Managing Relationships With Relatives

Our family life has changed considerably in the last period, following the birth of our daughter. It brought a lot of joy to everyone. We became parents for the first time, which is an experience that I still can’t find the right words to describe; my wife’s parents also found themselves projected to another dimension; my mother gained ten years extra lifetime just because of the joy and enthusiasm she developed from this event.

Mind you, it has been quite stressful too. Giving birth is no easy task and although I always thought that women must have the courage of a lion to be willingly going through the process, once I’d seen it happening with my own eyes this feeling and thought has been further reiterated. Overall we have gone through all of it reasonably well, with me being live-broadcasting from the hospital about our progress to the far away parents-in-law at each and every stage. Apart from when I was assisting directly with the contractions and the birth of our baby, that is. All good in the end, mum and baby ok.

Trouble came later. To anyone who is in the process of giving birth to a baby, my personal recommendation is to manage their own time and freedom very wisely. Although more or less every parent and parent in law knows from experience that this is a very demanding moment, one of those when you will, among other things, need privacy and intimacy with your partner and baby, they will feel a compelling and overwhelming instinct to burst in your life like never before and “do everything for you”. This would be ok if their interest were focused on the things that you really need, but from what I have observed the focus is the baby. They will want to spend as much time as possible with the baby, even when he/she sleeps and regardless of how exhausted you can be due to the extra work that they bring with them. Privacy and intimacy will almost evaporate into nothing.

In our case, this happened when the in-laws came to see us about ten days after birth. We have arranged everything, I picked them up from the airport, prepared some food for them as I knew they would be hungry and tired after a 12-hour trip and several thousand miles. The honeymoon was over the next morning when it dawned on me what the next week would be like. There usually is a voice inside of me warning about what is coming next and this time was no exception. Shame I didn’t listen to it and decided to let things adjust themselves rather than gathering everybody around the table and talk about expectations, duties, and responsibilities.

The next day, my wife and I found ourselves busier than ever. On top of the usual stuff and the running of the house, we found another two lodgers to look after, i.e. who needed to have breakfast prepared, food cooked for lunch, double the trips to the supermarkets, and so forth. All this without forgetting the needs of our baby, but this latter point is our duty and we felt no aggravation. The in-laws felt compelled to “cooperate and help”, this means be fed and looked after to be in turn in a good shape and spend as much time as possible playing with their grand-daughter, to the point that I barely managed to hold my daughter and spend some valuable time with her.

My character is of the kind that manages to keep calm and let things go smooth in spite a very strong sense of discomfort, and then bursts when I have enough of what’s going on. I felt the steam pressure increase and discussed my feelings with my wife a couple of times, explaining how the presence of her parents was in my view creating more aggravation than benefit. She acknowledged, and said she also felt the stress resulting from it. Sleep deprivation and increased responsibility proved to be a dangerous combination. She is a very strong woman, very resilient and a relentless worker. But the human body has its limits and she was slowly getting to the point of exhaustion. It was time to do something about all this but it was also unfortunately too late to handle the situation in a pleasant way and manage to come across as Mr Nice. Never mind, I thought, someone has to grab the bull by the horns and do the dirty job.

One night, after a busy and tiring day, we all agreed that we would put the baby to sleep and then do the same ourselves. My wife fell asleep as soon as she touched the bed, I was also very tired but paradoxically unable to fall asleep. When I decided to get up and check out if our baby was ok, I was shocked by finding her room’s door shut. When I entered the room, the in-laws were there “watching” the baby sleeping. I saw red. I asked everyone to leave the room and go to sleep, with the obvious consequence of having to face a discussion with my wife. This is a very rare event: my wife and I have been together for a number of years and we can really count on the tip of one hand’s fingers the times we had an argument. As such, we felt a lot of distress.

I fortunately managed to highlight a few basic but very important points: 1) This is our daughter; 2) This is our home, we are in charge of it and we decide what happens here; 3) No doubt about her parents goodwill, however even good things can cause concern when done with exaggeration.

There were no happy bunnies in the aftermath. But my strong position on this topic finally managed to get the message across, and things have gradually gone back to normal. With “normal” intended the way I see it, where grand parents are more than welcome to spend as much time as possible with their granddaughter, so long as this is in line with the requirements of everyone in the house, including the baby.

