Still feeling somewhat detached from the blogging muse. Today’s post will include the following:
1) Retirement homes
2) Our hostages
3) Darfur
4) Investment ideas
5) More work hunt developments and news from the home front.
With an elderly relative seriously considering moving into retirement housing I’ve realised that I need to bone up on the issues involved. I read about the Code of Practice of the Association of Retirement Housing Managers (ARHM) and decided to obtain a copy. The ARHM’s website had somewhat derelict windswept air to it and nothing seemed to happen when I clicked on the publications tab (and some of the other tabs as well). I sent off an e-mail and a couple days later received a very civil reply to say they would send me a copy of the Code if I sent my address with an invoice for £5 plus VAT (trusting but deservedly so in my case).
The Code runs to about 75 pages and is reasonably easy to understand. The red light that is flashing for me is that retirement flats are leasehold and I have searing memories of being a leaseholder in the 80s and early 90s. These include shyster owners of the freehold and the flats going to rack and ruin because there were no effective sanctions against freeholders who were only interested in renewing leases for extortionate prices rather than looking after the buildings. As far as I can work out the Leasehold reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993 and the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002 have put all that lark in the past and the safeguards are much better.
These flats are owned and managed by a company called Peveril and I’ve been fairly impressed with what I’ve seen after two visits. I’d be very grateful if any fellow bloggers have any advice for people going into this kind of property.
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I suppose the Royal Navy personnel and Royal Marines are really the Iranians’ hostages rather than ours. Anyway, hopefully some perception of the outrage they have caused by kidnapping them is beginning to percolate through to the leaders in the Islamic Republic. The news today said that the Revolutionary Guards who captured them will have done so on the orders of Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme religious authority, rather than those of President Ahmedinejad. I thought that the President was supposed to be more extreme than the Ayatollah and that the latter had been getting worried about where the development of nuclear weapons was going to take Iran vis a vis the rest of the world. It’s possible that capturing the British service personnel was done to beef up the Ayatollah’s anti-Western credentials while he works behind the scenes to undermine the President but the outlook for dealings with Iran doesn’t look very bright if the country’s leaders compete for legitimacy by kidnapping people.
This morning’s Today programme featured an Iranian professor (who’s name I didn’t catch) saying that there is no agreed dividing line separating the territorial waters of Iran and Iraq once the Shatt al Arab reaches the sea so the whole affair is ‘technical’. The approach the British government have taken suggests strongly that they think the Iranians did cross an internationally recognised boundary whether or not the Iranians recognise it. I imagine that there are records of disputes and treaties about boundaries in this part of the Persian Gulf going back at least 100 years. Might the Iranians be trying to flag up that they want a new deal on territorial waters down there (as part of the package for agreeing to stop their nuclear weapons programme)?
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Meanwhile, across Saudi Arabia, the Red Sea and Sudn (about 1,000 miles as the crow flies) is all the suffering in Darfur and Chad. Bob Geldof and Tony Blair deserve praise for trying to get the EU heads of government to do more to help at the recent summit in Berlin. But, as Geldof said, action is the only thing that matters. It is time for more sanctions against the government in Khartoum until they agree to allow in an effective force to stop the killing. Darfur seems to get into the headlines about each alternate month these days and then our concentration slithers away to something that we can connect with more easily. Perhaps Tony Blair could take on a role as international advocate and stirrer for Darfur when he steps down from office.
April’s ‘The Atlantic’ has interesting article about the roots of the conflict in Darfur by Stephan Faris. According to this it’s a phase in a long running crisis arising out of the desertification of the region (as a result of global warming). Apparently, the pastoral, nomadic tribes were already running into problems with grazing flocks in the 80s and these problems were beginning to cause friction between them and the settled population. Not that seeing developments in an historic perspective lessens the present tragedy or makes a difference to the immediate responses that are necessary.
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I've been slowed down by a phone call so today's post will have to continue (alomost) seamlessly tomorrow.
