Rachael McKelvey

• Thames Water is drowning in debt
• In defence of erasable pens
• George Osborne and Ed Balls join Persephonica
• How old are you really?
• BlackBerry Q1 Earnings shocker

Thames Water drowning in debt
Thames Water is in trouble, this week Sarah Bentley resigned with immediate effect after 3 years in post as CEO, a reason was not given but I suspect it’s due in part that the auditors are due to sign off their accounts next week and I doubt it will be clean, it’s balance sheet is stuffed with £14bn of debt that it can’t afford to service in the light of higher and higher interest rates.

Thames Water serviced 15 million people, has a terrible track record on sewage pollution that flows into rivers now even when it’s no raining, with huge swaths of country under hosepipe ban. What Thames Water needs is quite a huge injection of cash. Last year Thames Water admitted it needed to raise £1.5bn from its shareholders but to date as only managed to generate £500mn. Rumour has it the Government are drawing up contingency plan for its collapse.

This isn’t just a Thames Water problem; this is just the first one that might collapse as a result of its operating decisions. All water utilities were privatised in 1989 with absolutely no debt on their balance sheet, today collectively the debt on the balance sheet of UK utilities companies stands at £60bn. The hope behind privatisation was that the access to a mix of debt and equity would mean the utilities could invest in infrastructure…instead they have paid millions in salaries and dividends and borrowed quite significantly to do so.

Where else can it go? Water bills went up quite considerably earlier in the year and really they need to do it again, but to what end? With headlines of million-pound salary, record bonuses, appalling environmental and customer services. If Thames Water does collapse this, my money is on Severn Trent next.

In defence of erasable pens
The Guardian this week raised some concerns over the transparency of Government as they revealed that Rishi Sunak uses erasable ink pens on official government documents. Given the current positive correlation between trust in Government and the routine need for seemingly all forms of communication needing to be shared with a Select Committee it would seem a justifiable concern that his hand-written notes “could be erased”.

Such a concern it seems that there was a need for a source close to the PM at number 10 to say he “has never used the erase function and nor would he”, so we can add erasable pens to the list of things Rishi Sunak doesn’t know how to do, including making any form of card payment and using a petrol station. Rishi Sunak truly is a man of the people.

I want to defend the erasable pen, they are my pen de jour. I make notes, oh so many notes, the odd T account and proper little scribbles and being able to quickly rub something out an re-write or amend or just forget is incredibly helpful to not burn through paper. But and it’s a big but, what I don’t do is use them on any form of legal document or work documents. Need me to sign something? I’ll grab a biro. Need me to do anything that someone else might need to walk away with? I will grab a biro. It’s basic should I use a pencil or a pen territory and while Sunaks penchant for fountain pens comes as absolutely no surprise, neither does the likelihood that he probably didn’t buy it himself so arguably he doesn’t even know he can rub out his workings. In this instance, very much hate the player, don’t hate the game.

George Osborne and Ed Balls join Persephonica
Where to even begin with Ed Balls and George Osborne, a man who tweeted his own name and arguable you could ascribe the titles ‘godfather’ of the very mess we are in today to both these men, one probably a lot more than the other, but still. This autumn they are set to delight podcast audiences with their own unique take on politics, economics, and law, having seen success of the frenemies model in The Rest of Politics & thought how do we get a piece of that?

Ed Balls stating ‘George and I want to bring economics back to life and on the agenda – with explanation and entertainment in equal measure.’ There are some great economists out there and some great economics podcast, these two are neither of those things. It’ll be hard for them to walk in the “disagreeing agreeably” footsteps of Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, it’s also hard to see what value they bring. What works for Campbell and Stewart is the relatively low profile of their part in the current political, economic, and social undoing we have found ourselves in, we don’t hold them personally liable, just collectively part of the problem. I don’t see either Balls or Osbourne pulling each other up on their quite obvious short comings in their political careers in any meaningful way and a successful podcast requires some charisma, again not a word I would particularly associate with either of them.

Whoever ends up producing that podcast has their work cut out of them, this isn’t low stakes talks with friends, this is two quite comfortable, fairly wealthy architypes of our current misfortune. All that being said, yes I will give it a listen because I am very aware of the echo chamber I live in and it will be interesting to see if they do get it right.

