Fun at the CCK

The CCK (Centro Cultural Néstor Kirchner) is a massive cultural centre in the old Post Office in Buenos Aires. It is one of the largest cultural centres in the world.

It's an astonishing building. Built in the early 20th century when the Beaux-Arts style was fashionable in Argentina, it was, at the time, the largest public building in Buenos Aires. Its conversion to an arts centre in the early 21st century maintains many of its original architectural features and makes excellent use of the space.

When we were there, all the events were free because the Culture Ministry operates on the principle that the arts belong to everyone. We particularly enjoyed Saturday afternoons at the CCK, when there was an open tango class followed by a live band, an exhibition and dancing. Most of the dancing was tango, but there was always a break for folklore dancing in which people danced the chacerera twenty or thirty times and then moved on to the one with the handkerchiefs.

Chacerera (probably on about its tenth time round)

Hankies out. We may come back to the chacerera later

Marble Hill memories

We live very close to Marble Hill House, the beautiful Palladian villa built for Henrietta Howard, mistress of George II in the 1720s. There are plans to refurbish the house and grounds and a request to local residents to send in pictures that reflect the house in modern times.

I once had the idea of taking a series of photographs to show all the ways that the park surrounding the house is used nowadays, but I soon realised how impossible that would be. There was this enthusiastic chap in the cricket nets.

A woman with more trans-Atlantic taste was playing baseball.

But you can see kids in the background playing football and, of course, there is rugby on the rugby pitches and hockey on pitches set aside for that. The there are more informal games - frisbee is very popular in summer and there are always children playing chase games. Kites are flown, runners jog round the park, keep-fit enthusiasts form earnest circles and do press-ups. Just outside the park boundary we even have annual dragon boat races.

Then, of course, there were the concerts. This was back in 1989, when they were relatively small-scale affairs and many local families took their children for picnics.

There was just too much for it to make any sense to try to record it all, so I contented myself with pictures of the house and grounds. The trees are astonishingly beautiful in autumn.

There are so many professionally taken photos of the house that there is little point in adding mine. Where I win out over the professionals, though, is that I get to see the house at different times and in different weather.

There has been the odd extreme weather event over the years. Famously there was the October gale of 1987. Trees were blown down in parts of the park, while other parts were untouched. Here's the remains of one of the trees that didn't make it. (In those days you could sit on fallen trees, even with a baby. Now they are taped off as a Health & Safety risk.)

This was a freak snowfall in November 1993.

More dramatic are these photos of flooding taken sometime between 1985 and 2001. Sadly we don't have the exact date.

The most recent flooding was in 2014, but that seems a lot less dramatic.

Of course, the most exciting weather combined flood and freezing. People don't believe that you could ever ice-skate in Marble Hill House but some time between 1985 and 2001 I photographed us doing just that.

People round here love Marble Hill. That's because it's magical.

More on social media

Back Home having come out a couple of weeks ago, I've been quite occupied with promoting it, rather than with writing anything new. I think it's now time for a long, hard look at what I'm doing and whether I should keep on doing it.

Launch party

This time, for the first time, I had a "proper" launch party – that is something at a public venue with assorted Accent authors and Editor Greg there instead of just a few friends round my place. It did sell a reasonable number of books, though I discounted the price because I hate charging friends (and quite a lot of them were friends) full whack. As a result, I doubt the profit will have come anywhere near covering the cost of food and the sales won't have contributed to my Amazon ranking. It definitely made me feel better and we all enjoyed the party (or I hope people did) but I'm not sure that it makes any sense at all as a promotional effort.

Blog tour

I did a blog tour. This involved my writing pieces for nine blogs. Different people wanted different things, so there were a couple of excerpts, an interview and pieces on different aspects of writing historical fiction. I'm immensely grateful to everybody who helped with this but I have no idea whether it makes any real difference to sales. I'm not alone in this. I read something recently that suggested that blog tours are now a tired way of promoting new books which probably bored readers and had no real impact.

