January 24th – Did my first stock trade. Bought shares in Centamin Egypt and made a profit of around £50 in 3 hours without doing anything. It was to be the first of many.

March 28th – Learned to ski in Italy. Very, very enjoyable week.

May 19th to 22nd – Went to New York City for the first time. Enjoyed it.

June 11th – Got my first acting credit in the Superman fan film Superman: Requiem. First time on a film set too. Lot of fun.

June 18th – Went to Film School at the Hollywood Film Institute’s London boot camp.

August 7th – Asked my girlfriend out. She said yes.

August 18th – Went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the first time. Was a barrel of laughs. Enjoyed very much.

September 2nd – Turned 26. Had a party. Was nice.

September 22nd – Got another acting credit and did my first fight scene in the short action film “The Extraction” with Tony Cook on location in Essex. More fun times.

October 10th  - Made £1000 profit in 24 hours on the stock market dealing Amazon.com shares.

…And Thank You

To conclude, I’d just like to thank everybody who has contributed to my 2011. It has been an excellent year and I hope 2012 can be even better. Thank you. And God bless.

I’m fairly certain no independent or small chain pharmacy would use Alliance Healthcare if they had a choice, but the fact is, they don’t. Nobody does. And the reason is because of this monopoly over certain products.

The monopoly alone wouldn’t be so bad. (It would be far from ideal, but we could live with it). But what I will not stand for is the borderline criminal practise of charging what they call a “low order surcharge” to any pharmacy that cannot meet their own minimum order criteria on products that we have no choice but to buy from them. It’s basically a fine for not being Boots. And it stinks. It is the very worst most insidious tactic employed by a ruthless and heartless company interested in nothing but its own profits. It is companies like this that give business a bad name.

What allows them to do this? The same type of political corruption that we would assume of African governments.

I want to know where it all ends?

I ask Dullabhbhai Patel, 62, born in India, formerly of Kenya, now an accountant and resident of Leicester, if he has ever suffered anything as commonplace as loneliness. He blinks, surprised, “No,” he says, shaking his head, “if you are a Patel you can never be lonely. You can go anywhere in the world, and there will always be a Patel.”

At home I test this. I dial 153 and say to the international directory enquiries operator: “I want the number of any Patel in Fiji.”

“You’ll have to be specific,” says the operator, “Patel is a common name there. What initial do you want?”

I think of the wilder shores of the north Atlantic. I dial 153 again. “St John’s, Newfoundland,” I say, muttering under my breath, “Ha, they’ll never get there.”

“I want to speak to a Dr Patel.”

There is a pause, then the operator asks: “Would that be Dr D P Patel or Dr A P Patel?”

How did the Patels, originally subsistence farmers from the Indian state of Gujarat, come to manifest themselves as the most ubiquitous clan name in Britain and reach the far flung corners of the western world?

I call the General Medical Council. Could they please tell me how many patels there are on the register of doctors? They can: 521. What about pharmacists? “They fill 19 pages of our registser, they’re much the biggest enty,” says a staff member at the RPSGB. It’s 55 names to every page – that’s well over 1000 chemists called Patel [Note from Adam: and this was in 1996 - now it's 1505 as shown in the picture on the left].

And the Institute of Chartered Accountants? There are 277 Patels number-crunching away. They have been slower into the law – only 71 solicitors named Patel – but there are now seven barrister Patels [Note from Adam: I believe I know one of them]; including the first female one, Gita Patel, who has chambers in Manchester and specializes in family and civil law.

Christopher Field, acting Master of Dulwich College, the £2106 a term private school in south London peruses the pupil register and tells me that there are 37 Patels enrolled at his school as opposed to 11 Smiths. Steve White, headmaster of Rushey Mead Comprehensive, Leicester, has 152 pupils called Patel. He is proud of the career goals of his students, nine out of ten of them Asian. “Ninety-five percent of my pupils go on to higher education.” The message is clear. The next generation of Patels is already networking into the British professional classes.

To touch base with that butt of northern comedians, the Patels corner shop, I seek the advice of Kevin Whitlock, deputy editor of the Retail Newsagent. He is in touch daily with the older Patel generation, many of whom arrived here in the early 1970s from East Africa with just their belongings and their initiative.

“There are probably 34000 traditional newsagent outlets, and more than 60 percent of them will be Asian,” he says. “Patel is by far the commonest name. They tend to be middle-class, educated and entrepreneurial. They revitalized the corner shop. They were among the very first people to be open in the evening.” There are 160 Patels running Londis grocery shops and 100 in the rival Spar chain.

According to the Federation of Patidar Associations (Patidar is the old name for Patel), which has 11 family Patel branches affiliated to it, there are 200 000 Patels in Britain. Each family is traceable to villages in Gujarat, which bulges into the Arabian Sea from India’s left side.

