What am I really doing?

At work we have an investment club. When we started it we invested in something called an ETF - an exchange traded fund - and the ETF we chose was one that doubles whatever happens to the price of oil. If the price of oil goes up by 2%, our investment goes up by 4%.

That was in July last year (2008) when the price of oil was $147 per barrel. It is now less than $50 per barrel. Even so it wasn't that painful - between all the club's members we hadn't invested much more than £50 each in oil.

But something else happened. I was lying in my bath on a Saturday morning listening to a radio report about how the Georgia conflict had come off the boil. I was upset. This was bad news. There would be no war. The price of oil would not rise.

I was still in the bath when realised that this was not a healthy thought process. But I was on my own and I had not revealed my hollow soul to anyone. I felt relief. It would only have been wrong if someone else had known what I was thinking.

So I'm still a member of that investment club. We recently increased our holding in that same leveraged oil ETF. I've also told people about my Georgia crisis/bath moment. More as a joke. It is as if I know I have a serious lack of perspective, but am not interested in fixing it. I'm not even sure I want to here. I know this blog is about my search for fame and fortune, not peace.

Does it matter if, someone, somewhere, is hoping there will be a war in Hackney so they can make £20-£30? At the moment I think it wouldn't matter, but that's probably because I don't think there's going to be a war in Hackney... at the moment.

I'm hoping I can invest in Hackney, where I live, and that this might turn me into someone who wants good things to happen. But I don't know if investing like that works.

Otherwise, I've managed to spend the evening not reading "Google Blogger for Dummies" so I still don't know how any of this stuff works and I can't find my own blog without typing in the URL. In the meantime I've also been looking for blogs about Hackney. Below are a couple stolen from Baroque in Hackney.

Open Dalston and its old story about Barratt's potential to fail and leave Hackney with a large debt and nothing else to show for its development efforts.

This Stamford Hill jewish blog, called The Shaigetz was the kind of thing I'd love to be able to write, just because the more I read it, the more I wanted to read it. But it doesn't seem as active as it used to be.