My worry was that my burst could have affected the relationship between the in-laws and myself, and consequently creating a crack in the relationship between me and my wife, but fortunately, and I have to give credit to her parents, the seemed to finally understand and put all this behind in favour of a more constructive future relationship.

I am writing this with the objective to share my feelings and hoping that someone may find it helpful. This is not to say people should behave the same way (I do not always pride myself for my actions) but it may offer some thought about a similar situation.

Please feel free to contact me if you wish to me to go in more detail.

Leasehold and Management Companies

If you own a flat in the United Kingdom, chances are that you are under a leasehold contract. If you are in London and you are a foreigner, you may not be very familiar with this concept and I hope this article will be of your interest.

In my experience in buying and selling properties, both under a leasehold and freehold tenure schemes, I learned that under the leasehold tenure conditions YOU MUST keep yourself up to speed with the articles and covenants of your lease, as well as the relations between the organisation that manages the building and the leaseholders (all the leaseholders, not only yourself).

For those who are not familiar with the leasehold concept, this is in simple words a licence to dwell in the property for limited amount of time as specified in the lease documentation. This time can be variable and, as you would expect, these contracts have a time value that can influence the market value of your property. If you buy a property with a too short residual lease time, you may face several problems when selling or remortgaging the property. In the former case buyers may be turned off by the length of the lease and their interest may fade even at lower prices, in the latter case a bank may refuse financing your purchase or – even worse – to refinance your property once your first or past mortgage agreement has expired. This is, in one word, a disaster. In practical terms, you will have a big debt to pay, nobody willing to buy your property for that value, and nobody willing to refinance, leaving you possibly with a very expensive tracking interest rate to pay.

One option would be of course to buy the freehold or to have the terms of your lease extended for as much as needed. It goes without saying that this will cost you money.

But the main point of this article is that management companies are very often more interested in making money and than in providing services and fulfilling their responsibilities. The way things are in the UK, you just have to pay what is required, when you receive an invoice. However, the law gives you the tools to challenge the actions of the managing agent and a great deal of rights. For example, you can review and inspect the accounts and bills, and you can also team up with the other leaseholder to gain the right to manage. There are certain conditions to satisfy but it’s far from being impossible and you don’t need to demonstrate any dissatisfaction with the service provided: it is simply a decision that can be made at any time, if the conditions and circumstances are right.

I spent a long time managing some of my properties and have now developed the idea that freeholders and leaseholders would greatly benefit from having someone like me to manage their properties. Among the unethical behaviours that I can mention about the management companies, there are: double charging, reluctance in taking care of the premises, foggy accounting, overcharging, inflating costs by mean of conflicts of interest, tendering necessary works and give the job to owned companies, receive commissions on building insurances, and so forth. The list is long.

As I said, I gained substantial experience and one day may decide and commit to putting my experience to the service of the inexperienced buyer and leaseholder. I am not money driven and I am not sure I would like to do this as a job, but would be keen to help where I can, covering my costs by charging a honest price. Meanwhile, if anyone read this article, I would welcome some feedback and questions.

You Are What You Eat

After a long observation lasted many years, I came a while ago to the conclusion that people living in big cities have lost their desire for some simple but very pleasing things.

Life in big cities revolves around night life and very little dedication to private life. In a city like London, for example, so big to make it difficult for most to relax, people tend to have a life pivoting around work, the activities taking place soon after work, often involving friends who also work for the same company, and then a limited amount of time spent at home or unwinding with something unrelated to the hectic life.

This sense of rush and renounce emerges particularly well in the way people feed themselves during the day and, worryingly, during the evening. Most people nowadays rely heavily on the microwaveable ready meals offered by the usual fast food chains or the major supermarkets which have now colonised the spaces once occupied by some local corner shops. The result is a society that lost interest in good things, plus the usual things that the newspapers keep saying about unhealthy eating and so forth. But the really bad thing is that these microwaveable meals end in grocery bags even in the evening, ready to be warmed up and eaten for dinner. This is, from my point of view, shocking.

