Ricardos

We were down Middle Park way again, well, actually Albert Park, and had dinner at Ricardo’s.

It was a warm January night, and things were busy, but the staff were attentive and always there at just the right moment.   We had a booking, and knew we had to sit outside, which was fine (the street is relatively quiet), even though it’s not really my style.  

The menu is quite extensive and was complemented by a number of specials.    Everything we ordered was really good.  In particular, my scaloppine came with an interesting sauce, with a tomato/chilli zest added to the traditional white wine/lemon flavor.   The bottle of Montepulciano went down well, too.

There’s proper linen (becoming rarer these days!) The prices aren’t cheap, but fair value, all things considered.

And the area was really “buzzing”.  I’ve been to this strip during the daytime for coffee, but I hadn’t realised how much activity there is here in the evenings.  

 

 

Streaming

I sometimes watch the news on TV, and very occasionally, some sport – but almost nothing else.   Perhaps I spend too much time on the internet?    However, S watches more than this.   Netflix got her through the lockdown .  However, I was informed that she had watched “everything” of interest on Netflix.   Just how this can have occurred, I can’t comprehend.   So now we’re signed up to Stan as well. We’ll run both in parallel for a while, but perhaps in the medium term, we’ll only need to have one at a time?

Financial products – Commoditisation

I recently posted about an experience I had with a large international bank.    But the “service” issue (or lack thereof) extends to other parts of the financial sector.    For example, there’s a lot of pressure on superannuation funds to “reduce costs”, and presumably this is a “good thing”.  And there are mergers of funds taking place, too.   But there’s a downside to all this.   I had occasion to be involved in seeking advice from the fund  I previously mentioned as being involved in a merger.

My previous experience with this fund had been good:  I, and other members of the family, had always dealt with a pragmatic and informed person at the fund.  But he retired.    Hence, when an issue arose, we had no point of contact.

Getting some straight-forward advice recently was a drawn-out, bureaucratic process.   Our questions were not particularly complicated, but the “client service” people who you communicate with over the phone or by email invariably inform you that they can’t give “advice”.  To get “advice” an appointment (lead time of up to a month) has to be made with a “financial planner”.   We went though all this.  Then, three hours before the scheduled appointment (for a phone consultation), an email arrived to the general effect that for an undisclosed reason the planner wasn’t available and the appointment was cancelled.  

Attempts to get a new time were frustratingly complex.   Phone calls got diverted to people apparently working from home all over the country, yet they couldn’t assist:  it had to be done through the office with responsibility for the family member concerned.   Not even other people in the organisation were capable of getting in touch with anyone in that office.   All that they could do is to send through an email, asking for someone (preferably at a supervisory level, but who knows?) to get back in touch.   Eventually a replacement “consultation” was set up, and the basic advice we needed was provided.  But the planner didn’t comment on a number of the broader issues we raised, and declined to put the advice that was given in writing because we hadn’t paid for a full “plan”.

In short, client service has taken a severe nose-dive.   Whether it’s a result of the commoditisation of the provision of advice or whether it ‘s a consequence of the merger, we were left unimpressed. 

Superannuation, banks…. it all seems to be the same story.   A recent report stated that the public is loosing “trust” in the banks, with the replacement of bricks-and-mortar branches apparently contributing to the decline. 

Yes, there has been a Royal Commission, but the issues seem more general than the specific matters raised there.  In fact, it seems to me that its partly the result of that Royal Commission that the financial sector is so sensitive.

New train timetable

We’ve go a new train timetable on our line. I haven’t checked all the details, but there are no big changes to the frequency of trains (which in recent years, hasn’t been too bad).   The changes have been in other ways, such as no peak hour or weekend trains going through the loop and trains are now officially through-routed to Southern Cross and beyond.    And after 10 pm, there’s a 20 minute frequency which replaces the previous schedule of 4 trains per hour but at uneven intervals.

The removal of the loop trains would have annoyed me while I was working, but that’s a past era.   These days it doesn’t really affect me, but I can understand it might be inconvenient for some people, especially in the evening peak when, due to changes on the Pakenham/Cranbourne lines, there are far fewer trains running clockwise through the loop.  

Through-routing has in fact been occurring for years, but it’s helpful to see it acknowledged.  This will make things much more easily understood by non-regular users.  The displays at our station were fine, but I noticed there seemed to be “teething problems” at Richmond.

I also noticed that my trip today was cheaper than previously, because it was “off peak“. 

GameStop

No doubt like others, I’ve been watching with some fascination the GameStop issue in the US, where short sellers in the stock market  appear to have been caught out by the “little guys”.

