Back from a great trip to London

Jet-lagged and wiery from a four hour delay in Bahrain, I write this not quite knowing what time of day it is, let alone what day!

I just spent 9 days in London, staying with my son, DIL and my three fabulous grandchildren, Lucia (6), Maya (4) and Oliver (20 months), and while I'm full of the most amazing warmth for them, I'm still thawing out from the bitterly cold weather, served up to me by my home town.

The grand children, of whom I'd only met Lucia before (as they're all in London and I'm in Kuala Lumpur), are FANTASTIC! Maya is so very much like my wonderful little daughter, Nicole, who's also four years old, and in fact just 3 weeks older than Maya. They are both full of beans, full of (acceptable) mischief, cheeky, hugely talkative (just like me, I'm told.....) and absolutely adorable, as of course are Lucia and Oliver.

As for London, first time there for 12 years, it has improved enormously, and much of the credit should probably go to the Ken Livingstone, the former mayor, who did his level best to make living in the world's finest capital, even better for Londoners, residents, visitors and tourists. It's much cleaner (very little litter around), the people are so much friendlier, and the public transport systems really do work pretty well and don't have to be expensive either.

We took the children to so many fun places, but a couple are worth a special mention - The Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green (http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/) and the Tate Modern (http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/) which were so interesting, so very well laid out, and with something for everyone, no matter what age. The activities for kids were imagintive and FREE, just like the entrance, yup, no charges whatsoever!

The flights were OK, not anything better. I took Bahrain's Gulf Air, which I've flown a few times, but the last was about 20 years ago, as it was the cheapest, but it still cost £800 at the conversion rate at which I booked. The service was crap by comparison to the best of the Asian airlines, Singapore Airlines, Malaysian Airlines, Thai International Airways and Cathay Pacific Airlines of Hong Kong, but the Euro airlines all fall well short too, and the US airlines are among the worst in the world for service.

I was pleasantly surprised at some of the costs in London, and the relatively easy availability of discount stores for just about every thing. But the real revalation was a fantastic Chinese and Asian produce store in Camberwell Green (SE5), which had just about everything I can get in KL. I cooked a few Malaysian dishes for the family with produce from this store, and they all were very well received, especially a fresh lemon and fresh thyme flavoured, baked sea bass, which was delicious.

Of course the major highlights would not be complete without remarking that is was wonderful was seeing my terrific two children from my first marriage for the first time in three years. Matt, the father of my grandchildren, and Caroline, globe trotting project manager for VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). Matt's also in the Charity line, as International Co-ordinator for ATD Fourth World, a very large, Paris based charity, working exclusively with the world's extreme poor.

Right, I'm now ready to try to return to sleeping...... zzzzzz

Nightmare of a journey.....

Driving back from Penang to Kuala Lumpur, about 350km, usually takes me about 4 hours, including a break lunch or dinner of about half an hour. We have a house in Penang and an apartment in KL, and usually spend the week apart because of our work commitments :-(

Last Sunday it took me exactly 12 hours!!

I was about 30 minutes into the journey down our North-South Highway when my car ground to a halt, with some ominous noises coming from under the bonnet (hey, I'm English, but to those across the Pond it's the hood). As with most days here, the early afternoon temperature was about 34c (95f) and that's a shade temperature - I sure wasn't in the shade, so I reckon it was about 40c minimum.

Called the local Automobile Association, who regretably were not very helpful, but lucky for me along comes a truck of the highways division of the Malaysian Police, who were fantastic - and that is a word you will rarely hear about the Police here. They found a mechanic from a service station about 20km away - and remember this was Sunday afternoon. He arrived within about 30 minutes and pronounced (what I feared) that the timing belt had snapped, hopefully not causing any other damage in the engine.

Hope was in vain. The tow truck arrived after another hour or so, hanging around in the very hot sun, with a half-broken golf umbrella as the only protection!

