Food, National Crime Agency, Meditation

 Food

                                          Some recipes from Nigel Slater.

Kitchen Utensils, Meat and Vegetables, 

Floris Gerritsz. van Schooten (c.1585-after 1655)

Photo Credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum [CC BY-NC-ND]

 

Mustard Guacamole, Mozzarella, Bagel – A surprisingly substantial sandwich, and one that requires a couple of perfect avocados. Not just a point, but unblemished. A sandwich to be eaten within minutes of the avocado being crushed.

Chickpea, pea, sprouted seeds – one of those everlastingly useful “suppers in minutes”.

Paneer, Aubergine, Cashews – Gentle spice for a summer’s evening.

Freekeh, Peaches, Feta – A substantial salad of warm, chewy grain, salty cheese and sweet, juicy peaches.

(The Times, 2019)

Thanks but no thanks. How about a home-made beef curry?

National Crime Agency

Three London properties worth more than £80 million have been frozen by anti-corruption investigators using their powers to combat McMafia-style financial crime.

The homes are owned through offshore companies by a foreign national described last night by the National Crime Agency (NCA) as a “politically exposed person believed to be involved in serious crime”.

Unexplained wealth orders were granted at the High Court preventing the owner, who has not been named, from selling or transferring the properties until they can prove that their fortune was legally obtained.

It is the second time that the NCA used the orders. They were imposed last year on an £11 million Chelsea house and a £10 million golf course in Berkshire owned by Zamira Hajiyeva, wife of a jailed Azerbaijani banker.

(The Times, 2019)

At last some action being taken against rogues and thieves.

                                  Meditation and Sleep Stories

A start-up company that is worth $1 billion is called a unicorn in Silicon Valley. Calm is such a company founded by a Brit – Michael Acton Smith.

…In the App Store, Calm describes itself as “meditation and sleep stories”. At its most basic level, it guides users through 1, 5, 10 or 30 - minute meditations, with a woman telling you to sit comfortably and concentrate on your breathing while the lake noise, which you can change to a crackling fire, evening crickets or “celestial sunbeams”, gurgles away in the background. For insomniacs, it plays soporific music or even bedtime stories, narrated by the likes of Matthew McConaughey.

Meditation, 

Thomas Benjamin Kennington (1856-1916)

Photo Credit: Atkinson Art Gallery Collection
[CC BY-NC-SA]

Acton Smith is fully aware that many people think meditation is “weird and woo-woo” and that “there will probably be people rolling their eyes and wondering how on earth is this company worth $1 billion”.

There is nothing “woo-woo” about Calm’s growth numbers. The app has so far been downloaded 45 million times and one person every second signs up for the app’s pep talks, entitled “7 days of Managing Stress” or “Loving Kindness”, or David Walliams reading Sienna the Sleepy Sloth. “By the end of this year, we’ll add about 20 million-plus,” says Acton Smith. “So we’re growing very, very fast.” At that point, 1 in every 116 people on the planet will be using Calm.

Anyone moderately talented can build an app, but persuading consumers to pay for it is another matter. And that’s the key to Calm, “the first mental health unicorn”, as Acton Smith proudly describes it. For £49.99 a year, you can sign up to Calm Premium, which unlocks a host of further content on the app – more sleep stories, more meditation masterclasses. How many are Premium customers? “We’re over 1.5 million and growing very, very fast there,” he says. It even made a profit last year, something very unusual among start-ups.

…Others worry that Calm’s $1 billion value is an indictment of our society, not least the fact that we need a smartphone app to tell us to take a break from our smartphones. When I don’t click the “Set sleep reminder” on the Calm app, I get the passive-aggressive message, “Are you sure? It’s hard to get ready for bed each night without a little help.”

“In some ways it makes me quite sad,” says Will Davies, lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of The Happiness Industry. “If there is that much money in doing some of the basic human things – resting, chilling out, sleeping – then I think that tells us something quite troubling about the economy we have built for ourselves.”

Calm’s legion of fans do not share these concerns. And Acton Smith is evangelical that he is a force for good.

(The Times, 2019)

Any wonder why so many have mental health issues if such numbers are signing up to Calm? Just sit in a chair in a quiet room, close your eyes and relax. That’s the first stage and it’s for free.