The argument in favour of blog tours is that they get your books (or, rather, posts about your books) in front of people who would not normally be exposed to them. That's a really good argument. I'm always happy to have people write about their historical novels on my blog because they can reach an audience of people interested in historical novels who might not have already heard of them. But to what extent does this apply more generally? Are people who read blogs that are generally about other genres really interested in suddenly being exposed to Back Home? I hope they are. I hope that it gives them something a bit different from the usual post that they would see and makes them think that there might be something in this historical fiction malarkey. But I have no idea if this is the case. There were very few responses to the blog posts I wrote, so it's difficult to know. I don't even have any way of knowing if people read them.

Before anyone thinks that this is a really good reason for never hosting a blog tour again, I would point out that there are advantages for the host. People whose book is being promoted on a blog tour will usually use their own social media to encourage people to visit each of the sites hosting them. In my case, Accent produced rather a nice banner with everything listed. Hopefully this attracted people to these blogs who would not usually have visited and some of them may turn into regular readers. But, again, this seems to be an article of faith and I have no idea if this is happening or not and, as far as I know, neither does anyone else.

My own blog

If anything, I have a slightly reduced activity on my own blog in the last couple of weeks, as my posts have been popping up in so many other places. Generally I try to blog about once a week. I've read that you are more likely to get regular readers if they find new content on each visit. More than once a week seems a bit excessive but once a week has suited me for a while now.

My blog posts run about 700 – 1,000 words although many are shorter and a few are longer. I've read that it's better to write shorter blog posts, but I'm trying to attract people to read historical novels that are generally 70,000 - 80,000 words long, so if they find a blog post of a thousand words is more than they are comfortable reading, they probably aren't in my target market.

Blog posts are more likely to be read if they are broken up with photographs and I increasingly try to do this. There is a small, but real, chance of being sued if you use copyright material on your blog, so I try to avoid legal issues by taking a lot of my own photographs and editing them for publication. Getting decent pictures, whether you take yourself or find them from copyright free sources online, does take time – often longer than writing the text.

I enjoy writing my blog. I’d probably do it even if I didn't have books to sell. Readership fluctuates quite a lot, but at the moment it’s stabilised at around 1,500 page views a month. That's not many compared to some of the more successful blogs, but it seems a reasonable number to me. I have hardly any people who have registered as followers, but I think that's because I'm using Blogger and unless you're on Google+ (and who is?) there's really no benefit to following a blog like this. With so many page views, I'm assuming that most must be repeat business, so presumably I'm doing something right.

I do have a Comments box on my blog but I don't get a lot of comments. I generally reply to those that turn up. I'd love to have more, but I can't think of any obvious way to get them.

As far as promotion goes, the big question is: do blog readers buy my books? Well, I'm certainly not selling 1,500 copies a month. More significantly, sales in the USA seem very weak despite the fact that I have far more views from the US than from the UK. This does make me wonder just how effective the blog is at shifting books.

Facebook

I didn't used to have an author page on Facebook, but I really recommend that you get one (assuming you're an author, of course). Having an author page means that you don't end up ‘friending’ a whole bunch of people you hardly know just so they'll see updates about your books. (Yes, I know that for some people friending a whole bunch of people you hardly know is what Facebook is all about, but some of us aren't entirely comfortable with that.) Even more importantly, it means that your actual real friends don't get annoyed by continually being told they should be buying your book, which they hopefully bought ages ago. An author page means you can separate real life and this sort-of-public-persona that writers are now supposed to have.

I don't put a whole lot of posts on my Facebook page. I may be wrong, but I feel that it's not necessary to be posting all the time as I think that Facebook posts have a reasonable "shelf life". I post when I've just put up a new blog or when I think I have something interesting to say, so it doesn't take a great deal of time. The fact that people can easily "like" Facebook posts or comment on them means that there is some sort of feedback, which is always nice to have.

As with everything else, I'm not sure how effective it is, but given that it is not particularly demanding, I'm happy to keep doing it.

Twitter

So we come to Twitter.

I'm terribly conflicted about Twitter. There are people who are Twitter "naturals" and find the whole thing very easy, but I most certainly don't.

