90 days ago
OptiBiotix Health (OPTI) has announced a license agreement to incorporate Tata Chemicals’ proprietary short chain fructo-oligosaccharide Fossence into its SlimBiome and LeanBiome for the Indian market.
106 days ago
The Met Office keeps on telling us all how jolly warm it is as a result of global warming. I have covered how its numbers are bodged and unreliable before but I can say without lying that, here in North East Wales, I feel bloody cold. It is, after all winter, so no climate change there. While the Mrs and my son Joshua are enjoying the Indian sunshine for another few days, the cats myself and little Jaya are really feeling it as the temperature, with wind chill, falls to zero
852 days ago
OptiBiotix Health (OPTI) has followed a sales agreement with Apollo Hospitals Enterprises for its GoFigure weight management product range in India with an agreement for GoFigure and SlimBiome Medical in Saudi Arabia (KSA). Is this further encouraging progress or just more flannel?
918 days ago
There are some folks out there who suggest that to make amends for Britain’s role in slavery we white folks here in Britain should ALL have to pay reparations to ALL people of colour on the basis that their ancestors were slaves. Heck, I know we did not enslave the Indians but I am sure we must have committed multiple Imperial sins in India, becuase in the new narrative of 2021 Empire is always bad, so surely my Mrs gets a look in as well? No. Okay well let’s talk about Alex Scott, the former footballer and TV presenter who is a person of colour and about me.
976 days ago
Having already admitted that it it was going to run out of cash, the only questions are when will shamed Remote Monitored Solutions (RMS) do a placing and how massive a discount will the bucket shop spivs demand to get it away? To that end one can expect a stream of ramptastic RNS announcements using the Adam Reynolds keyboard and often contain lies. Here is the first one today and it seems to have got the morons creaming themselves with joy even though this is , in fact, Remote announcing the same thing for a second time. If you needed evidence of just how dim shareholders in this company are….
1034 days ago
We still do not know the status of the first face nappy order announced by Remote (RMS) on March 4 for 100,000 masks and then 1 million every month thereafter. We were told on 4 May that within a couple of months the distributor Francis Mcintrye would be ordering as planned. I sense that with face nappy wearing set to become voluntary in the UK soon that this will come to nowt. But fear not there is news from India.
1066 days ago
My wife’s family originated in India. Her parents were born there and would say that they were Indian. My father’s father’s family originated in Kent and would say that they were Kentish Men or Men of Kent. I can never remember which is which; it is to do with which side of the Medway you are born on. But when it comes to Covid and the BBC…
1093 days ago
If we do not all wear our masks and social distance back here in Blighty then look at India and it will happen here say the Covid jihadists and those in the media and Political GroupThink. As ever data is not their strong point. Do not get me wrong, the scenes from India are shocking. But this is not covid-apocalypse hell.
1218 days ago
Gosh, the tree and its oak barrel container are heavy but a friend and I somehow got it inside for its 16 days of warmth. Then it will be back to the garden where it has lived for the past year, gaining about two and a half inches. I reckon it is now just under five foot nine tall.
1351 days ago
He is not in fact anyone’s Uncle. In India, an older man is always termed an uncle so Joshua has lots of uncles including both his godfathers, Johnny and Lucian Miers, Uncle Brokerman Dan and the list of unsuitable and disreputable “uncles” goes on and on. However, this uncle is in fact a relation. He is something like the third cousin of the Mrs but for historic reasons, these distant families were quite close.
1410 days ago
More than 5,000 folks have signed the petition to have the statue pulled down, like that of non slaving Thomas Guy. But who is this beast? Okay i shall give you two clues then a multiple choice.He is a great figure from the history of the British Empire and had Indian links. Who was the alt right beast: a) Winston Churchill, b) Lord Canning, governor general in 1857, c) Gandhi d) Lord Mountbatten? Got it yet?