Put simply, some of hedge funds (in this case, one in particular called Melvin Capital) were “short sellers” of a stock that they thought was over-valued.    But, the story goes, they’ve been caught out on this occasion by the “social media crowd”, particularly on a Reddit thread called “WallStreetBets”. 

It seems that social media users swarmed to buy the stock that the funds were shorting.  This has been pushing the price up instead of down as the short sellers were predicting.  The motivations of the social users are partly to make money but it’s also said that there’s a feeling that the large funds have played the market over the years to their advantage, on occasion making a lot of money shorting vulnerable stocks.  Hence, on one view, this is the revenge of the little guys on Wall Street.     Certainly, it appears that some of the social media users are saying this, but I wonder whether a motive can ever truly be ascribed to a “mob”?    I suspect that everyone has their own motive.

Anyway, the big players don’t like what’s been happening and there have even been calls for regulation.  

This has been met with suggestions of hypocrisy, and there have been comments to the effect that while the actions of the social media users have some features of manipulation, it seems that it would be very difficult to demonstrate that this had occurred.    How can a bunch of people talking on a reddit forum about a stock be “market manipulation”?

But in fact, there are many “moving parts” here.     The first is, it’s not really clear just what is going on.   Sure the price of GameStop appears to be volatile, but who is making money and who isn’t isn’t necessarily apparent.   Melvin appears to have had to be re-financed, so perhaps it did in fact suffer.   But why did Melvin choose to go short in GameStop?   It was very heavily shorted, so it was a “crowded” trade and in any event it was (until the present issue) a small company. 

There’s also the the role of those institutions – such as many superannuation finds – that “lend” stock to funds such as Melvin so as to avoid “naked short-selling”.  In Australia, these also include listed investment companies such as Djerriwarrh Investments which openly acknowledges that it’s in this business.   Related to this is that the investors in funds such as Melvin in fact include funds such as superannuation funds (or the US equivalent) – so what isn’t good for Wall Street may (indirectly) not be good for some of us Mums & Dads!   However, the bonuses that managers of hedge funds receive for making money tends to obscure this aspect.

At the time of writing, the full implications of the issue haven’t played out, but there seems to be at least an element  of truth in the statement that we’re seeing some “democratisation” of the markets, so perhaps the Wall Street funds won’t have things quite as easily going forward.   Partly thus is due the rise of trading platforms such as RobinHood which apparently facilitate trading by people such as social media users by not charging commission, although it eludes me how this works.

That said, the people that run the Wall Street funds are well-versed in the markets and no doubt they will adapt.   For one thing, no doubt their traders will be watching on-line forums and perhaps using what they see to their advantage.

I looked at the Reddit feed, but wasn’t impressed with what I saw;  perhaps regular users know how to find what they need.   Locally, there’s been some comments on Whirlpool. 

The Windsor Diaries

The Windsor Diaries are the diaries of Alathea Fitzalan Howard, who lived close to the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret at Windsor during World War 2.  The diaries were left by Alathea to Isabella Naylor-Leyland, a niece by marriage.

Shortly stated, the book would be dismissed as boring were it not for the relationship between Alathea and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in the years 1940-45.  Midway through, I was on the verge of dismissing it as a fairly tedious account of the doings of the British upper classes/aristocracy, it being sometimes  hard to work out where she’s staying.  She certainly appeared to travel around the country at times, war or no war, often staying in grand houses.    But I persisted, and through the day-to-day accounts of her activities, we build up an insight into her outlook on the world.  This includes the bombing endured by the British and Alathea’s infatuations with men and her views on life and marriage generally.

Her life was a bit of a mess, and she dwells on this quite a lot.  She had a distant relationship with her mother (who lived in London) and she wasn’t close to her father or grandfather (she lived with her grandfather and his sister).  She found the affection she craved through her close friendship with the two princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and their parents King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, her neighbours, with whom she frequently attended drawing classes.   She writes of her infatuation with the trappings of royal lifestyle – which she seems to have relished more than the Royal family itself!    And her ambitions emerge:  her desire for a “good” marriage and to have children, and to become a lady-in-waiting

During the war, she worked with Red Cross as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment at Queensmead (Red Cross home in Windsor) which involved menial housekeeping work.  At times she seems to have accepted this;  at other times she complains about the nature of the work and those who supervised her.  At one point, she states, “I have an instinctive and unconquerable loathing for touching any dirty water or dust, etc….”, yet later she appears to move on from this position, spending some years at Queensemad (albeit with mixed feelings).    And her life continues throughout the war as a whirl between drawing classes with the Princesses, dances, meeting numerous members of the aristocracy and army officers and some nice suppers and meals.  Yet she also regularly mentions her sewing and catching the bus and train and frequently rides her bike – an interesting contrast, one might think.   Interestingly, the existence of domestic staff often appears to be accepted as a “given”.    Her former nanny gets a lot of mentions but other domestic staff and the like seem to be taken for granted. 

