A pilot's lament for the way things used to be

Such a strange year’s end we’re living through. There’s lots of bad news out there and, conversely, lots of hopeful talk as well. You hear many ‘experts’ saying things will get worse, and just as many saying things will get better. Who knows which way it’ll go in ‘09.
You also hear lots of grumbling about how everything’s falling apart in the 21st century, and much yearning for the way things were back in the 20th.
For instance, read the following lament by an ageing pilot about the glory days of aviation. An un-named flyer who once commanded Boeing 707s - presumably in the US, given the American references - he vents a heap of rage about a time when pilots were kings, check-in queues were short, security barely mattered and flying was a whole lot more fun.
You might find some of his views dated (even offensive!) but there you go... that’s another of the differences between then and now.
Thanks to local former aviator Len Mills for passing on this anguished piece. It’ll ring bells for you not only on air travel, but also on political correctness, gender relations and social attitudes that have all changed radically in the last decade or three.
That's John Travolta's own 707 in the picture, painted up in old Qantas livery. I reckon that secretly, most men want to be like him. and the guy who wrote the following piece, probably once was like him.
“Those were the good ole days. Pilots back then were men that didn't want to be women or girlymen. Pilots drank coffee and whiskey, smoked cigars and didn't wear digital watches.
“They carried their own suitcases and brain bags like the real men that they were. Pilots didn't bend over into the crash position multiple times each day in front of the passengers at security so that some government agent could probe for tweezers or fingernail clippers or too much toothpaste.
“Pilots did not go through the terminal impersonating a caddy pulling a bunch of golf clubs, computers, guitars, and feed bags full of tofu and granola on a sissy-trailer with no hat and granny glasses hanging on a pink string around their pencil neck while talking to their personal trainer on their cell phone.
“Being an airline captain was as good as being the King in a Mel Brooks movie. All the stewardesses (a.k.a. flight attendants) were young, attractive, single women who were proud to be combatants in the sexual revolution.
“They didn't have to turn sideways, grease up and suck it in to get through the cockpit door. They would blush and say thank you when told that they looked good, instead of filing a sexual harassment claim.
“Passengers wore nice clothes and were polite, they could speak AND understand English. They didn't speak gibberish or listen to loud 'gangsta rap' on their iPods. They bathed and didn't smell like a rotting pile of garbage in a jogging suit and flip-flops. Children didn't travel alone, commuting between trailer parks. There were no mongol hordes asking for a "mu-fuggin" seatbelt extension or a Scotch and grapefruit juice cocktail with a twist.
“If the captain wanted to throw some offensive, ranting jerk off the airplane, it was done without any worries of a lawsuit or getting fired.
“Axial flow engines crackled with the sound of freedom and left an impressive black smoke trail like a locomotive burning soft coal. Jet fuel was cheap and once the throttles were pushed up they were left there. After all , it was the jet age and the idea was to go fast (run like a lizard on a hardwood floor).
“Economy cruise was something in the performance book, but no one knew why or where it was. When the clacker [a flight-deck warning sound] went off no one got all tight and scared because Boeing built it out of iron, nothing was going to fall off and that sound had the same effect on real pilots then as Viagra does now for those new age guys.
“There was very little plastic and no composites in the airplanes or the stewardesses' pectoral regions. Airplanes and women had eye-pleasing symmetrical curves, not a bunch of ugly vortex generators, ventral fins, winglets, flow diverters, tattoos, rings in their nose, tongues and eyebrows. “Airlines were run by real men like Juan Trippe [the founder of Pan Am] who had built their companies virtually from scratch, knew many of their employees by name and were lifetime airline employees themselves...not these pseudo financiers and bean counters who now flit from one occupation to another for a few extra bucks, a better golden parachute, or a fancier title, while fervently believing that they are a better class of beings unto themselves.
“And so it was back then....and sadly, will never be again.”