Thousands of them went with the British to East Africa 100 years ago to build the railways, stayed to form the commercial and administrative classes there, and were then botted out of Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 and out of Kenya just before that. As British passport holders, more than 140 000 of them came to Britain, mainly to Leicester and north-west London, and integrated with other Hindus who had come here directory from India in the 1950s and 1960s.

“So did the Patels from Africa know the other Patels?” I ask Dullabhbhai Patel, president of Leicester’s temple, which serves a Hindu community of 75 000. “We have always had links with India,” he says. “I did not have immediate family here, but I had lots of friends. We have  astrong cillage system because we were all farmers.” Patel, he says, is also a title bestowed by the Moguls who ruled India for more than 200 years. It was given for sorting out disputes between villagers, and therfore “Patel” means magistrate or administrator as well as farmer.

So even the Moguls were aware of the Patels’ instinctive characteristic, to manage, to placate and, so the self-criticism runs, to avoid trouble of any kind. There is a joke about a Patel who sees a woman being attacked by muggers and wades in, putting them to flight. The woman rounds on him and beats him up. “I’m a Patel,” he pleads, “I saved you.” “Imposter,” says the woman, “You can’t be a Patel if you’re in a fight.”

Arvindbhai Patel, who came here as an electronics student in 1961  and founded the Brent Indian Association 30 years ago, says that the first ever Patel in Britain was rpobably a Dr Patel who, in 1930, speculated in property by buying a large chunk of Uxbridge Road in Pinner, north-west London. But the first modern day Mr Patel is believed to be Jivanji Patel, 71, of Kenton in north London. He had a row with his fater back in Gujarat, borrowed 3000 rupees from a neighbour and arrived here in 1954 with £3 in his pocket and nowhere to stay. He knocked on a door somewhere in South Woodford, east London. A woman answered it. Mr Patel brought his hands together and bowed in a typical Hindu greeting and then said the only English words he knew, “Room. Bed. Sleep.”

The woman called her husband who invited Mr Patel in. Mr Patel remembers their names as George and Betty. They gave him some food, got the local newspaper out, and telephoned numbers that were advertising rooms to let. Then they drove Mr Patel around inspecting them. He got one for 15 shillings (75p) a week. Next day he got a job as a labourer in a furniture workshop for £7 a week.

Mr Patel now lives with his wife, his son and daughter-in-law and their children in a four-bedroom corner house in a suburban street, a shrine to Mahatma Ghandi in his living room. He remembers those days with dewy-eyed nostalgia for a country free of hooligans, drugs and crime. “I love this country and its people,” he says with unashamed affection.

It was six months before he met another Asian, a hospital nurse, “but I had so many friends it did not matter. At Christmas, George and Betty invited me to share dinner with them.” Mr Patel eventually set up his own printing business. He is distinctly sniffy about the Patels who have arrived more recently. “They all want to be millionaires in five minutes,” he says. “People should ask what they can do for their country, not what their country can do for them.”

Certainly the Patels’ impact on Leicester is everywhere. Rita Patel runs Belgrave Baheno, the Asian women’s organization; Bhavesh Patel edits the Asian edition of the evening newspaper; Veejay Patel is a member of the city council.

Vivacious 26-year-old Jyotti Patel is  a playwright (her latest play, True Blue, about an Asian housewife who tries to become a Tory MP was broadcast on Radio 4 last December) and former television scriptwriter for Eastenders and Emmerdale. She represents something of the new generation of British-born Patels trying to establish freedoms for themselves outside the sometimes suffocating confines of Patel family life.

“Patels need a good kick up the backside,” Jyoti says. “They accept things to easily. When I go back to my part of Leicester, I ask girls, “Where do you work, then?” and they all say, “Walkers Crisps”. Ninety percent of the workforce at Walkers must be Asian, and 60 percent of them Patels.”

Writing and performing arts are generally no-go areas for Patels except for local Gujarati theatre groups [the odds were stacked against me! I never knew!] Raj Patel, actor and founder of the British Asian Theatre in north London, nearly had to run away from home when he won a place in drama school and his parents suddenly realized he was serious about it. He is one of the few full-time acting Patels around, though his son Sarfraz, 15, has appeared on television several times, including twice in The Bill.

“Patels like to be solicitors, doctors and accountants,” he says. “They are going into business to make money in a big way. One thing’s for sure: the next generation won’t be carrying any fruit crates.”

In any case their base, the corner shop, is beset by supermarket competition. May Patels are looking at business prospects abroad. Some are thinking about going to the United States (around 50 000 Patels already) and others are even going back to Uganda. Still others are assessing opportunities on the Continent.

I dial 153 and say, “I want Mr Patel in Frankfurt.”

“Which one?” says the operator, “I’ve got seven.”