I wonder how this society lost focus on the good home made eating. Can it be the illusion that preparing something good takes a long time? If that’s the case, this is not really true. Can it be a money issue? Even in this case, the cost of a ready meal is not much different than the cost of a good stake or some fish and vegetables, for example.

I suspect that most people ignore that preparing a soup is an activity that can take place whilst you relax under the shower, talk to a friend over the phone, or do some exercise. It is just a matter of putting some vegetables to boil slowly in a pot of water, then add some meat, fish, or seafood, a pinch of salt, some pepper and seasoning, and the soup is ready. The same applies to preparing a salad, roasting some vegetables and searing a juicy stake. Omelettes can be delicious if prepared and cooked with some little creativity. It doesn’t require much commitment, just inspiration. Last but not least, this food can also be taken to work the next day if prepared in sufficient quantity, allowing for a more satisfactory eating.

Personally, I find cooking as being an excellent way of drawing a line between daytime and the evening, between work and my own life. It’s an experience that I recommend to anyone, you may be surprised on how much satisfaction and relaxation cooking can bring.

Camera Bag

I decided after a quite long time to open my camera bag and see what’s left inside. No surprises, as I was expecting. My old equipment is still there, relegated to a “temporary” retirement following a big change in my life a couple of years ago. Nothing has really prevented me from taking pictures but, since my real interest for photography was triggered by the possibility of using a computer as my dark room, not having a computer available to do all my work resulted in me almost abandoning photography.

So, going back to my camera bag, I still have my Nikon D70 and F80. When I bought my D70, years ago, a new world opened its doors to me. I was finally able to improve my picture taking skills thank to the new technology, and also had a chance of running my digital dark room. Not that I like to manipulate images to the point of making them look substantially different from the original, but some good retouching can really help where the circumstances don’t allow the shot that you desire.

I have a few lenses to go with my D70, although noting really special (higher quality lenses can cost fortune) but then, as anyone involved in photographic activity knows, the real quality of a photo comes from a skilled photographer who knows how to make the best of his/her system. That’s the real key: how to use your equipment and how good you are at telling a story by freezing a moment in one frame. In my bag, in order of preference, I have: one 50mm f/1.4; one 18-70mm DX; one 70-300mm ED (non VR); one 28-105mm. I also have a couple of circular polariser and UV filters.

In the last couple of years I have been mainly taking pictures with my mobile phone. Although this may sound as quite sad, it is quite surprising to discover how creativity can be boosted by the lack of equipment coupled with the necessity of using your limited resources to express the best of your photography.

I recently explored the idea of investing some money in new equipment, with a new lens purchase in mind. Sadly, I found that the downturn, deflation (!), currencies fluctuations, and some other circumstances, pushed prices up quite significantly compared to a couple of years ago. I could buy a new body, but an extra 4 mega pixel aren’t going to make me take better pictures. I think I will pass the hand this time, but now I found the spark to start using my camera again… who knows, I may be soon able to post some new pictures.

The Discovery of Blogs And The Writing World

Although I have been regularly surfing the web for over a decade, since the times you could only connect via a 28.8kbps modem, I have discovered the blog world only recently.

It goes without saying that I have been quite amazed by how many people write about themselves and their lifes in a way that it isn’t always possible in their everyday’s life. The more you dig and explore, the more you find things of your interest and people who discuss the same issues that you care about. I started my blog just to try out and have my own window on the internet, and to be able to post some comments about various things every now and again.

I ended up reading more than I write. This is probably a good thing, as I am discovering hundreds of people with whom I share common interests and that I read with pleasure.

I hope that in the future I will get the inspiration that I need to write more and give some of this reading pleasure back to the community.

Monopolist Abuse

Further down the line of my consumer/user experience, there are some suppliers that cannot be replaced due to out of control circumstances. One of these categories are building management companies. In the United Kingdom there is a form of property ownership called leasehold, where people buy the right of using the premises for a given amount of time (long term). In many occasions these buildings belong to people or organisations that in turn use a management agents or companies to collect charges and carry out maintenance and repair works in the communal areas and stuctural parts of the building.