But in all seriousness, and I cannot stress this enough, please stop giving overpromoted middle aged white men microphones and platforms. I can guarantee the world does not need two more white dudes with a podcast, go to therapy.

How old are you really?
Age is just an arbitrary number and your birthday marks the end of the year you are celebrating being that age and I will not be told otherwise. I was 1 365 days after I was deemed to be 0, so on day 366 of my life I was being 2. I use this as a convenient excuse to never provide my actual age, simply because I don’t know, I usually have to do the maths and it’s on the basis of the current year less the year I was born, yielding the age I will be this year, regardless of whether my birthday has passed. It typically hasn’t and for more of the year than not I am actually a year younger than I state I am, but I am already living my +1 year. But it’s rude to ask someone’s age, so stop it.

The point? Well this week South Korea has formally scrapped what is known as ‘Korean age’ making the entire country a year younger over night. Historically South Koreans have included the time spent in the womb as year, so everyone is born aged 1 year old and a bit like race horses all having the same birthdays everyone gets one year added to their Korean age on New Years Day which also gives them a “calendar birthday” so you can be two years older than you technically are.

Under new legislation they will now adopt “international age” which is the one most of the rest of the world uses, it is hoped that standardising ages will “reduce social confusion and disputes” according to Lee Wan-kyu, the Minister of Government Legislation. It is anticipated that colloquially these informal birthdays will continue, but it is hoped that universal adoption of “international age” will make formal age-related requirements a little easier to manage.

BlackBerry Q1 Earnings shock
BlackBerry have reported a really solid first quarter with significantly reduced loses with quite some top line year on year improvement. Sadly not from increased handset sales off the back of “BlackBerry” the movie nor their current core business, but for slightly more boring reasons of a sale of non-core patents which added $218m to its cash reserves for the year.

BlackBerry really did miss the boat in corporate market in the early 2000’s and then through poor leadership dug in and pivoted a little too late. The finally decided to rightly capitalised on what made them great, the underlying software of their handsets with BlackBerry’s Internet of Things (IoT) providing software to 235 million vehicles and their cyber security solutions used in a surprising number of mobile banking apps.

I’d cut my right arm off for my little clicky-clacky keyboard and roller ball back, they were happy days before emojis, just used to shove it back in it’s case like a debit card and moved on with my life, now I need my phone to do everything.

Current watch: Matt Willis: Fighting Addiction – I have been putting off watching this, for lots of reasons, but I am so glad I did. This hour-long documentary looks back at Matts life as he begins to explore the origins of his addictions, even before his rock and roll life style in the early 00’s with Busted.

He revisits people and places to have those conversations in hindsight, and meets other addicts at the centre he spent four weeks in before he walked out clean and sober for his wedding. The documentary also allows him to look at the latest developments in treatment for addiction, meeting researchers from Imperial College London who are looking into the differences in the brains of those with additions and those without.

I think the thing that struck me most was the time and care taken about the impact on his wife Emma and the rest of the family at a time where relapse is most likely in the preparation for the Busted reunion tour.

Current read:
The ‘Bad’ Girl’s Guide To Better: A stealth help guide to getting your act together by Casey Beros – A line in the synopsis for this book is “A bestie in a book” and it absolutely felt like that, that no holds barred trip down memory lane with the friend you’ve known or felt you’ve known for ages. No story that can’t be shared, no shame too great. I laughed, I cringed a little at the echoes of my own shame, I got a bit teary and felt endless joy. There isn’t anything this book doesn’t cover on how to reframe and grow from some of your least proud moments, it pulls you up on the BS and perfectly reframes even the smallest of hesitations in navigating a grown-up life with some excellent use of swears along the way. I already know fake Auntie Rachael is going to be gifting this book to the young girls in my life when we get to having those conversations, sorry not sorry to all my mum friends.

Most Impactful Listen: Nudge: There’s a problem with the world’s most famous nudge – Making something easier is literally the easiest trick in the book, want someone to do something? Make it easy. Want to influence the behaviours of many to a desired outcome? Make it as easy as possible, make it so people can’t say no. The world over is full of examples of this simple trick in action, but sometimes easy isn’t always the best option. You will often find me, even in a crisis, pointing out that we can do the easy thing or the right thing, because more often than not they are not the same thing.

Phill talks through the behavioural science behind the easy option and talks with London’s most popular taxi driver Tom Huntley about the problems of making things easy.