GM splutters and gold glows brighter

On October 10, General Motors shares in America fell to the same price as they were at in 1950. The company once produced the mighty Oldsmobile, such as the hulking 1958
sedan seen here. But now ‒ bogged down its by huge factories, enormous workforce and crippling pension payments to past employees ‒ it is said to be chewing through $1 billion a month and simply not selling enough SUVs to make even a small dent in that river of cash. And they have only $14 or so billion left in the kitty. Which means (unless they, too, get a bailout from Uncle Sam’s resentful taxpayers) it won’t be long before they’re broke.
What, then, would happen to the GM and Holden brands in this part of the world? Interesting thought. Of course, things are little better at Ford - which will lay off 1500 Australian workers just before Christmas.
Out of the Northern Hemisphere we hear cries of ‘carnage’, ‘chaos’ and ‘catastrophe’. Iceland is virtually bankrupt. Governments are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars and euros at the market-collapse problem and still there’s little economic confidence out there. Yet here, if you turned on talkback radio last week, the only concern being expressed was over the government’s plan to reduce the water flow in our showerheads. And the lead story on Thursday's TV1 news was about the retirement of two Olympic-champ rowers. If that was the biggest thing going on in the world, either we're exceptionally calm and resilient in the face of our own recession, or exceptionally passive and thick.
The next day I was in a shop next door to Michael Hill Jewellers, who had a staff member out front with a bullhorn, shouting at customers to come buy glittering stuff. ‘That must be driving you nuts’, I said to the woman who was serving me. ‘Sure is,’ she replied. ‘And you know what? There were people queueing up outside the door at 7am yesterday to get in there for some bling.”
Meanwhile, in the States, women are taking their old gold jewellery to suburban precious-metal parties, having it evaluated and weighed and swapped for cash. The word in these new troubled times is that, once again, gold will be king.
I’m old enough to remember the same eagerness for gold in the late 80s, the last time we fell into a financial crevasse, when an Aucklander called Ray Smith set up the Goldcorp bullion company and lured in thousands of fretful investors who bought his gold certificates. Only trouble was, when they wanted to clap eyes on the actual shiny stuff it turned out that he had no gold bars at all – or nowhere near enough to cover the cash he’d taken in. He’d just sucked up the money instead and had a high old time before fleeing the country with the loot. He was brought back to face the music, did jail time, and put a whole generation off investing in gold for ever.
But now that few remember his name, a new gold rush can’t be far away. Checking your jewellery box, anyone?

Double-edged swords

The world today seems full of swords that can fall both ways (which can even apply to flying pigs). We have, for instance, the impending bail-out vote in Washington that, we're told, is the only way to avoid impending financial catastrophe/armageddon/Pearl Harbour (you name it - some expert has said it). And yet the other side of that sharp blade is the undoubted enormous risk that the bail-out will chew away at the value of the US dollar, thus eroding the economy that everyone is so desperate to save.
My local newspaper reminds me today of fund manager Peter Schiff and how he's been predicting this state of affairs for a very long time. Back in 2006 he appeared on the Fox News Bulls and Bears show and was jeered at by other panellists when he said that America's economy was heading for collapse. You can find that clip at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoB4BS7CGAw
That two-year-old show reveals the sword-aspect of Youtube as well. Every foolish word every politican/celebrity/expert ever says will be there online for decades to come. While Youtube can bestow fame, it can open you to endless ridicule as well.
Or endless kudos, as it turns out, in the Schiff case.
Even harmless imagery can carry potential for differing interpretation these days.
Look at the pig pictures above. The fat and smiling pig (think piggy banks and childish happiness at the jingle of coins therein) is the current 'face' of the Bank of New Zealand - happily smiling beneath buoyant balloons of
prosperity. The other pink pig is a very different beast. He cowers on the cover of Peter Shiff's book, with only a frail umbrella sheltering him from the lightning storm overhead. The book's jolly title is Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse.
It was published a year ago.
Clever Mr Schiff.

