pumpkinstrokemarrow

Back at Cheam, the business model of the baker is clearing working on me. While I started off by just buying bread at maybe £1 a day, the cakes are gradually creeping up on me, with the result that I am now spending more on cake - a much higher profit item I imagine - than I am on bread.

But not so sure about the business model of the newly opened delicatessen next door. Doesn't open until 1000 in the morning. When I finally get around to taking a look inside, very lightly stocked. Some sausage, some cheese, some olives. A few made dishes. Some grocery in boxes, bottles and jars on the shelves. But not really a place to browse and buy a whole lot of bits and peices which one had not previously thought of. So I spent £2.85 on a 100g or so of quite decent looking salami, tendered a £20 note and 85p in change (at which the proprietor did not look too happy) and that was it. I don't suppose I will be back again for a while as we have a much better stocked delicatessen nearer home. Name of Alio's. More or less on the way home from the baker at Cheam. He does not have a web site but Mr G. does come up with some honourable mentions, for example at http://www.pbase.com/lindarocks/image/25341369.

Read about another sort of business in the margins of shaving this morning. It seems that it is an offense under common law to sell something which one does not own. But it is also a principle under commercial law that if I buy something in good faith it is mine. This second rule was said to be essential to the smooth development of capitalism. And not at nutty as it at first sounded. Suppose that A owns a car. B steals the car from A. C buys the car from B. So A is a loser, B is a winner and C is neutral. He has given the cars worth to B, so his net worth is unchanged. So the idea is that he gets to keep the car and A has to seek redress from B, this including damages for loss of use of the car's worth in the interval. The chances are that if C has bought the car in good faith, he does not live anywhere near A, so A does not have the irritation of waking up every morning to see what was his car in the road outside and not being able to do anything about it. And good news for lawyers as they can clock up a lot of chargeable time detirmining whether C did indeed buy the car in good faith or whether he can be charged with receiving stolen goods, in which case differant regulations are applicable. Maybe I should have been a lawyer after all.

Two more snippets from the NYRB. First, there is a chap called Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who has been a thorn in the flesh of the Israeli establishment for many years by coming clean about the fact that Israel was largely established by theft. But, just as in this country, those who are hardened lefties in their youth, wind up reading the Daily Mail & Telegraph just like everybody else, it seems that Benny Morris is swinging into the centre ground. His latest utterances have much less sympathy with the Palestinians than his former utterances. He even talks about the Jews having been in charge of Palestine for some 13 centuries (1000BC to 300AD), so they are just coming home really. Must try telling the Druids who retreated to Anglesey that it is time that they surged back over the Menai Straits and claimed their inheritance. Second, there is a rather sad story about Diego Garcia. It seems that around 1970, the US thought that this would be a jolly good place to build a jolly good base, from where to dominate that part of the globe. So they asked us (the UK, as beneficial owners) to kick out the modest number of inhabitants and give them the freedom of the place. So we did. Now the fact that we did this is not that dreadful. Such things happen in the world. But what is dreadful is the crude way in which we did it. More or less shoved them into cattle boats at gun-point and shipped then off in Mauritius where most of them have lived in slums ever since. One might have though in the enlightened era of my youth, we might at least have paid them off decently and got them properly fixed up in new homes. Maybe pensioned off for life. Although to be reasonable, this would have to exclude those born after the Exodus. Otherwise there would be no end to it.