I am a million miles from being good at Twitter but there are some things I have learned. The most important is, I think, that there is no point in being on Twitter in a half-hearted way. I know somebody who uses it for their business and only posts when they feel they really have something to say. They frequently go weeks between tweets and then they just put out one tweet and go back into hibernation. I follow this organisation and cannot remember the last time that I saw one of its tweets.

The awful truth is that, while opinions differ on how long a tweet lasts before vanishing into total obscurity, the answer is measured in minutes and not hours. That means that an effective Twitter presence means tweeting at least three times a day.

Everybody agrees that people who only tweet about the book they want to sell are unlikely to be successful. Their Twitter feed is simply boring. Different people will take different approaches to making their feed lively. I try to make at least a third of my tweets general stuff, a third blatantly selling and a third about my blog. In addition I retweet stuff, which further dilutes the sales material. But doing all this three times a day takes a lot of time. I find myself taking photos just to have stuff to post.

Some people claim that they just toss off the odd tweet while they’re making a cup of coffee or, in the case of one author who shall remain anonymous, while they’re in the loo. I'm not convinced by all this multitasking, unless they're making an awful lot of coffee or spending an awful lot of time in the loo. (I suppose the two could be connected.) There's lots of research that suggests that stopping what we're doing to deal with an e-mail makes us less productive for the next twenty minutes and I suspect that producing a tweet has much the same effect. In any case, I keep being told that I should engage with people on Twitter. Given the short life of a tweet, this surely means coming back in five minutes to respond to any witty remarks that people have made. Maybe I misunderstood. All I know is that if I'm doing serious tweeting (as during the blog tour) everything else suffers.

The obvious question that people ask me is why, if I don't like tweeting and I see it as hard work, I don't just stop doing it. The answer is that I have looked at the effect on page views on my blog when I do or don't tweet. A couple of times recently I have put up blog posts that have not been publicised on either Twitter or Facebook and the result has been a completely derisory number of page views. Just being on Facebook pushes the page views up quite a lot, but the real boost comes from Twitter. Although I have only a couple of hundred followers, some of these re-tweet me to thousands and every time I tweet about a blog post I can literally see an immediate response in terms of page views. Anybody who writes a blog without using Facebook and Twitter is essentially talking to themselves and a few close friends. If you want your blog to be read, you must use one or the other. If you want it to be widely read, you must use Twitter.

If you are going to use Twitter, should you have a whole marketing strategy and buy software to enable you to run it more effectively? That's a separate question that I will explore in another post. For now, I'll just say that Twitter does definitely up my page views and I think this would be true for anybody else.

Bottom line

So I've used Twitter and Facebook to drive visitors to my blog to an acceptable number. I've run a successful blog tour and probably thousands of people must have seen one or another post about Back Home. What has been the net effect of this?

Authors tended to be coy or downright dishonest about their sales but I'm going to come right out and say it: the net effect has been miserable. Back Home is a sequel to Cawnpore, which did not sell spectacularly well but did receive very good reviews from people who read it. You could reasonably expect Back Home to start from a similar sales base. Accent’s edition of Cawnpore was not the first time it had been published, so, if anything, Back Home should have done better because it had not already been available for sale by another publisher. Yet Back Home’s sales have been horribly disappointing. All the marketing effort has had no measurable impact at all. Sales are markedly lower than the initial sales of Cawnpore.

Of course, this could change. Word-of-mouth takes time to build. People who saw a blog post last week may not have rushed out to buy it immediately. We are still waiting for some reviews, which should help things along. But, at this stage, I can only compare the sales of Cawnpore, with no Twitter presence, no established Facebook author page, a very low-key launch party (essentially just a few friends) and no blog tour, with the sales of Back Home, which has had all these advantages. And the conclusion that I might reasonably draw is that all the promotional effort has made no difference at all.

Is it time to give up on social media? I'd love to know your views, especially if these are based on personal experience. Let me know in the ‘Comments’ below. I'll be reading your views and thinking things over and posting again in a week or two

Tweeting about books

There are many reasons to be on Twitter. For some people it is a way of keeping in touch with world events: all the news with more immediacy and less flannel. For others, it is a way of letting their friends know where they are and what they’re doing. A few people like to share their witty comments or brilliant photos with anyone who happens across their Twitter feed. For some of us, though, it’s all about selling.

