Wednesday, September 9

Underground

My yesterday begins at Bikram yoga, 6:30AM, which I say is miserable. It takes 30 minutes to recover and another hour to stop sweating. Fortunately my first meeting - at the Wolseley - not until 9:30AM and I am perspired out by then and even dry. It is an unusually hot day in London which doesn't help much either. So I meet my dear friend Najib, who used to be with GE Capital where he was Chief Executive of GE Credit Services. He left GE in 2001 to start 1st Credit, which has become one of the UK's largest debt collection agencies, managing more than four million consumer accounts with a face value of approximately £5 billion. In short, Najib is a bad ass who has come up from humble roots (his parents shop keepers) and delivered on the Western dream. Bravo. Now Najib is also Muslim and this summer married a Jewish women from Regent's Park or the flashy part of town. We laugh a bit about this and he comments: "crossing the divide, one wedding at a time" and it is hard to disagree - not that I know many Muslims but I certainly don't know any married to a Jew. Or visa verse. I love Najib for this.


From breakfast, I sun myself in Green Park before meeting David at Nobu for lunch. I get sunburn, pictured and serves me right, made worse by this being the last week of summer and I have otherwise been pretty good about sunblock.

"Amigo! Amigo!"
--George W. Bush, calling out to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Spanish at the G-8 Summit, Rusutsu, Japan, July 10, 2008