The valves were damaged and it would all take at least two days to repair - and here I am about 300km from home, now at the service station, on the edge of a very small kampong (village).

I decide to get (another) tow truck organised, but this time to take me all 300km back to KL. Lucky for me, I know the CEO of Asia Assistance, and even though I'm not a member, he very kindly organised his call centre to find the right tow truck for me. It eventually arrived two hours later, and having broken down at about 12.45pm, we set off on the journey back to KL at just after 6pm.

The nightmare was only half over. At least none of this was going to cost me a single cent. My own service centre had put in a new timing belt only six months earlier and since then I'd only done about 10,000 km. The timing belt is good for 100,000! My service centre assured me they would cover all costs. It's OK, that's not a part of the nightmare, for they did cover the cost, without any arguments.

By now, the sun had gone, to be replaced by rain, in monsoon proportions! At best the tow truck can't do more than 80kmh, but at times, 50 was the best we could do safely, and even then that wasn't slow enough for some others. We came across several accidents on the way, one of which the tow truck driver, now my best buddy, felt he should stop to see if he could help. He donned his yellow fluorescent jacket and disappeared into the rainy gloom for about 20 minutes. He came back to get us going again, but said that a two of the passengers in one of the cars involved were in pretty poor shape, but the ambulance had now arrived.

We eventually stopped at 10pm for a very late dinner at one of the many good R&R stops on the highway, and enjoyed an excellent Hainanese Chicken Rice, a big favourite here in Malaysia.

There were still 120km to go to reach home in KL. At least the rain had softened to not much more than a drizzle.

To cut a very long story short (well, sort of), my car was unhooked from the tow truck at precisely 12.45am, exactly 12 hours since I had broken down, 300km away.

Never was it so good to be home.

I eventually got my car back, good as new, on Wednesday. Gee, did I feel naked without the car in its parking slot :-)

Lemon, honey and mustard chicken - my own recipe

I think I've mentioned before that I enjoy cooking, and often use it as a welcome distraction from workday stresses. Well, I'd bought some beautiful, big lemons the other day, and was thinking on how I might use one or two of them in a recipe I'd not tried before. So, this is what I did.

Took four large chicken thighs (I'm not a fan of breasts, but they would work just as well if you prefer), de-skinned them and removed as much fat as possible. Pricked them all over with my very sharp knife, to help the marinade get deep into the chicken, and put them aside.

Made the marinade with:

Half a cup of honey
A teaspoon of dijon mustard
The juice of two lemons
The peel from the lemons (none of the white pith), very finely chopped
Four large cloves of garlic, finely chopped
Fresh ginger (size of your little finger), peeled and finely chopped
Pinch of salt and generous amount of freshly ground black pepper
Two large red chillis, finely chopped (optional, but we all love chillis)

Place the chicken and the mixed marinade into a freezer bag, seal it, and massage the marinade well into the chicken before putting into the fridge for about an hour. Don't need longer as you're going to cook the chicken in the marinade.

Pre-heat oven to 180c (350f) and place the chicken and marinade into an oven proof dish, covering with aluminum foil, and bake covered for 30-40 minutes or until cooked. Remove foil, drain off all the juice, saving it for the sauce, and put a pat of butter onto the top of each piece of chicken, then return to the oven for about 10 minutes to brown off.

To make the sauce, pour into a saucepan straining off all the bits of chopped garlic, chopped ginger, lemon peel etc, and bring the juice to the boil, reducing it by half to make it more intense. I thicken it too with a little cornflour, but it's fine without.

I serve with plain steamed rice and stir-fried baby bak choy.

The family's verdict was a big thumbs up, which gave me the confidence to share it here with all of you.

Please sign this petition

OK, I realise that firstly not everyone who reads this is British and secondly those who are and follow English football are not fans of West Ham....well, I'm not a fan of WHU either, but this is a very worthwhile petition.

http://www.petitiononline.com/RFCMOORE/petition.html

For those who may not know, Bobby Moore was a great English footballer and captain of the England team which won the World Cup in 1966. Tragically, while still only 51, Bobby died of cancer in February 1993.

