Any other business

Paul Theroux, in The Great Railway Bazaar, paints a louche portrait of the capital of Laos. ‘The brothels are cleaner than the hostels, marijuana is cheaper than pipe tobacco and opium is easier to find than a cold glass of beer,’ he wrote in 1975. When Theroux finally got his beer, the waitress told him sex was on the menu too. Gosh, if only I’d know about Vientiane in my gap year. It might have taught me more about the real world than three months at the British Institute in Florence and a lost week in Fez. These days, of course, Laos is firmly on the gap-year trail, but Vientiane (one hour from Bangkok by air or 11 by train) has cleaned up its act. If you want a cold beer and a smoke in a pristine hostel, it’s not difficult to arrange.

The other evening I went to a ‘pig roast’ in our Somerset village. It was a tremendous turnout from far and wide. There is something about the idea which stirs up deep guzzling instincts, and certainly this pig on his spit looked, and smelt, gastronomically alluring, despite the fact that six of his live colleagues waited in a nearby pen for their ‘pig race’, another local custom. People sat on bales of hay, eating slices of the pork wedged in buns. There is no elegant way of doing this, I reflected, an observation subsequently confirmed by study of the photographs taken. So what?

Martin Vander Weyer's thoughts on the world of business Shell and Barclays were the two highest-profile British companies in South Africa during the apartheid era. Both pursued non- racial business practices as far as they could, but both endured years of disrupted shareholder meetings and flak from the student Left. Shell stuck it out — and shortly after his release from prison in 1990, Nelson Mandela declared, ‘We’re glad you stayed.’ Barclays bowed to the protesters and abandoned its network of 900 branches in 1986; when the bank returned in 1995 to open one office in Johannesburg, Mandela told the men from Lombard Street, ‘You should never have sold.

So Britain is talking itself into recession. Keep chattering. If people want a recession, let them have one, so that the rest of us can benefit from it. This is not a suggestion that cold showers do us good or that a spell of reality in the housing market is overdue; it is a reminder that when other consumers have lost their confidence, the bold can take advantage of their apprehension. Slumps mean opportunities. When the majority are out of the market place, the brave can go there without being crushed or outbid. This is the time to be counter-cyclical. If for the past five years no builder even had time to give you an estimate, next year you will be swamped with workmen undercutting each other to win your job. Want a new carpet?

Somebody asked: ‘How do you express your love of country in this leaden age? How do you sweep aside the multicultural poison and simply assert — “I am an English patriot?”’ I answer: ‘Create a garden, or help those who do so.’ There is no more English activity than gardening, and it has been so for over a thousand years. Indeed, there were Anglo-Saxon gardens before: traces remain. Gardens grew under castle walls, and were tended by the wives of men who wore chain mail. They took the place of water lilies when the moats were peaceably drained. The first great English essay, written by Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, is ‘Of Gardens’. I have just reread it.

Richard Orange says the Indian tea industry is enjoying a revival — but that the traditional tea-planters’ way of life, established by the British, is passing into history There is not much to distinguish Dhanesheva Kurmi from the rest of the crowd at the Hautely Tea Estate, a remote garden an hour and a half’s bumpy drive from the Assamese town of Jorhat. Richard Orange says the Indian tea industry is enjoying a revival — but that the traditional tea-planters’ way of life, established by the British, is passing into history There is not much to distinguish Dhanesheva Kurmi from the rest of the crowd at the Hautely Tea Estate, a remote garden an hour and a half’s bumpy drive from the Assamese town of Jorhat.

In 1990, the former Wall Street trader Jim Rogers (interviewed here by Jonathan Davis, 15 March) set off to circumscribe the globe astride a large motorcycle. He returned in 1992 having pondered the meaning of life — and the answer was ‘commodities’. As a player of markets, he did not have to do anything so practical as to go out and drill or mine. He just kept buying more commodity futures — a gigantic bet that commodity prices would rise. He was right, and became hugely wealthier as a result. But as the price of oil, the world’s most essential commodity, continues to rise, listen for the sound of market ideologies creaking under a weight they cannot bear: for example, in the Economist’s editorial last week. ‘Speculators do not own real oil...