Problems start when the service level agreement is not clear or when there is a difference between the expected service and what is being delivered. As you may have guessed at this point of your reading, I found myself in this situation with a management company that, to put it politely, is reluctant and negligent. Money is the issue: they are keen to collect and reluctant to spend and invest. I have been dealing with them with poor results for about five years but only lately felt that I had enough of their procrastination and delays. So I decided to shift a gear and make them run faster.

About one month time has elapsed since I decided to  put them under pressure and, astonishingly, they seem to react better to very strong input and management rather than threat of legal action (on which I would have good solid ground, but that they seem to be laughing off). They tried a number of times to divert my attention to futilities and unconstructive protracted discussions, but I curbed enthusiasm each time in response. They even tried to explore the road for an amicable relationship (which they enjoyed in the past) and I just shut the door to this option.

For now I will carry on pushing them hard to be on track, by keeping them under constant high pressure and by measuring their results rather than their efforts: this is proving to be the only effective way to manage their inefficiency and get them to do the job. Not my favourite style but it seems to be a choice between “this way” and “no way”.

B2C Abuse

This article is to write down some of my thoughts regarding the general behaviour of businesses of various sizes and nature toward the consumer, also known as the customer.

We all know companies for their swift implementation of new technologies to better serve the general public and we can all, I believe, appreciate their effort and success each time we buy something from them. Shame that, in many cases, this feeling tends to fade as soon as we become customers, possibly on a long term binding contract. My consumer experience includes the purchasing of a variety of goods and services, from furniture to utilities, and the bottom line seems to be that once you are in, you become second priority. It may depend on the large numbers statistics, where even if many customers are somehow upset about the quality of services and support, only a small number of them will have enough time and resilience to get their suppliers taking responsibilities for failures and bad service.

One common trend is that everything can be agreed and settled (paid) over the phone when the communication is in the supplier’s interest, but the reverse, when the customer has an interest, has to go through complex and often discouraging procedures. There is however, to my satisfaction, a recent change of trend, perhaps due to the financial crisis and business need of survival. But it took the 2008 systemic economic collapse and a big change in the consumers habits (people are now more concerned when it comes to spend money) to make this happen. We can be reassured that it will all be business as usual in a year or so, but I think we should be encouraged to ride this wave of improvement now that we can.

The People of the Mountains

It’s been a long time since my last mountain walk on the Alps.

The Alpine environment has something special about it, perhaps due to its vicinity to both continental Europe and the Mediterranean area. The Alps split Europe beyond the mere environmental point of view, they are in fact a very effective fence between cultures.

I have always been in love with mountains and being a person that tends to appreciate more the fresh climate rather than hot and humid places, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. But there is more to this and I realised this time around that what I miss is the “people of the mountains”.

The mountains seem to be able to put hearts together, merge cultures, make people sharing this love for the environment feel closer to each other, whichever side of the mountains they come from. It’s a feeling that I had almost forgotten, something that had been trapped in a corner of my mind for many years, to come out again only now.

The really good news is that since now on I will be able to share my passion with my family, and this is a real change as in the past I only went with some of my friends.

Italy and the Berlusconi Era

I go to Italy, the place where I was born and where I spent most of my life, quite regularly. The news talk about Italy quite frequently these days, and the purpose of this document is to offer the opinion of a simple man who still hopes to see some form of improvement.

On one side there is the place that I miss, the things and the places and some people that I love, the ones that almost made me cry every time I saw the Alps running below when I was flying north. On the other side there is a place that I no longer feel as belonging to, that I feel so distant from and that I no longer feel anything to share with.

The last decade or so brought to Italy a feeling of decay that I can’t remember from the past. I can’t really say whether this is due to the fact that I was living there and consequently my objectivity was somehow limited, or if there has really been a sharp deterioration, nevertheless this is the impression that I believe many people around the world, like myself, are getting from the country.

The Berlusconi era seems to have encouraged the explosion of indifference and superficiality to unprecedented levels, paving the way to a big loss of integrity and credibility that will take decades to repair. Decades of efforts of the future generations, as it will be down to people to reform the country, to rebuild Italy from this dark era. Yet at this stage it looks as if the real problem is a society too far from desiring and demanding a framework of reforms and a platform for success. Italians seem to be too busy looking after their own personal interest rather than being committed to their interest as a whole, this is perhaps one of the reasons why Silvio Berlusconi and his friends are thriving: they are a reflectian incarnation of this way of thinking and culture.