Tracing your distant past

Do you ever wonder where you’ve come from? I mean, really wonder? This isn't about musing on who your great-grandparents were. It's not recent genealogy going back to the 1800s. I’m talking big-picture stuff.
I’ve become so intrigued with this question that I decided to take part in the National Geographic society’s Genographic Project. This is an enormous piece of genetic research that aims to figure out where we all came from.
It’s becoming obvious that actually, we’re all Africans. Sure we may be fair or olive-skinned and have red or blonde hair and count Scots, Irish, French, Persian, Fijian, Chinese (or whatever!) people in the ancestry we know about, but gene studies are proving that the whole world’s very first ancestors grew out of African soil.
So I sent off for a kit (it costs $US100) to find out about my own far-distant rellies. You do a couple of inside-cheek swabs with a special brush, pop the resulting DNA samples into little vials that they supply, and send the envelope off to the US. In a few weeks I’ll be able to go to the website, type in my password and get the results – which will tell me the region where my most ancient female ancestor lived and what path her descendants took, maybe 50,000 years ago, to work their nomadic way up into Europe. This is expressed in map form, with dotted lines showing your family’s ancient trail.
As a woman you can only select your female ancestors. Their X chromosomes (we don’t have a Y chromosome) have come in a long, shimmering line down to the person that is you. Men can choose to track either their male (Y) or female (X) side.
My interest in this was sparked by seeing the Lascaux Caves in the south of France – where you can see fabulous paintings of horses, bison, reindeer and all manner of mythical beasties painted on the cave walls some 18,000 years ago. Eighteen thousand years! (That's a bit of Lascaux pictured above.)
The paintings are gorgeous, full of life and vitality. They’re all the more wonderful when you consider they were daubed with basic pigments in the guttering light of primitive lamps. The paintings were hidden there for millennia until some boys stumbled on a cave entrance in 1940, went in, looked up and said “wow” (or whatever French schoolboys would have said back then).
Just before my Lascaux trip I heard about a DNA testing programme in Britain which had discovered that nearly all British people are descended from a small group of people who were bailed up in the south of France and northern Spain by the chill of the last Ice Age. I’m guessing it was some of them who filled those caves with art as they sat out the long, cold centuries.
As the climate warmed and the ice retreated, they gradually migrated further north and crossed the Channel to begin populating what we now think of as UK. Anyhow, modern-day Brits who’d thought about their roots at all had assumed they’d have some familiar label, like Anglo Saxon, Celtic, Norman or Viking. Some were a bit shocked to discover traces of African, Arab and even Mongolian genes in their blood. (That Genghis Khan guy went everywhere!)
Because I'm from basically British stock, it seemed reasonable to assume that a far-distant ancestor of mine might have been one of the artists.
I love this big-picture stuff. In a world where we keep on emphasising our differences, this research surely has to prove that in the end we are all one enormous family. And now that there are so many of us ‒ surging to nine billion by the middle of this century ‒ it’s even more important that we learn to get along together without hitting each other over the head with clubs, not to mention nuclear bombs.
To find out more, go to www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic

SUPERMAN THE DREAMER?
It's interesting how it can take just one picture to make you see things in a new light - it's part of the old story about a picture being worth a thousand words. One can debate that now, of course, in this era when you can't trust photos at all, what with Photoshop being so available to everybody.
But recently I was browsing around looking for material for a workshop on authorship that I was running. I wanted to touch on how graphic novels are becoming hot again. If 'graphic novel' means nothing to you, then think 'comic'. Yes, you loved them when you were a kid and they're big again - very clever and sharp. They're also being printed on substantial paper, not at all like the flimsy, throw-away comics of old.
I stumbled across a TIME magazine list of the top 10 graphic novels for last year, and here was this picture of the number three title, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. It's Superman, but not as I remember him.
I haven't seen the book, and so don't know how these two have re-engineered the big guy overall, but this image seems to say it all. Who is this guy? He looks like Sensitive New Age Superman, adrift on fluffy clouds, gazing out over Gotham City and waiting for the next runaway train to stop in its tracks. He looks like he's been groomed by the keen guys on Queer Eye team.
He could be Supermetrosexual, or Superpoet, just pondering and dreaming. Sure he's still got the well-toned bod and rippling muscles, but it's like he's, well, gone soft! He even looks a bit drippy.
The cape that should be streaming in his wake as he scorches through the sky is tucked demurely beneath his bum, as if to cushion that super posterior (the clouds not being fluffy enough). The glance he gives us is languid. Should the sirens shriek it's going to take this guy a while to wake up, flex the muscles and go to battle. It doesn't look like he'll be biffing baddies with a 'zap!' or a 'pow!' any time soon.
"Got a problem down there?" he might call out. "Yeah, okay. I'll be there in a bit. Just taking a nana-nap right now."
This picture reminds of America itself. Not seeing what trouble it's in. Not as sharp and shiny as it used to be. Distanced from the rest of the world by being up there in the clouds.
According to recent polls Americans aren't too sure who to vote for. The Republicans might even make it. Especially now that Lois Lane is bustling about and taking all the attention in her high heels and power suit. At the same time the BBC has polled people in 22 countries about who they'd like to see in the White House, and the resulting was an overwhelming vote for Barack Obama. Instead, there's a chance the world is heading for John McCain. Wake up, Superman. You may needed. Soon.