Of course the publication of these diaries is intrusive into the Royal family’s private life.   It’s one thing for fictional productions (such as The Crown) but these diaries were written contemporaneously and are intimate and authentic.       However, it was was Alathea’s expressed intention that the diaries should be published (as has now been done by Isabella).   Does this intention, as well as the lapse of many decades, lessen the seriousness of the breach of confidence that their publication involves?  True,  almost invariably, the Royal Family is described in complimentary terms, but the present Queen, and the Duke of Edinburgh (who is mentioned in a number of places) are still alive. 

In fact, the diaries reflect much less favourably on Alathea than on the  Royal Family, who she admired and respected.   She readily admits her envy for the aristocratic life and the trappings.   I suppose that’s what diaries are for, to release the inner envies and emotions, but why do we have to read about these things?

On a different note, the compilers have researched the identity of the numerous people mentioned by their given or nick names, with the details set out helpfully in footnotes.

The Afterword (describing her life after the era of the book) confirms that Alathea’s life seems to have been rather sad:   from mixing freely with the Royal Family as a teenager, with big hopes for a grand marriage she ended up marrying what is described as a “younger son” and being unable to have children.   She never became a lady-in-waiting as  she would have liked, with Isabella being unable to say whether this was because she was impractical, not very robust or a Catholic.

 

Banking problems

I have a little-used debit card with an international bank. I got it years ago for use when travelling because it allows international transactions at a good rate (or it did back then).  Be that as it may, it reached its expiry date and the replacement card arrived.  I carefully followed the on-line procedure to “activate” it, or so I thought. I then did a trial withdrawal – only to have the card swallowed by the ATM and I got an SMS on my phone  to the effect that the problem was the card hadn’t been activated.  News to me, but there you go………

I came home, and found the bank’s 24-hour hot-line.  That’s when the fun really started.  The phone menu was totally inappropriate and when I finally found (not easy) the default option, so as to speak to an operator (in the Philippines, I believe) she asserted she couldn’t hear me.

I tried again to negotiate the complex phone menu but eventually gave up, and used the webpage message function to send a message via the option on the website.

The outcome, via the messaging option, boiled down to, “tough luck”.   The Bank’s system hadn’t recognised that I’d activated the card, the card was irretrievable,  and they were going to deactivate both the old and the new cards while they sent me a new one.    I have no idea how long that will take, and in the meantime I don’t have  card access to the account.

Just as well I wasn’t travelling and in need of access to the funds.

Needless to say, when the inevitable email survey arrived the next day, I was not at all complimentary.  I suspect, looking at a “product review” website,  that this won’t be the first such response that they have received.     It certainly seems that my experience trying to resolve an issue with a bank (this one, and others) was by no means unique!   So this bank is in good company with most other banks.  Perhaps one more unfavourable review is just going to be lost in the crowd.

Middle Park Beach

Seems we’ve been to a few local beaches recently, and now we’ve added the Middle Park Beach to the list!  This is just along from West Beach Pavillion but of course is over the Bay from Altona.   We had lunch at the Sandbar cafe – all very casual but enjoyable. 

C has moved into an apartment not far away, so perhaps we’ll be back.

Sandbar cafe

Kerford Rd pier

Middle Park beach

 

Keep off the grass

The guy up the street obviously paid a lot for the grass he had laid in the nature strip.  It looks as though it’s high quality.  In fact, even the grass he replaced looked pretty good, so why it needed to be replaced was a bit of a mystery to me.   That said, it seems he wants to protect his investment!  To have “keep off” signs is perhaps a little over the top?

Nice grass

But this is the nature strip!

 

 

UooUoo

An object appeared on the footpath not far from us, and another in an open space nearby.    I didn’t take much notice, then I saw that it’s all part of a public art “trail”  to mark the 150th anniversary of the  the Royal Children’s Hospital.  Apparently there are one hundred of these “art sculptures” out there.   The challenge seems to be to find them all (they’re on the map here)!

Of course the objective is to raise money.    Each statue is sponsored.   It seems that the unpainted statues were provided to the artists, and each has painted it.

Well, it’s “different”.  I might check out the small number of other exhibits that I see are in our area, but I have no plans to chase down the whole 100!