As an external observer, I notice that the Berlusconi coalition is made by smaller entities who also act in their own interest, this cannot be a winning formula in the long term. Italy needs to cure itself but it is unfortunately prisoner of a political class that has nothing to offer. There is nothing really new on the horizon, no innovation, no interest in pushing ahead those who can really reform and renew.

The sad news is that unfortunately Berlusconi really seems to be the only one able to keep together a political system. The opposition is ineffective and unable to offer a real alternative, leaving space to a government busy with bills designed to favour Mr Berlusconi, to promote racism, and more. The stagnation of the labour market, tax evasion, and discrimination, complete the profile of a country that continues its fast decline with nobody able to stop it.

Photography

Another of my hobbies is photography.

It all started many years ago with a Yashica FX D film SLR, and it is still ongoing with a now old Nikon D70 that I use very rarely. These days I have no suitable PC for my RAW files, therefore much of my enthusiasm has been put in hibernation. At the moment I am shooting with my mobile phone and a Canon Ixus compact camera.

But don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that using a mobile phone with its pinhole lens and a compact camera I can get better images than by shooting jpegs using my old Nikon D70 with proper lenses. The problem is rather lack of motivation. I basically went back to the times of film photography when I had no possibility of processing the images by myself. No space available, no dark room… not much interest in it.

You can imagine what kind of inspiration and feeling of liberation digital photography brought around when the first 6MP DSLR came to the market. With Photoshop installed on my PC I could finally process my images, and then save them in a format that would yield EXACTLY the image I wanted. Cool, isn’t it? Undoubtedly so. Apart from the fact that now, with no suitable PC, I am back to square one. For the time being I keep fiddling with my jpg images and GIMP, which is quite good on 8-bit imaging if you aren’t too demanding.

The trouble is that once you get used to good quality pictures and decent optics, you find it difficult to ignore all that noise and colour fringing of more basic equipment. On the other hand, when you have to choose between low(er) quality pictures and no pictures, suddenly your creativity gets its (overdue) boost. And you start shooting again. After many years spent photographing images that didn’t include human beings, I discovered the pleasure of shooting portraits.

These days the mobile phone is definitely the device that in my case stimulates creativity more than any other image capturing equipment, such as cameras and camcorders, because it is always in my pocket and I can take a picture at any time. A camera is not as convenient, even if it is one of the small compact ones especially in an era when many people (I am one of those) already have to carry a laptop, a personal mobile phone, and a business mobile phone. By the way: I have been saying for many years that mobile phones should all be able to handle two SIM cards at the same time, shame that only a few devices can do that. Buy hey, the world isn’t perfect.

Here is an example where the mobile phone inspired me:

This picture was taken one day in April 2009 when I was walking with my wife near Knightsbridge, in Central London. The sun was relatively low and the sharp shadows have inspired this shot. This is how it came out from the phone, no tricks, no post processing. Not too bad, after all, although it isn’t an image that I would enlarge and hang on a wall at home (or anywhere else) due to the relatively poor quality.

I also have a camcorder. I have two, actually: one that I bought in 2001 and managed to use only 2 (yes, two) times, and the other that I received as a present last year. Good stuff, both are from Sony and are good quality, but somehow I am not a video person. I can definitely do better with still imaging, I don’t know why. When I bought the video camera I thought that once I had it I would start using it, but it never happened. Even today I use it when people ask me to and almost never on my own initiative. In fact, it tends to be forgotten for months until somebody reminds me of it.

Now I feel it’s time for a revamp of my photography hobby. Sometimes soon I will buy a Quad Core PC with a few GBs RAM and then I will explore the purchase of a new DSLR. If I could buy one now, it would be a choice between the Nikon D300 and D700. Given the pixel count and the feeling that 20Mp will become the standard pretty soon, I would probably go for the D300 and then see what happens in the future. But we’ll see what happens anyway, because DSLRs are now capable of recording HD video and that might bring around a whole new way of shooting photo and video.