A cancer research fund was set up in his name, and now with West Ham having just lost their shirt sponsor, they are looking for another. While they won't directly benefit from sponsoring The Bobby Moore Cancer Fund, they will undoubtedly sell far more replica shirts, pictured here:

http://www.kumb.com/gallery/news/080917-bmkits.jpg

So please click on the petition link above and join the 7,207 who've so far signed.

Andy Murray - Gracious in Defeat

Just finished watching an imperious Swiss superstar, Roger Federer, give Andy Murray, precocious, new, British tennis sensation, a lesson in how to win a Grand Slam Tennis Final.

Not to put it too mildly, Fedex was awesome. I doubt anyone could have lived with him, as he not only played his best at what he does superbly, he's also learned to come into the net, something he has always been quite reluctant to do.

But Scotsman Murray, while showing very little of the verve and panache with which he overcame world number one, Rafael Nadal, in the semi-final, did show a new and very important trait. In the post match, on court, TV interview, he was very gracious in defeat, acknowledged the Swiss's mastery of the game and his overwhelming superiority in the final. He also told the appreciative (and of course, noisy) New York crowd, that the Arthur Ashe Center Court was still his favorite place to be!

He will be back.

I've no doubt young Andy learned a huge amount from his first Grand Slam Final, but I think there are also lessons here for anyone, particularly those of us in business.

We're all going to have a good days and our bad. Some days it seems like everything we touch turns to gold, other days everything seems to crumble to dust. The important point is to never stop learning why. Can we analyse what is the difference between these two very different days?

You know what? I wonder if it's not nearly always down to our own attitude. We've all heard of the saying "he got out of the wrong side of the bed", perhaps to describe soneone "in a mood". Maybe that's better understood by describing someone whose normally positive attitude has deserted them.

In the "Science of Getting Rich", author Wallace Wattles, writing mind you, 98 years ago, stated very accurately, that if we always maintain a positive attitude, money will flow to us as if from an open tap. Banish forever the negative thoughts and attitudes which inhibit our potential for personal and financial success. Click on my above link and get a FREE copy of Wattles's amazing book, now in eBook format. I really believe it's a click you will never regret. But more.....

Bob Proctor and Jack Canfield's collaboration (with Rev Michael Beckwith) on the incredible movie, "The Secret", based on Wattles's nearly 100 year old book, have collaborated again, with The SGR Program, taking the Law of Attraction from "The Secret" a whole stage further. You can do no better than clicking on the SGR Progam link, even if it's only to discover their fantastic Affiliate Program. But I suspect that many of you will indeed be tempted by their amazing SGR Program Home Study Course.

I know I was!

Two new pages added to my website

Very, very busy, but very satisfying. Got one major new page written and uploaded to my main site at:

www.makingdollars4u.com/sgrprogram.html

and a second uploaded, but not yet totally complete at:

www.makingdollars4u.com/sogr.html

These are related pages, all about an amazing new affiliate I’ve joined, The Science of Getting Rich and The SGR Program, the latter being lead by sales and marketing icon, Bob Proctor and wildly successful founder and co-creator of “Chicken Soup for the Soul”, Jack Canfield.

If you’re at all interested in making money, do please visit the above sites.

I started at about 7.30 this morning, and am writing this at just after 8pm, and want to watch the F1 from Spa, Belgium - come on Lewis Hamilton and McLaren!

Afloat in a Sea of Abundance

I thought this was a brilliant article, and as I have the permission of the author, Rebecca Fine, to reproduce here, I wanted to share with all readers of the blog and especially the new members of the Zephyr's Musings community at My Blog Log.

