The times they are a-changin'

A change, it is said, is as good as a rest. The 5,000 tearful employees of Lehman Brothers who were turfed out onto the glossy streets of Canary Wharf yesterday probably didn't welcome the sudden change in their circumstances, but it's OK because they'll now have plenty of time to rest, whilst looking for new jobs in a chaotic market. London has always been a fast-moving city but at the moment it's helter-skelter.

I returned after a few days away to discover Cannon Street station swathed in scaffolding, the preparatory stage of a huge redevelopment project. As fast as companies are shedding staff from the Docklands, new office buildings are appearing in the City itself, most of them apparently destined to remain empty for the foreseeable future.

It's also a time of change for me personally. In late July, I and around 70 colleagues were hit by the bombshell that the project we were working on, was to be relocated to Houston, leaving us to guess what might come next. The contractors have been leaving and as of yesterday I'm officially in limbo, pending a decision on whose team I should join. I have been putting to good use the inverted commas in “working” from home. My team of nine, closely knit over a number of months, is being scattered to the winds.

Even managementspeak is changing. In a meeting yesterday I heard the phrase “in the hopper” (i.e. up for consideration) and “set the hares running” (get people excited without full knowledge of the facts) – and the latter was also used by a loud-phoning man on the train. No doubt there will soon be more job-loss euphemisms like “rolling off”.

I think a lot more change is around the corner. You could probably count on your fingers the people who understand the macroeconomic structure of modern Britain, but a growing number believe the whole financial system is rotten to the core and we are headed for a very nasty fall. There will be more high-profile casualties of the current meltdown, which is proving to be far more than a credit crunch. It's long been argued that socialism breaks down because people are greedy. Now we are being reminded that capitalism also breaks down because people are greedy. And that is one thing that definitely will not change.

A whole new ball game

At the moment I'm too busy with paint, demolition, invoices and the like to think straight let alone write anything for the blog - although with the kitchen close to completion at last, an update will follow in due course. But as mentioned previously, I was in Houston recently and here's something I wrote in the dead of night but couldn't post because the hotel's internet connection was so feeble...

Baseball. Oft derided for its World Series which includes teams from precisely one continent, but a huge business. And finally after many years of longing I have seen a live game. The "many years of longing" part isn't true actually, and it wasn't much of a game either. The Houston Astros are one of the weakest teams in Major League Baseball and this definitely contributed to the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates looking like, well, World Series winners. It was 5-0 after five innings and when a three-run homer went "out of the ballpark" at the top of the seventh, that was the end of the contest. At least the Astros had the decency to score the last couple of points, but without the home run that would have sent the decorative train on its celebratory run along the top of the outfield. Final score 8-2 to the Pirates, who won 9-3 yesterday evening with seven runs in the ninth inning and who will almost certainly win again tomorrow afternoon.

So much for the game. Even aficionados - and I'm not convinced there were many at the game - didn't seem exactly gripped. But the attendance was almost 34000, which meant one Houstonian in every 70 was in Minute Maid Park on a Tuesday evening to watch two unremarkable teams (correction: one remarkably bad team and one merely moderate) play the second in a three-game miniseries. Our tickets cost $37 each and even in a foreign currency I can do the math. Someone somewhere is making a huge amount of money from baseball and I suspect it was the men singularly failing to hold the attention of the crowd. At any one time about 10 percent of those present were out of their seats fetching refreshments; no one cared that the beer hawkers in the gangways were blocking the view of the game; and there was far more excitement about the between-innings competitions (eg a Hannah Montana look-not-very-alike, trivia contests, which Hummer would win a cartoon race on the big screen) than anything that happened in or around the diamond. The infamous KissCam did catch a guy proposing to his girlfriend and she said yes although it was hard to imagine a less romantic setting.

And you know what? I actually enjoyed it. I wouldn't want to go to the baseball that often because I imagine it's always more of the same, but MMP with the roof open would be a great sight. And it's a family/social event that football in the UK could only aspire to: families with young children, teenagers on dates, middle-aged men, no segregation and the only police on duty were directing traffic. On top of that, the baseball players were among some of the least athletic sportsmen imaginable. And being a Gillingham fan, that sense of impending doom from the very start of the game made me feel right at home.