I’ve been reluctant to go onto Twitter. (My first paragraph contains 418 characters, so I’m obviously not a natural Tweeter.) But I have a book to sell. (Five books, actually: check out my Amazon author page.) This means people keep telling me I should be there. So last week I gave it a serious look. Here’s what I think I learned. (My ignorance is profound and what is true for me may not be true for you, but here are my thoughts, for what they’re worth.)

Twitter can probably work as well as a promotional tool as do other social media. However, to make it work, I think you have to commit to it. This will involve quite a lot of effort.

Do set up your home page with a decent picture and a banner across the top. You can use the same ones as on Facebook. (Accent authors: Accent can help with banners, if you are struggling.) Make sure that your home page includes a description of what you do. Mine just says that I write historical novels, but it really ought to be a bit sexier and more gripping than that (but it must still include the fact that you write whatever it is you write). Include a link to your blog or anything else you want to link to.

That’s not too bad, but now comes the whole issue of what to tweet, how to tweet it and how often.

Firstly, you need to tweet about lots of things, not just promoting your books. Why would anybody want to read a string of messages from you that say nothing but ‘Buy me! Buy me!’? It’s the same as with blogging. My blog contains a mix of general stuff about 19^th century history, stuff about writing, some random bitsand pieces (usually about tango) and then the odd post directly plugging my books. But whereas I have to come up with just around one idea a week, Twitter demands a constant stream of tweets.

Nor is it enough just to tweet. You must engage with other people and that means reading their tweets. I’m writing this at midday on a Sunday and I only follow twenty people, some of whom are presumably still in bed. Yet I already have forty six tweets to read. And not just tweets, for a goodly proportion are linked to blogs. Let’s assume that just four or five of them are and that I can pull up, read and digest a blog post in five minutes. That’s a good twenty minutes reading blogs that are not necessarily just what I want to see. If the alternative was playing patience on the computer (and, let’s face it, it might well have been) that’s fine – but if there was any danger of working, or cleaning the house or, god forbid, going out into the fresh air, that’s twenty minutes of your life you’re not getting back. Almost worse, the people you interact with might be amusing and stimulating. Since I met @CarolJhedges online, hours have vanished in enjoying and responding to her tweets: definitely not a waste of life but hardly getting much done.

You need to get busy with hashtags, such as #mondayblogs. That means other Monday bloggers will see your blog and retweet the link to their followers. You’re supposed to return the compliment, of course. But the problem with this (and all retweeting) is that either I am passing on a naked link (boring for me and boring for people who get it) or I have to read the blogs. There’s hundreds of them. Literally hundreds. It’s not an Interweb rabbit hole: it’s a warren. I just won’t go there. Which means I’m not really playing by the #mondayblogs rules (other#blogs are available and same applies). So I don’t use the hashtags, so Twitter will never work that well for me.

The most terrifying thing for me is the sheer volume of tweets. I have read (I suspect it was the lovely Carol Hedges again) that, given the nature of Twitter, a tweet is lost to the world after about five minutes. If you tweeted details of your lunchtime sandwich, this is a good thing. But if you were trying to sell, oh, let’s say ‘Burke at Waterloo’ (Buyit. Buy it NOW!!) then you need people to see it. Hence the number of links that seem to be posted by some people every seven or eight minutes. It makes Twitter a rather shouty, repetitive place but you can tune them out. More importantly, though, you have to contribute to the racket. The advice I’ve seen is that you should be on Twitter often – say three times a day, tweeting, engaging, responding. Say half an hour (and a fairly intense half hour). Three times a day. I’m sorry Twitter, but life is too short. Life would still be too short if I live to be a hundred.

At this point I give up. It’s partly my efforts at time management, but largely a personality thing. There are people who love constant engagement with others; loud parties; crowded bars. They’re extraverts and I’m happy for them. But I’m not one of them. I prefer long, sometimes even considered, conversations with a few friends. I’m naturally a bloggy person, rather than a tweeter. Hence this blog.