1695 days ago
Thanks to my cousin H, I stumble across this Pathe News clip from 1946 as three British Cabinet ministers headed to India for talks on partition. Accompanying them was the Foreign Office Press Officer, my great Aunt Eleanor Booker. She is the rather pretty young woman (she would, I think, have been 28) in the third row at the start. Later on that trip she sat in on meetings with Mountbatten, Gandhi, Jinnah etc. She was, I think, the last person alive who was at the partition talks. Another moment she witnessed in her career, about which she rarely talked, was aboard HMS Tiger in 1963. The clip seems so incredibly dated and is below.
1745 days ago
For some reason, my wife’s family seem to be the only Indians on this planet who do not give two hoots about cricket. After seven years with the Mrs, I still found myself yesterday trying to explain what is a four, a six and an overthrow. None the less, as yesterday afternoon went on we had two TVs going at my mother-in-law’s house: one for tennis and one for cricket. Gradually even the Tennis goggle box became a cricket one as my mother and father in law became engrossed by the World Cup Final, without doubt the most exciting ODI ever.
1884 days ago
The fact that Mercantile Ports (MPL) is run by a crook and has misled investors on a serial basis over many years is not in doubt. Yet greedy City financiers, notably Nomad & broker Lagos Securities (CNK) continue to earn vast sums raising cash for this POS which claims to be making progress on building a new port in Bombay, India. The photos below demonstrate that is just plain horse.
1931 days ago
OptiBiotix Health (OPTI) has announced that it has entered into an exclusive manufacturing and supply agreement with Zeon Lifesciences. The agreement grants Zeon an exclusive license to manufacture and supply OptiBiotix's SlimBiome weight management technology in India, in return for 50% of the profit.
2480 days ago
It is the sort of conversation I only really have with my father. We sit here tonight in Shipston. With the Mrs having taken Joshua back to Bristol, I am with the old man for a couple of days. We are killing time ahead of the BBC news. I write the odd article, he reviews old family papers, something that is the focus of his life these days. Have I discussed the Ightham murder of 1908 on these pages? No? Well, maybe another time.
2685 days ago
Today is the annual Christmas party held by the Mrs for her mad lefty friends, a Godless bunch who regard Christmas as having nothing to do with Christ. The normal score is that I do the cooking then, to avoid being emboldened by a few glasses of wine into pointing out that whatever they are saying is patent nonsense, I feign illness and go to bed. Let them believe
2983 days ago
There seem to be a few problems in the Delhi area right now thanks to a dispute between castes in the province to the North. It may seem odd but one - privileged - caste has demanded its status be lowered so its kids get the same breaks as lower castes. Riots have ensued.
This is being discussed by John Humphries on Radio 4 just now - his guests two Indians. You will remember that the parents of my wife arrived here from India in the 1950s and that I can claim an Indian passport if I wish as my Grandmother was born there. We both like India in this household.
But I have just screamed at the radio. The woman guest says this is all down to tamperings with the caste system introduced by the British.
3132 days ago
In today's podacst I start with an apology to India from yesterday's Bearcast. Then it is on to defend Malcolm Stacey for his column today on refugees - for once the old boy is 100% correct although most folks seem to disagree. Then it is onto Zak's piss poor analysis of China frauds (HERE). Finally CEB Resources (CEB) which looks like a totally overvalued AIM Casino ramp.
3282 days ago
The Mrs is finally back from India tonight but her delay is clearly a breach of my human rights. Will any political party remedy this? The podcast refers back to yesterday's bonus China fraud Bearcast on Gate & Naibu (see HERE) before moving into the farce of today's two China Norfolks in the news, JQW and Sorbic. Then there are the lessons we learn from Arria, the Kenmare tale, Optare, Mosman and Ubisense which seems like a POS.
3288 days ago
The Mrs. is still in India on work. Today she is visiting the house once inhabited by my great great grandfather Sir Courtney Ilbert in Shimla. It is now a luxury hotel. How nouveau. The result is that I am in residence with the cats who are in utter disgrace having caused me another day of living without trousers.
