Pattaya, 2nd October, 2009
02 Oct 2009 5 Comments
Today I have been sober for 33 days.
Yesterday evening I attended another AA meeting in Pattaya. It was another good meting and there was some heart searching “sharing” going on. I also “shared” some emotional stuff about my loneliness and shyness that have plagued me all of my life.
When I was a kid, my father was such a domineering and controlling bully, that he made me feel utterly worthless and totally lacking in self esteem. Whatever any of his family did was wrong, and he would shout and scream at us every day over the most trivial matters, and intimidate us into doing everything his way. In effect he smothered any desires we may have had to exercise our initiative or free will.
As a result, by the time I reached my teens I was scared of my own shadow, and it has been a life long battle to conquer this shyness. These days I am a pretty confident and outgoing person, but it has taken me most of my adult life to achieve this state of being, and even now I occasionally have to hide my innate timidity which is still lurking, deep within me.
For a young man, such as Mobi, making his way in the world, shyness equates to loneliness, and I can remember well the long, lonely nights and weekends I spent when I first moved to live in a room in Bayswater, London. For many years into the future, I have experienced countless periods of almost unbearable loneliness that have inevitably led to seeking comfort in a bar and a drink, and which also led to periods of severe depression.
Booze and women were a self prescribed cure for my shyness and loneliness, and helps to explain why all my relationships with the opposite sex have failed and why I have been married no less than 6 times. It goes without saying that this is also one of the many reasons why I descended into alcoholism.
At sixty three years old, I seem to be approaching a cross roads, and if I can continue my sobriety and extricate myself from my latest doomed marriage, I may still have a few years left to find the happiness I have been seeking all my life.
Right now, I feel pretty good in myself; my sense of purpose and determination are stronger than they have been in a very long time, and I look forward with optimism to the next few weeks, as I start to make and carry out some life changing decisions.
Now back to “Mobi’s Story”.
MOBI’S STORY – (PART 11)
THE INSURANCE YEARS (CONTINUED)
Things were looking very grim for our poor little London based insurance company, and the ‘word on the street’ was predicting our demise within months, if not weeks.
About a year before we reached this critical juncture, our masters in Sydney had purchase another small company in the London insurance market, but this one was concerned with transacting reinsurance business, a totally different animal to our own business.
Reinsurance is the business of insuring insurance companies. An insurance company writes an insurance policy for the general public or for commercial concerns; calculates then risk, and then “lays off” a portion of that risk with a reinsurance company. The very nature of reinsurance is that it is not as labour intensive as an insurance business, as although the gross value businesses can be very large, the number of customers is relatively small, ( it only does it’s business with other insurance companies). But the level of risk can often be much higher, and the consequent rewards or losses much greater. So it would be fair to say that a great deal of skill is required to underwrite and manage reinsurance risks.
A majority of insurance companies either transact insurance or reinsurance business – rarely both. The businesses are not compatible in many ways, and the skills required are very different, as are also the administration, reporting, computer and accounting systems.
The reinsurer that my masters had bought was a small, London based reinsurer with a back up office in Shannon in the Irish republic. It was there that the computer systems and other back up work was carried out, and the London office housed the senior management and senior underwriters.
So at the time of this acquisition, no thought was given to whether there could be any value in merging the two companies, or looking at possible “synergies” between the two entities.
But such was the dire state of my company, and also the increasing vulnerability of the small reinsurer, (it became increasingly apparent that in a post Lloyd’s financial crisis, that reinsurance companies would need to have a much higher capital base to survive), I was charged, amongst other things, with the task of looking into a possible ‘merger’ of two small, unviable entities, into one larger entity with a greater capital base, which would be able to transact both insurance and reinsurance business.
At this stage another very strange and fortunate event happened which helped to push me ‘onwards and upwards’ in my career path.
I have recounted how, 2-3 years previously, the senior management of my employers had assumed, erroneously, that they had hired an insurance professional. Well, when we first started looking at the viability of merging the two operations, everyone assumed once again that not only was I an Insurance expert, but that I also knew everything there was to know about reinsurance accounting, which, (you must take my word from this), is a whole different technical ball game to ordinary (‘direct’) insurance accounting. At that point in time I was blissfully ignorant of reinsurance business and it’s associated technical accounting mysteries.
If I thought the learning curve I had been through to successfully hold the reins of the insurance company was tough going, it paled into insignificance in comparison to the multitude of tasks that now faced me. Not only did I have to rapidly get up to speed on the technicalities and nuances of reinsurance and the accounting of reinsurance, but I also had to head up the team which was to produce a project proposal for the merger of the two entities.