Please note that, ideally, blogs and tweets are not alternatives. You need both. Without tweets, your blog will lack readers; without a blog, your tweets will not have enough impact to get people to buy your books. (Remember the Prime Objective. If you just want fun online, do whatever you enjoy: this post is about tweeting to sell.) This means that I will tweet, but in a fairly low-key way. I’ve written this largely to explain why and in the hope that the people who retweet me and encourage me will realise why I’m not responding as enthusiastically as I should. In the end, I have books to write. I enjoy blogging, and it does seem useful, so I do that as well. (This is a relatively ‘private’ blog: the one that sells the books is http://thewhiterajah.blogspot.co.uk) I’m never going to be as comfortable tweeting, so I’m not going to do so much of that.

Tempted as I am to sound off about tweeting being the death of sensible conversation and marking the end of civilisation, I’m not going to. It has its uses and its fans. Horses for courses – but I think I’m leaving serious twittering to the birds.

Writing CV

I have been earning at least part of my living by writing for about three decades. I have written for Euromonitor, Keynote, Pira and a host of companies, trade associations and government bodies.

Over the years, I have published work on a wide variety of subjects, including:

·         Research summaries for sales support
·         Employment issues in the legal profession
·         Gambling
·         Government responses to peoples' debt problems
·         Complaint handling

I have written polemical leaflets for political groups, confidential market reports to guide top executives, industry standard guides to the print industry and novels. I have also re-written other people's work for publication by Pira and sub-edited a publication for the National Consumer Council.

My book on complaint handling (Dealing with Customer Complaints) was published by Gower in 1996. I now write historical novels published by Accent Press.

I have been published in magazines, paperback and hardback. My voice is readily adaptable to the tone clients require and I am happy to modify my style in the light of feedback.

Selected publications

“Fortress Throngard” Warlock Issue 9 (1986)

“Temple of the Pharaoh” Warlock Issue 13 (1986)

“Market research for lawyers” Law Society Gazette 30 Oct 1991

Dealing with Customer Complaints Gower (1996)

"Welcome the moaners" Carpet & Floorcoverings Review 20 Sept 1996

"Any complaints?" Municipal Journal 30 Aug 1996

"Internal Complaints Procedures: A Suitable Case for Treatment?" The Ombudsman 1997

"Calming a storm" Chemist & Druggist 11 Jan 1997

"The image of a solicitor" New Law Journal 1999

Evaluating Customer Magazine Effectiveness, Association of Publishing Agencies: London (2001)

Review of Research into the Impact of Debt Advice Legal Services Research Centre, Legal Services Commission: London (2004)

Developments in the UK Print Market Pira International: Leatherhead (2007)

Carol Goldstone Associates (2008) Research Into Childcare Provision In West Berkshire West Berkshire Council.

(With Tamara Goriely) Complaints About Insurance: a look at the figures Association of British Insurers: London (1998)

(With Tamara Goriely) "A question of numbers: managing complaints against rising expectations" in Harris & Partington (eds) Administrative Justice in the 21^st Century.  Hart: Oxford (1999)

(With Tamara Goriely) Recruitment and Retention of Solicitors in Small Firms, Research Study no. 44, Strategic Research Unit, Law Society: London (2003)

Does growing the economy create UK jobs?

I'm not an economist, so this is very much a layperson's view, but somebody asked me this question so here's my attempt an answer.

Once upon a time, it was all so simple. A growing economy increased employment and hence created jobs. The ready availability of employment in an otherwise stable labour market meant that employers had to pay more to get good workers and hence wages rose.

Is this model still even remotely true?

I suspect it is not. There are several reasons for this:

1. Many manufacturing jobs are now heavily automated. Growth comes as a result of capital investment, thus increasing the productivity of the workforce. It does not come about primarily by investing more in labour.
   
   Interestingly, the recent upturn in the UK economy has not been marked with any increase in productivity, suggesting that people are not investing heavily in improving factory equipment. To that extent, the growth is increasing employment, but commentators (including the government) see this as a source of concern. They argue that if the growth is to be long-term, productivity has to be increased. As it is, although unemployment is increasing, real wages continue to drop. So we are increasing UK employment, but we are not increasing the overall wealth of the labour force by nearly as much.
   I have seen analyses that suggest that since the increase of computerised and automated production systems in the late 20th century there has been a profound disconnect between increases in GDP and increases in the overall value of labour. That is, either the same number of workers are producing more goods for the same money or, although skilled workers may be earning more money, there are fewer of them.
   