The house is perhaps not as tidy as it might be in normal times. With the Mrs. away it is back to a student routine of washing a plate before you eat rather than afterwards. I sense that before the Mrs. gets back I may be paying the cleaning lady to do a double shift to hide evidence of what myself and the cats have been up to in terms of housework. Or rather lack of it.
The cats are in disgrace.
3299 days ago
The Mrs touches down in Delhi tomorrow morning and that and a film we watched last night set me thinking about all those family links to India strteching back to 1856: Knatchbull-Hugeson, Eleanor Booker, the Ilbert Bill and my grandmother Margaret Booker. A personal family tour through history podcast.
3761 days ago
As I am off to London tomorrow and as our Christmas tree is a good two foot taller than the Mrs it must come down tonight, 24 hours early. A sense of guilt now descends as I prepare to lug the bare tree onto the Street where it will next week be collected by the Council and head off to meet its maker.
When I was a boy my father planted a tree in the garden. Each December it would be uprooted and find its way in a few days before Christmas. It would be dressed and watered and looked after. And on January 6th it would return – feeling rather tired and over-heated as it sat in a room with an open fire – to its real home in the garden. By the end of the spring it had shed its dead leaves from its Yuletide horror and by the next December it was a bit taller and ready to go again.
Now that we have a garden of sorts we plan (okay I plan but the Mrs has not objected) to do the same thing. And so this 2013 will be the last year of wasting a Christmas tree in this way. Come the early spring I shall plant a five foot tree in the garden hoping that by Christmas we have something on which to hang my global decorations.
Luckily the Mrs was not big on Christmas trees and so this is one area that in merging possessions it is just a straight takeover. I have always picked up a little something from wherever I have been to add to what goes on the tree as well as a bit of tinsel and the normal baubles. And so there are two, three legged Isle of Man Christmas decorations, ornate elephants and also stars from India, a small soldier with moving legs, some red and also white wooden stars and a mouse from France, a couple of stars from Israel, there is a tortoise from Ecuador and from Greece a small picture of Christ. Next year’s travels? A trip to the USA in April is planned and I shall return with something else for the tree.
3790 days ago
High profile defector to UKIP Victoria Ayling is now exposed on camera saying about immigrants that she wants to “send them all back.” UKIP Fuhrer, Nigel Farage says that this is “slightly odd”. No, Nigel it is despicable. What do you not understand about that?
4084 days ago
Sometimes I wear contacts. Sometimes glasses. I do not really like contacts so being almost blind as a bat spectacles are my vision corrector of choice. But they are bloody expensive in the UK. And so a few years ago I hit upon a wheeze of getting my eyes tested in Bangalore, India. My sight is no worse now than it was then and so all I need to do is wait for my ex girlfriend to go home to visit her folks and I can get new glasses.
Sadly she has not been home for some months during which time my current pair have more or less disintegrated. I “wing” is now held on with a thick roll of sellotape but still fell off last night and I cannot seem to find it. So right now my glasses are perched on my nose ready to fall off at any moment – hopefully at a time when I am hammering my ten letter keyboard rather than cooking up a stunning Linguine Manx at The Real Man Pizza Company.
But salvation is here.
The ex is back from a trip on Monday and brings with her two new pairs of glasses which will together cost less than one pair bought anywhere in the UK. I can’t wait.
4251 days ago
There will be some folks who tell you that you must (I repeat must) have exposure to China or India as part of a diversified portfolio. The question such folks ask is which? The arguments are well rehearsed: demographics, GDP Growth prospects, transformation of agrarian economies, competitive advantage. There is a plausible long term case for both which i shall discuss at another time. The issue is whether holding such investments now will make you money and the answer is no. As such I suggest that if you hold units in Anthony Bolton’s Fidelity China Special Situations fund you should sell the lot now at 74p.