Now if you have a company selling sweets, and another selling ice cream, then it is a relatively simple matter to merge the two businesses. But not so insurance. There are thousands policy holders to consider, thousands of potential future claims payments to consider (some of which may take decades to settle), and the whole operation becomes mired in a mass of technicalities and insurance regulations. One of the myriad tasks that had to be undertaken was for us to write to every single policy holder, and every single person or company who may have insurance claim outstanding, and notify them of our plan and in effect, seek their approval. Notices had to be posted for day after day in the national press and the specialist insurance press.
But the worst and most difficult part of the project was to obtain FSA, (then known as the DTI), approval. We held a number of initial, exploratory meetings with them to get some preliminary approvals for our plan, and then had to produce countless financial spread sheets that showed what we were proposing to do, how we proposed to carry it out, and – crucially – to project the combined business forward for 5 years into the future to demonstrate that it would be a profitable and viable concern.
I could write a book about this project alone. What we were undertaking is rarely done. Usually, when an insurer is taken over, its business is retained within the entity that has been acquired, and becomes an additional trading subsidiary with just a name change. In our case, we were ‘backing’ the insurance business into the reinsurance company, and obtaining FSA approval to convert a company that was only authorized to transact insurance business into one that could write all lines of business. It was akin to obtaining approval to set up a new company from scratch; only more complex.
For me, my whole future was on the line. If I could pull this project off, I would be ‘made’, but if it all fell apart and we failed to obtain the necessary approvals, then my career would go down the drain along with our business. The stakes were high, and I sweated like I had never done before.
I cannot recall exactly how long the whole process took, but it was certainly at least a year, and maybe longer, but finally, I will never forget the meeting we had with the Deputy Chief of the FSA, when he informed us that our plans had finally been approved and we could go ahead and merge the two entities under a single, new name.
I am sure that you can well believe that the champagne flowed that night and for several thereafter.
So overnight, in insurance circles I had become a “hero” and a “financial genius”!! I even received personal congratulations from the CEO and FD of the international company, and as a reward, I was appointed as a Director to all the company boards, and became the Financial Director of the company’s European operations.
I had now shifted into the big league; with greater financial rewards and a commensurate increase in management responsibilities.
I was on my way.
Pattaya, 1st October, 2009.
01 Oct 2009 7 Comments
Today I have been sober for 32 days.
On Tuesday last, I attended the morning AA meeting and then picked up Bob, who had stayed overnight in a Pattaya Hotel with his new girl friend, and then we headed off to Bangkok and checked in at The Honey Hotel on Soi 19, Sukhumvit Road.
We took the Sky train to MBK where Bob had his iphone repaired, did a spot of shopping, and then we went back to the Hotel for a shower before taking off again in the early evening. First stop was for soft drinks and a magnificent view of Bangkok at the rooftop bar of the Centara Grand Hotel next to Central World. Then an Italian meal on Soi Langsuan, and finally to Bangkok Beat on Soi7/1 to listen to some loud and pretty good live music.
A fairly exhausting day, considering it started in the early hours with a meeting in Pattaya, and as a result, I slept like a log.
Wednesday was a more serious time for us. Bob went over to see Dave, our sick friend, who was continuing to recover at his home on Soi 49.
Bob and Dave have known each other for 40 years. They both were professional musicians, and played together all over the world – from Hawaii to Japan, and of course….Thailand, where they worked in the late sixties and early seventies. They both have vivid memories of the Thailand of old, and in particular the far flung US air bases and the perilous journeys they used to make overnight to get there. They also did long stints in both the Pattaya of long ago (the Nippa Lodge, now renamed Nova Lodge), and several of the leading Bangkok night clubs of those times.
When they were in Bangkok they resided at the old Fortuna Hotel on Soi 5, and it was there, when their “playing days” were over, that I met Dave in 1973. He later introduced me to Bob, who was also staying on in Bangkok after they ceased to be musicians.
Dave had always been very interested in sound recording and right from his earliest days as a musician, (initially in the UK), he had been avidly recording his band and other stuff on reel to reel tape recorders. This had continued when he travelled overseas, and when he stopped playing he decided to go into the recording business and opened the first multi track recording studio in Thailand.