Undone by love

It’s so interesting how time forges and mellows our characters. For evidence look no further than May 17’s Herald on Sunday and the next day’s Sunday Star Times. Paul Holmes writes for the first newspaper; Michael Laws for the other.
Both are radio stars in their Monday-to-Friday lives. Both have long histories as cocky roosters, leaders in their fields, never short of a barbed comment or lofty opinion delivered from on high. They’ve been newsmakers for years – Holmes in television and Laws in politics – both of them adept at batting away criticism and apparently rarely troubled by self-doubt.
But on that May weekend we saw these two men undone by love. Both wrote columns remarkable for the lack of cynicism in guys who’ve been hard men from way back. Of course, the worlds they live in have a habit of breeding cynicism. Politics and broadcasting are not fields in which the “love” word gets bandied around. Love is too cosy, too heart-driven – way too sentimental by far.

Politicians and broadcasters want the facts. Theirs is a world in which analysis matters most. When they talk about truth they’re speaking with an eye on what’s in the news today – about business trends or legal matters or policy detail. Sure, it’s fine to have a sense of humour, to have a laugh, be impish, share a joke. But heart? Oh, let’s not go there. Hearts are too soft and gooey to refer to when you work with people who think it’s normal to scoff at caring politicians (the much-despised “wets”) and for whom the term “do gooder” is one of derision.

At least, that’s the norm when such people are flying high. But none of us can fly high for ever. Life comes along and slaps us in the kisser. For “life” read family. It’s the family woes that really rip into us. Work crises can be irritating and enraging but rarely have the power to undermine us the way personal problems can.

For Holmes, the softening has come in waves that have included the ending of his TV career (even if he’s still tops in radio), plane crashes, a cancer battle and, worst of all, seeing his daughter fall under the spell of the cursed drug, P. He made a magnificent speech in court some weeks ago, vowing to support her through her recovery. And judging from his Sunday column, it sounds like he made another good one in Wellington when he talked to teens about leadership. It seems that most of his speech centred on how important love is.

He told the kids (so he wrote): “Leaders love. You have to love and stay open to love because people are all we have. In the end, it’s about people. If you cease to love your heart, your mind and your world will shrivel. No one will follow a shrivelled spirit. Cease to love and you will not be open to opportunity.”

Over at the Sunday Star Times, Laws was writing most movingly, as he’s been doing for weeks now, about his small daughter Lucy’s fight for life in the face of leukaemia as well as a dire infection. Though Lucy has improved, the struggle goes on, and Michael is overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. More than that, the mayor best known for his feistiness is hugely grateful for people’s prayers and comforted by knowing that people he’s never met have been praying for her. He is not “particularly religious”, he writes – and the rest of us sure can’t recall him ever expressing any glimmer of interest in spirituality. But now, he says, “till my last days, I’ll affirm that those prayers made the difference.”
We don’t much like growing older, but there can be small compensations in the troubles that time may force us to confront. They bend us towards more empathy and compassion. Our caring side waxes as our toughness wanes. We realise the vanity of ambition and the pointlessness of “success”, if all that means is money and fame. We finally know what’s important. Ah, how our hearts soften when we’re battered by love.