Afloat in A Sea of Abundance

By Rebecca Fine
In the days of the mighty sailing ships, when brave souls voyaged into the unknown, dependent on the winds and their as-yet incomplete knowledge of geography and navigation, one of the greatest and most dangerous challenges was to traverse the area known as "the doldrums."
Extending about 30 degrees on either side of the equator, the doldrums are subject to days, weeks, even months of no wind at all. After a long and difficult crossing from Europe to South America, lying becalmed in the doldrums — with no land in sight and with the ship's supply of fresh water dwindling — was a terrible and life-threatening situation.
But history and legend offer us some fascinating insights into the power of our own thinking and belief. Back then no one had yet figured out how to determine longitude, although latitude was easily calculated. So if you could not see recognizable land, you could only know in what band of latitude you currently were. Exactly where you were in that ring around the earth was, at that time, unknowable.
And so it happened that at times a ship would fetch up off the coast of South America, out of sight of shore, fresh water supplies exhausted and death knocking at the door. Then, with what must have been the sweetest sound those sailors could ever have hoped for, the lookout would suddenly call out that a ship was approaching in the distance.
Once the ship was within hailing distance, the cry went up: "Water! Give us water!"
And the reply would come back, "Lower your buckets over the side."
You see, although the sailors didn't know it, they were afloat in a virtual river of drinkable and life-sustaining water flowing from the mouth of the powerful Amazon River, which carries nearly 20 percent of all the earth's runoff water into the sea with such force that the fresh (or brackish but safe) water flows as far as 100 miles out into the Atlantic.
The sailors, dying of thirst, only THOUGHT they were experiencing lack. The REALITY was that they were afloat in a literal sea of abundance. Exactly what they needed was within their reach the whole time, but the APPEARANCE of scarcity and their BELIEF in that appearance threatened to overpower them.
They could have died — and many certainly did — believing in lack while surrounded by abundance.
In his amazing 1910 forgotten classic, The Science of Getting Rich, Wallace Wattles writes:
"I have said that people get rich by doing things in a certain way, and in order to do so, people must become able to think in a certain way.
"A person’s way of doing things is the direct result of the way he thinks about things.
"To do things in the way you want to do them, you will have to acquire the ability to think the way you want to think. This is the first step toward getting rich.
"And to think what you want to think is to think TRUTH, regardless of appearances.
A couple of months ago, my friend TERESA ROMAIN of Access Abundance [ www.accessabundance.com ] wrote in my ezine, The Certain Way, about how Galileo changed the world by looking at things from a new perspective. By dropping the prevailing attitude that the sun revolved around the earth, he was able to see that the opposite was, in fact, the truth.
The key to finding the truth, she noted, was choosing to cast off the old notion and look at the situation anew, through a new lens. Teresa wrote:
"The path that lies before you is one of unlimited abundance. And it begins by SEEING the abundance available all around you.
"As you begin to experience life through the new lens of abundance, you'll find that many of the problems you face today will simply disappear. As for the ones that remain, your relationship to them will have changed profoundly, empowering you to take actions that are congruent with and support abundance."
What old beliefs, what old ways of looking, seeing, and perceiving do YOU need to cast off right now, my friend? If you find yourself "in the doldrums," how can you take a fresh look today and begin to see the abundance that surrounds YOU so that you are empowered — not becalmed and hopeless?
The choice is always available. If you have chosen unwisely before, remember that every moment is new and the great power lies in your ability to CHOOSE AGAIN, no matter the appearances and no matter what it seems everyone else thinks or does.
Teresa says that this choice "is the path that leads, ultimately, to the fulfillment of your dreams." Mr. Wattles says this choice is "the first step toward getting rich."
And, bearing in mind those long-ago sailors, I would add that this choice can be the ultimate choice — for death or for life itself.
That choice, every moment, is yours. Which way do you choose — right now?

Rebecca Fine is the founder of The Science of Getting Rich Network where you can download your free copy of the amazing 1910 forgotten classic, The Science of Getting Rich.

http://www.scienceofgettingrich.net/gifts/MD4U.html ©2001 Certain Way Productions.