2. In a globalised labour market, there is a race to the bottom in wage rates. Increasing numbers of consumer items are now being made in Third World countries where workers are paid, by European standards, ludicrously low wages. The growth in consumer spending in this country is fed by cheap electronics and cheap clothing, both of which are largely produced in Far East factories. Prawns that are harvested in Europe are sent to the Far East for processing before being returned to Europe for sale, because processing costs are much cheaper. Improved communications mean that even time sensitive goods can be produced in remote locations to save money. For example, newspapers, which used to be seen as a classic example of something that had to be produced near the point of sale, can now be printed in Eastern Europe and moved by autobahn well into Western Europe in time to be sold the next morning. Eastern European print rates are, obviously, lower than those in the West.
   
   Paradoxically, the knowledge economy makes this much easier. Whilst physical goods have to be shipped, intangible goods and services can be provided remotely without shipping costs. Thus legal firms in London will dictate documents for typing in India and the finished product will be printed out in London the next morning with nothing but electrons having left the country. The system is actually more efficient than overnight typing in the UK, as differences in time zone mean that the typing is done during regular office hours. 
   
   Free movement of labour within the EU means that employers can obtain offshore labour rates in their own country. Workers from Eastern Europe are often prepared to work for much lower wage rates than local workers. They are often supporting families in their own countries and the money that they send home, although seen as pathetically inadequate in the UK, is seen by their families as enough to justify their leaving to work abroad. As a student, my son took casual work in a local factory where he was the only one of a significant workforce whose first language was English. There are obviously massive advantages to having a ready supply of cheap labour. Many care homes would be unable to survive economically if they did not rely on carers from Eastern European countries. The NHS is increasingly reliant on nurses from abroad. I am not arguing for or against a liberal immigration policy – simply pointing out that if you have a substantial supply whose economic conditions in their home countries mean that they are prepared to work more cheaply than UK labour, then increasing the demand for workers will not necessarily increase wages.
   
   
3. The UK economy is dominated by the financial sector. In 2011, financial and insurance services contributed £125.4 billion in gross value added (GVA) to the UK economy, 9.4% of total value added. The nature of financial services is that the value of the service to the economy there is little relation to the size of its labour force. In fact, the UK financial and insurance services industry employs only 3.6% of the UK workforce.
   Note that these figures are for 2011. It is likely that financial services accounts or even more of the U.K.'s economic output now and it did then.

     
So, no, I don't see us building a high wage economy just by growing GDP. What's the answer? That's another question for another post.

Tough Times in Tango Town

I've been visiting Buenos Aires for ten years now, and from as soon as we arrived this year, it was obvious that things in the Argentine economy weren't going so well. Inflation is rocketing. The official rate is 12%. This figure is so widely at variance with people's experience (people we talked to claimed anything from 25% to 40%), that the International Monetary Fund has officially queried the government's estimate. Unemployment is up to 7.2% and expected to rise as the country mires into recession. Political protests were an almost daily event while we were there (in October) and there have been more and larger protests since.

Despite this, everyday life seemed at first glance to be carrying on much as usual and we were enjoying our visit, wincing at the higher prices but generally able to pretend that things hadn't got that bad really.

Buenos Aires pavements are a mess and the amount of rubbish that can pile up is startling, so it was a few days before I saw anything out of the usual in the stack of old chairs, boxers and blankets just along from our flat in a fashionable area near the centre of town. I passed it every day and it was only when I heard a child crying that I paid it any attention. It took a while before I could quite believe what I was seeing. This pile of garbage was home to a man, his wife and two small girls.

When I mentioned this to people we know who live there, their response was simply to ignore the reality of what was happening. One very pleasant, kind woman I know said that there was no need for people to squat in the centre of town as there are squatter camps emerging on the outskirts. The opinion of most locals is probably summed up in this photo. Immediately above this family's home someone has stuck a flyer asking for information about the loss of their family pet, the stray dog obviously a greater concern than the people living underneath their notice.

