd never known the identity of his maternal grandfather until one of his sisters uploaded her DNA to Family Tree DNA. The report came back that it closely matched my mother's brother who had had his own DNA analysed and stored online for an entirely separate purpose. Seems his dad, my grandfather Simeon, had a 'relationship' with an 18 year-old waitress in Portsmouth in 1924 when my mother was 4 years old. He was a travelling salesman and Portsmouth was on his patch. We'll never know if he knew she became pregnant because the baby was given up to an orphanage. Shame on him if he knew and abdicated his responsibility. But we'll probably have to give him the benefit of the doubt, because it happened again to her a couple of years later with another unknown man. Bob shared some pictures of his mother with me. She was the spitting image of my mum. They were wit...

In 1926 New York, during Prohibition, 1,200 people were poisoned by whiskey containing small quantities of wood alcohol (methanol). Around 400 died, the rest were blinded. The methanol they drank was in the moonshine they had bought illegally. In fact it had been added by law to industrial ethanol in order to make it undrinkable. Prohibition existed to protect everyone from the 'evils of the demon drink'. However, people still wanted to enjoy alcohol. So bootleggers bought cheap industrial alcohol and attempted to distill it to remove the impurities the state had added, but the process wasn't regulated. The state was inadvertently responsible for the suffering - although it was easy for them to blame the bootleggers and to justify escalating the war. This didn't stop the bootleggers. In fact it forced them to become more violent to protect their operations, and even less cautious about their production standards. Volumes of illicit alcohol, and therefore proportionat...

Update: OK, so I was wrong.... We ended up with the largest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher. In fact I got it badly wrong. Interestingly more people voted for Remain supporting parties than Leave, but our voting system distorts who gets into power. However, the points I make below are still valid even if I wrongly predicted how strongly brainwashed the British public had become about being able to 'do a deal with the EU... and therefore expecting their newly elected leader, Boris Johnson, to "get on with it". He won't, because he can't! Free Trade Agreement for goods and services means we forever follow the EU's rules We can't agree to do that (it's why we left) So no FTA [My original post starts here] On the day of the Brexit referendum in 2016, I realised I'd had enough of being a Tory party member. Indeed I had, until that day, been a donor to party funds, such is my fear of socialists destroying yet another economy by promis...

When you get in a mini cab, don't just sit there looking at your phone. Chat to the driver! He or she has a story you need to hear as you make your way to a warm home in the suburbs, an expensive restaurant, the theatre or a concert... which your drivers and their families can only ever dream about. It's not only courtesy to respect them as humans rather than vehicle accessories, it's an opportunity to learn about other countries, other cultures and to take a glimpse into what it's like to be a 'have not'. It's about respect and empathy. By banning Uber from London, its socialist mayor, Sadiq Khan, is ironically removing one of the most powerful opportunities for privileged classes to meet and get to know, albeit briefly, the very people he is dedicated to helping. When else do we have the opportunity to hear their stories? We're trapped in a metal box for up to an hour or so. Instead of rudely ignoring them, we should be finding out why they're mi...

I recently gave a presentation using my personal career journey to illustrate how the acquisition of experience over time enabled me to become increasingly useful to a broadening variety of businesses:- Education to Employment to Entrepreneur to Mentor to Angel to Non Executive Director There is plenty of overlap between each of these chapters. I have, and continue to form my own companies, invest in lots more, and mentor even more. So it's not a simple consecutive flow. However, what it does represent is an accumulation of sufficient experience and confidence to progress through each stage before exploring the next. There's no way, for example, that I could have been a successful entrepreneur without having first gained experience by working for someone else. Equally I didn't have the breadth of experience of other people's companies to feel confident about investing in them without first getting to know many of them through mentoring. Per...