The decade's almost over

Here’s something surprising to think about. It’s not much more than 18 months before we’ll be farewelling this decade. This 10-year block that some call the noughties (not much of a label, but what else is there to call it?) is fast disappearing down history’s plughole.
All too soon it will join the nineties, the eighties, the seventies and all those other 20th century time zones in the library of what used to be.
When you’re old enough for your memory to span a few decades, the past tends to blur. Now, when was that singer a star? What era does that movie come from? And how did we get to here?
Even going back to the dearly departed nineties is an exercise in realising that even if we think not much has changed since 2000, it certainly has. I’ve recently been ploughing through early Next magazines in the course of doing some research. I was Next’s launch editor in 1991. And, oh wow, talk about nostalgia. If you were a grown-up in the early nineties, you too may remember life when:
* magazines still had knitting patterns because everyone knew how to knit
* maternity clothes were big and baggy; showing off your baby bump just wasn’t done
* Johnny Depp was just that strange young dude in Edward Scissorhands.
* we were ripping out leg hair with the fiendishly painful Epilady
* no-one had yet had a Brazilian
* Suzy Aitken was pushing her fitness videos
* Olivio and Olivani began to give butter a fright
* we were suddenly delighted to eat sushi
* Anne Geddes was just beginning her rush to fame by photographing babies in clay pots
* Sitcoms still reigned and we’d not even heard of reality TV
* every woman worried about toxic shock syndrome
* we were endlessly debating how possible it was to “have it all”
* beauty companies first told us that “cellulite” existed, and that it had to be banished
* we lusted after clothes by Barbara Lee, Annie Bonza, Marilyn Sainty and Thornton Hall
* everyone’s kitchens were painted yellow and blue
* home renovation involved heaps of rag-rolling, stencilling, sponging, dragging and stippling
* the Filofax was everyone’s must-have business tool
* cell phone price tags sank to around $200, down from $2000 in the eighties
* Call Waiting first became available for home phone lines and drove us mad as we struggled with the new phone etiquette rules
* 50% of people had a home computer but 20% couldn’t programme their VCR
* The first personal trainers started working in gyms
* Women actually wanted to make their own pot pourri
* Lionel’s Muffins (recipes from Shortland Street) was a mega-best seller
* waterbeds were finally ejected from the nation’s bedrooms
* we were fixated on millennial predictions based on the sayings of Nostradamus
And right at the end of the decade some group of bureaucrats called the Y2K Commission warned us to stock up with three days of food, a stash of fresh water and batteries for our torches. After all, there was a chance that the world, as we knew it, might stutter to an end as every computer died. Pictured above is a fridge magnet I still possess, sent by the government to every New Zealander, telling us what to do.
Looking back, it all seems so naive. But somehow we got through the nineties, just as we'll survive this decade too. Even if things do look decidedly dodgy on a whole lot of fronts right now!

The First Wives' Club from Hell

New Zealand TV channels don’t do overseas news until about 25 minutes into the news hour because they’re so stuck on the idea that viewers like local news best. The only time that changes is when the world is falling apart.
Around half an hour into the news bulletins of the last day or two we’ve been witnessing the sad sight a woman whose world is falling apart. Poor Mrs Spitzer. Skewered by the glare of lights and cameras, she was either forced or felt it necessary to stand alongside her husband, the granite-jawed Eliot, now former Governor of New York, as he confessed to using the services of prostitutes even while he was going after other people for doing the very same thing.
He blah-blahed all the usual things that American politicians have said over the years as they ’fessed up to wrongdoing. There’s been a long line of them, including Bill Clinton’s own excruciating moments. Every time, their wives (including Hillary) stood shoulder to shoulder with their errant spouses, grim-faced but upright, willing to be seen as the good woman staying strong through thick and thin.
It seems, in America, to be required of them. And even a woman like Silda Spitzer, a top Harvard graduate who once had a big career in finance, felt the call to fall into line and stand gamely before the avid cameras as her husband intoned his “sorry” speech.
What a face she showed us. Eyes like stones, grey complexion, compressed mouth, face wiped blank with... what?... rage, humiliation, grief, anger, shame. No need for the latter, of course. He’s the bad boy. But she’s probably feeling stunned with the shame of it all, knowing that her position as Number One society wife of America’s greatest city, with all the parties, the honour and glory, the designer gowns and flowers, the best seats in restaurants and shows and operas, the invitations engraved on fine paper, the chauffeurs opening doors, and doormen saluting and lunches with powerful ladies... all of it is now in the compost. Along with whatever life she used to have with the father of their three teenage daughters.
What, by the way, do you tell three teenage daughters about the trouble their daddy is in over his habit of having expensive sex with young women not much older than them? How did Silda hold it all together in public like that, when what she must have really wanted to do was howl and sock him in the chops?
But this, it would appear, is how life is for the spouses of famous men. Just look at the great political parade going on in the US elections. Each candidate must be accompanied by their other half. Whenever John McCain appears, there alongside him is his wife of 28 years, the smiling and silent Cindy, groomed to the max, pin-thin in her bright silk suits and with ultra-sleek blonde hair, looking like a very mature Barbie doll.
Michelle Obama, wife of Barack, looks like she can barely contain herself as a talker, but must resist blurting for now. When she did speak recently she made the mistake of saying she was “proud of America” for the first time in her adult life. Big oops! Patriotism must not be questioned. Since then, not a murmur.
Then there’s Bill – so verbally effusive in recent weeks that he came close to and pushing Hill’s campaign off course. The former Prez has had to go quiet, too. It must be killing him.
It’s a weird thing. All these middle-aged couples but must chat and argue and fight and debate and chew the fat far into the night – but on the election trail there can be no hint of that. Instead the partners must just stand there, visible but mute, as useful as a stuffed sausage but still somehow necessary to the process. For it seems no single candidate could ever be elected to the White House. Hard enough to be black or female. But single? Not a chance.
Here, it’s all so different. Our own First Husband, Peter Davis, pops up only when absolutely necessary. And because here, too, it’s election year, PR requirements will mean we’re bound to see him pottering amiably in the next few months, keeping the home fires burning while Helen does her thing. Mrs Key? I don’t even know her first name. I could bump into her at the supermarket and be none the wiser. And I have no idea if there’s a Mrs Hide, or a Mrs Peters, or a Mr Turia. What a good thing. How lucky we are.