Once you start to notice these makeshift shelters, they are everywhere. There is even someone living outside the Parliament building. (Apparently the Argentine government has yet to introduce the same legislation that would prohibit this in London.)

At least these people have shelters and, in some cases, a job. Not everyone is so lucky.

How did this happen? Since Argentina defaulted on its debts in 2002, it has had the fastest growth rate in South America. Its economic boom has been hailed by many as an example of what Greece could achieve if it followed suit. But the last year has seen the economic miracle run out of steam and the second quarter of 2012 saw GDP contract.

Cristina Kirchner's government was re-elected only last year in what commentators called a "landslide" victory. But with the wheels apparently coming off the economy, the government has responded by courting its supporters with an array of subsidies and giveaways.

The problem with this approach is that the very economic problems that have made this necessary mean that the government hasn't the money to pay for them. They've tried to solve that problem by printing more cash. Obviously this has added to inflation and weakened the peso on international markets. Cristina's response has been to impose an arbitrary exchange rate with no relationship to market values. So the official exchange rate at the beginning of October was 4.7 pesos to the dollar, though the street rate was 5.8. By the time we left, at the end of the month, the street rate was 6.0. Argentina isn't East Germany before the Wall came down. People travel regularly to the US and other areas where they need dollars. Government restrictions on the export of dollars simply boost demand for black market currency. Despite a police crackdown at the end of October, this problem will not go away.

With the government increasingly unable to balance its books, the handouts are now being matched with cutbacks. So, while there is talk of a laptop for every child (now amended to a notebook for every child), adult education is being cut back. In the latest move to save cash, government workers whose fuel bills are being subsidised by a few pesos are being asked to pay for this generosity by seeing their salaries slashed. Hence the strikes and protests.

Cristina is also taking lessons from the last strong woman to hold the levers of power in Argentina. She is building a cult of personality, identifying herself with Eva Peron. Huge pictures of Evita now adorn the state broadcasting station, dominating the view down the Avenida 9 Julio.

On the Avenida de Mayo there's a new museum to Evita, packed with relics of Argentina's secular saint.

Meanwhile, Cristina's faction within the Peronists plasters the city with posters of her and, slightly morbidly, her late husband, Nestor, who was President before her.

The result of all this is an increasingly divided country. Peronist loyalists give every impression of satisfaction with a leader who is constantly on television assuring them that the economy is sound, inflation negligible and the people easily able to live on six pesos a day (well under £1). The rest of the people loathe her, denouncing her as, at best, living in a fantasy world and, at worst, the lying leader of a corrupt party threatening basic democracy in Argentina.

How have a sophisticated, educated people got into such a mess? Partly, it seems to be the lack of an effective opposition. The Peronists, whose enthusiasm for taking politics out of politics rivals Nick Clegg's Liberals, have welcomed so many different elements into their broad church that the only realistic prospect to defeat Cristina is another faction within the party. Ordinary people, while constantly discussing political theory, see the actual politicians they are presented with as out of touch and unresponsive. The fact that many of them are blatantly helping themselves and their friends to government money doesn't help. So Cristina and the Front For Victory hold onto power but apparently with little idea what to do next. They are lurching leftward at a rate that alarms the middle classes, choosing to make political alliances with Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, instead of the economic powerhouse of Brazil that shares their northern border. They posture about refusing to pay the money the government owes to US hedge funds. (While we were there, the Libertad, a tall ship that is the pride of the Argentine Navy was seized in Ghana in lieu of unpaid debts.) They threaten Britain over the Falklands/Malvinas Islands in an attempt to rouse patriotic sentiment, while making no proper provision for soldiers who suffered during the war there. By now, Cristina's main political goal seems to be to change the Constitution so that she can run again in 2015 when her second, and final, term expires.

Everyone knows that it will end badly, but no one is quite sure how. The people we spoke to were philosophical. "Every ten years," one woman told us, "this country messes everything up. But then it will build things up again." Meanwhile, under a poster for a lost dog, a family of four settles down for another night on the street.