Acknowledgement at last...

It's a strange world! Last night I went to the launch of a friend's book on third world debt "IOU: The Debt Threat and How to Diffuse it"(Go out and buy it now! On page x you'll spot got my first ever book acknowledgement alongside Bono, Jeffrey Sachs and Ann Pettifor!... Okay, not exactly alongside, more like way down below in the small print, so my ego has been kept in check :-) but still I was really childishly excited by it). Anyhow, I had a couple of surprising and intriguing conversations at the launch party. One was with some investors in "distressed debt" (or debt vultures as some people call them) who had gate crashed the event to investigate the opposition and they even tried to lure me over to the dark side with the promise of a job with a fat pay check.

Another interesting discussion was with a friendly unassuming lady who turned out to be fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. She was a classic example of not judging people, as she didn't at all fit the mould one might expect. She was very well read and insightful (even when fairly drunk), and we had one of the most interesting conversations I've had in weeks, ranging from Bertrand Russel and moral relativist through climate change, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and eventually focusing in on the way the poor subsidise the rich through cost-externalisation in international trade and the related spiritual decay caused by consumerism (something she was extremely worried about, though we didn't get around to discussing whether the fashion world is one of the leading drivers of this). The parting line of our conversation was "anyone with religious beliefs is sick in the head", so possibly a good thing I hadn't mentioned that I'm a committed Christian.