See the whales dive

Have you too been watching housing for the last half-decade, marvelling at how those values have gone up and up and up? It’s been optimism all around. Those who’ve bought houses since the turn of the century have been on to a very, very good thing. It’s all been so fabulous that few imagined a time could come when the value of our dwellings might not only plateau but slide, just like a whale arcing up out of the sea and then slipping back down again, propelled by its own great weight.

At least three years ago I chatted with a young (well, 30-ish) friend about real estate’s great cycles. She and her man were buying property after property, leveraging each one on the back of the one before, starry-eyed about the future and confident that their returns would always cover their outgoings and that values would keep rising for ever.

I told her about a place we tried to sell in 1998. We’d paid close to $320,000 for it just a few years earlier, and it was in a prime location. The best offer we got was little more than $290,000. We sighed and accepted it. We were buying again on the same market and so could move on to something similar for about the same money. But the point I was trying to make to my friend was that prices had tanked then – that they can and do go down sometimes. She listened politely but was convinced that long-term they’d be fine. Which is probably right but there's still the short-term to get through.

The drive to make a killing has kept on building, fuelled by all the TV property programmes showing the thrill of doing up houses, flicking them on and looking for the next one. It’s a strategy that’s worked beautifully, with people making delicious (and untaxed) capital gains. I mean, why wouldn’t you? Lots of us have done it, or cheered as our kids did it. And yet. And yet.

I watched a local show a few weeks ago about a young couple who are dreaming of establishing a property portfolio of 20 houses. Their idea is that when they finally retire, a few decades hence, all that rent income will fund an ongoing good lifestyle.

But six houses later, the combined rent was failing to keep up with their mortgage payments and they were having to top them up out of the husband’s reportedly average salary. The wife had no salary, being a stay-at- home mum. Some people might have sold a house or two to get back on even keel. But no. Their solution was to buy two more places because the rents from these two new places were going to be (applause, applause) around $900 a week.

Aided by a smiling broker, the couple borrowed still more, blithely increasing their indebtedness to $1.8 million. One. Point. Eight. Mill.

I sighed again a month ago when I read a New Zealand Herald story by Simon Collins about how 10-15% of all new mortgages are now going to people borrowing 100% of the cost of their homes. He interviewed a hard-working couple who looked like really good citizens, both working fulltime to raise their two lovely kids and repay $1500 per fortnight back to the bank.

They’d just paid nearly $400,000 for what was described as a “modest house”. Judging from the latest stats, the value of their Birkdale house may already have dropped. The Real Estate Institute reports that the median North Shore price sagged from $516,000 in December 07 to $495,000 in January 08.

Not so much, you might say. Just a few thousand. But they, and many other hundred per centers, must be hoping like hell that this is as far as it goes. And that they don’t lose their jobs. Or get sick. Or have an accident. Or get divorced. Or encounter any obstacle to the continuance of happy life in their pleasant home, with their careers secure and their expenses stable. Fingers crossed, everyone