Banff, Alberta, Canada
I’ve been invited to address the annual meeting of the Canadian Investment Dealers Association on the subject of ‘why China isn’t going to be a global superpower’ — a theme I explored here in January, in contradiction of eminent pundits whose New Year essays had gone large on the coming ‘Chinese century’. To be negative about China in any gathering of investors is to invite the response provoked by H.M. Bateman’s Man Who Asked for a Double Scotch in the Grand Pump-Room at Bath, and this turned out to be especially the case in Alberta, which has oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia’s and sees the Chinese as huge future customers. So I followed an eminent China-watcher to the platform with some trepidation and started with a low trick to get the audience on my side: a joke about that well-known former Canadian investor Conrad Black. I’m sorry to say it went down rather well, and I think I made some unlikely converts to Sinoscepticism.
Icertainly made more friends than the star lunchtime speaker, James A. Baker, the US elder statesman and Bush loyalist who has recently come out of retirement to negotiate the cancellation of Iraq’s debts. He offered a grimly militaristic view of America’s role in the world — harderedged, I suspect, than anything he would have subscribed to when he was Bush Senior’s secretary of state — that did not hide contempt for Canada’s refusal to go to war in Iraq. The audience was polite, but a gang of feisty Québecois told me afterwards they had been relying on me, as a member of the notoriously impolite British media, to have a go at Baker in the Q&A session. I’m afraid I let them down. I lobbed up a G8-related question about debt forgiveness and American hypocrisy, but I’m no Paxman: the leathery old Texan lawyer drove my limp googly straight to the boundary and left us none the wiser.
All this took place at the Banff Springs Hotel, a baronial fantasy in granite much visited by British royalty. According to family legend (my family, not hers) the Queen once recommended it to my late father in one of those stilted receiving-line conversations — though my mother, whose memory is sharp, now says she has no recollection of this whatever. So I passed up the extra point I might have scored if I had slipped the anecdote into my speech after the Conrad joke. The hotel is so vast that at close quarters it feels as big as the Rocky Mountain behind it, but seen at a distance it is a mere cabin in the woods in such a monumental landscape. It was conceived in 1886 by Cornelius Van Horne of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a man of unstoppable drive who was given ten years to complete the ocean-to-ocean rail link and did it in five — the sort of challenge only the Chinese would attempt today. But his work has stood the test of time better than I suspect much of theirs will, and the hoot of his mile-long freight trains curling through the high passes is still a hauntingly beautiful sound.
Ihave been involved, secretively, in a significant challenge of my own: to lose a stone and a half in 12 weeks. After a succession of big lunches on the slopes in March, my annual skiing party decided collectively that we had run to flab, and one friend came up with a scheme to raise money for the British Ski Club for the Disabled by each achieving specified weight-loss targets. Remarkably, we all did it, and our heaviest contestant, a very big boy indeed, shed an awesome 36lbs on a regime of brown rice, oily fish and industrial muesli. The boring thing about dieting is talking about it — hence the secretiveness — but the pleasing thing is that it makes available eras of wardrobe that you never thought you would visit again. I’m already back in my 1987 cream linen suit, and if I keep going I can see some wicked batik shirts and flared trousers at the end of the rail.
What with all those elk steaks and breakfast muffins in Banff, the last couple of pounds were putting up a valiant rearguard action as the deadline loomed. I baulked at colonic irrigation in the hotel spa but I thought terror might have the same effect, so I booked a day of whitewater rafting. What I actually signed up for was the ‘family fun’ introduction to rafting, but it was cancelled because of heavy rain and I found myself instead on the ‘extreme’ version, in helmet and wet suit, hurtling down the Kicking Horse River with a crew of RAF fighter pilots on leave. It was a startling contrast to my last river outing, the Spectator staff ‘booze cruise’ on the Thames at Henley. I was so busy trying to paddle or hang on as instructed by the supremely macho Canadian helmsman that the fear only got to me afterwards, when I saw the photographs. And it worked: I weighed in on the nose.
If I had been at home in Helmsley on 19 June, I could have white-water rafted the River Rye that flows through the town. The fact that (conveniently for this diary) North Yorkshire, western Canada and parts of China have all recently experienced freak rainfall and flooding is widely taken as evidence of global warming. But it’s worth pointing out that a cloudburst on a hot summer afternoon created an even more destructive torrent in Helmsley back in 1787, and that there is another possible explanation for this year’s weather event. It may have been my fault. As a town councillor, I launched a debate in May about whether we should build a new car park in an ancient meadow beside the Rye bridge. At a public meeting a vociferous majority opposed the idea. Four weeks later a truly biblical scene came upon us: the sky turned black, the river foamed, the air filled with the bleating of sheep as they fought to escape the rising waters, and the meadow became a seething lake bestrewn with debris. I think we can safely say that God was voting against the car park.
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