Initially he used to go out to night club locations and record some of the big name Thai bands of the day, and later he progressed into recording proper studio albums. I suppose his greatest claim to fame at that time was when he was invited to write the songs for an album that was to be recorded in Norway by the then top band – “The Impossibles”. Dave even accompanied them over to Norway to act as a producer to the recording sessions, and for many years to come, he was proud to receive his annual royalty cheque for his contributions to the Impossibles’ European album, minuscule though it might have been.
But there wasn’t a great deal of money in album recording and studio hire, and although he continued to record the odd album for many years to come, his main line of work switched to writing and recording jingles and background music for the advertising industry. Again, Dave broke new ground in this regard, as he was the first person to provide original music for TV and radio advertising. Prior to Dave’s arrival on the scene, the agencies had only used “library’ music and songs that they ‘stole’ from commercially recorded albums.
Dave’s business thrived for a couple of years, but it wasn’t long before the Thai musicians who worked for him began to realise that they too could do what Dave was doing, only at a much cheaper price, and a number of them set up rival businesses, which undercut Dave’s more “professional” output, and severely damaged the profitability of his business.
There was a period in the late seventies when I worked with Dave full time at his studio in an attempt to put it back on track and provide a decent living for him, and I have written more about this in “Mobi’s Story”. For now, it will suffice to say that once the Thais started muscling in on his business – both as a recording studio and as a sound/music production house for the advertising industry, then it was a never ending struggle for Dave to survive.
There were some who continued to support and back him – farangs and Thais, but these faithful few were insufficient in number to gurantee him a stable business and for many years Dave never knew where his next job would come from, and whether he would have enough cash at the end of the month to pay his rent and other overheads. He did enjoy periods of relative prosperity, but they never lasted long, and right up to the time, a year or so back, when he finally called it a day, he has been obliged to live a spartan existence, with very little money for even the small pleasures of life.
Dave is one of life’s unfortunates. He is a highly intelligent, wonderfully talented man; with a gentle and friendly nature who never raises his voice in anger and would never hurt a fly. But for some reason, he always seemed to make the wrong choices at crucial moments in his life, and the result is that life has just kicked him in the backside every time it seemed that he might be on the way up. Today, Dave has been described as one of the few, true English eccentrics remaining in this manic world.
Of course, alcohol became one of his crutches in life very early on in his career, and as I have previously written, he is a now a hopeless, chronic alcoholic who will surely die if he has one more drink.
Dave still lives in a house which contains his most recent studio, ( I think from memory, this is his fourth location in the past 35 years), but not much is done there except for some minimal copying of vinyl disks, old reel to reel tapes, and cassettes for friends who try to help him out by giving him some work. But also on the premises are priceless tapes that go back to the earliest day of his career and containing recordings of the old Thai bands, Dave’s own band (including original songs) and much of what Dave has recorded at his studio, including much original music over the past 35 years.
So the purpose of Bob’s visit yesterday morning, and the reason that I did not accompany him (apart from the fact that I was still asleep!) was that they were discussing the disposal of the huge tape library after his death. Dave has already ‘willed’ the collection to Bob, but Bob needed some instructions in how the filing system worked, as there are literally thousands of tapes which will have to be shipped to Bob’s home in Australia.
At around midday I met up with Bob and in the late afternoon we headed back to Pattaya.
I tried to call my wife en route to tell her that we coming back a day early, but there was no reply. Unfortunately we hit the start of the evening rush hour on our way out of Bangkok, and it took us almost as long to get out of Bangkok as it did for the remaining journey to Pattaya. We stopped for a meal on the way, and eventually arrived home at 9.30 p.m. My wife wasn’t home (surprise! surprise!) and her son and his friend were watching sexually explicit programmes on the TV. The house boy/baby sitter had gone out for a drink!!
Amazing what you find when you turn up unexpectedly.
We both had an early night, and this morning we headed into Pattaya at 8.a.m., me to my morning AA meeting and Bob to do a bit of shopping.
This afternoon Bob headed off for Ho Chi Min City for a couple of nights, and I dropped him at the airport. Around 12 noon my wife finally called and told me that she was in Pattaya, and that if she had known I was coming home yesterday, she would have come home. I told her I had called her, and she replied that she had called me dozens of times, which is certainly strange, as I have no record of her “missed calls” on my phone log. Maybe AIS is to blame.
Today I had an excellent AA meeting. It was a full house of about 15 people, and there was some excellent “sharing”. I came out of the meeting feeling much better than I had gone in, and to top it all I think I have finally found a new sponsor who will take me through the twelve step AA programme. I will see him again tomorrow after the meeting and take it from there.
Tomorrow, God willing, I will return to Mobi’s Story.
