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So I often end up listening to
Farming Today anyway. Once I’m up, then I might as well make a
pot of tea, because Eunice will be awake, grumbling that my
“tutting and harrumphing” about the cat had woken her too. As
the years go on, I find that I’m sleeping less, so the lie-in
has become pointless. Today was a case in point. Brought up a
mug of tea to Eunice, couldn’t get back into bed without turfing
out the cat. Merely suggested that we get a cat flap, so the
animal could come and go as it pleases.
“No, Bernard, really. If you
build a cat flap you’ll get every tom, puss and moggy coming
into the house. You know how Hermès gets bullied by that ginger
monster from over the back.”
Eunice turned to stroke the
cat’s belly, while it waved a paw coquettishly. “Poor Hermès .
You wouldn’t even feel safe on Mummy’s bed any more, would you,
Darling?”
“She’s a cat, for Christ’s
sake! A killing machine refined over ten million years of
evolution with teeth and claws for ripping and tearing flesh.
There is nothing in the DNA of a sabre-toothed tiger that says
some poor bloody caveman had to get up at a quarter to six to
give it a saucer of milk and a cuddle.”
“Bernard, Hermès is a
domesticated animal, not some escapee from Longleat.”
“Tell that to the tortured
sparrows I’ve had to pull from its maw. She chews off the flight
feathers and the feet and watches the poor things as they flap
helplessly. Quite puts me off breakfast.”
“Well, we’re not having a
cat-flap and that’s final.”
And so it goes. Eunice gets
her way, and I relent. After the best part of three decades at
home, Eunice is in her element. Everything is arranged just the
way she wants, from the anti-macassars on the sofas to the
myriad baskets constructed at her evening classes that gather
dust on every inch of sideboard, mantel piece and coffee tables,
like a legion of refugees from some savannah bondage ritual.
As the
Johnny-come-lately I am told I’m in the way in the kitchen, that
I clutter up the sitting room and am merely a nuisance in the
dining room. I actually can’t get into either bathroom except by
appointment, and as for the bedroom…well, I tell you about that
later. Suffice it to say once Eunice has had a drink or two the
threat of hippopotamus manoeuvres is real enough to deter any
move into that room. In fact I only feel at home in the den,
where I have my desk, PC and investing materials, or up in the
loft where my model railway is taking shape.
Monday
4th April: Investing at a run
Investing has for me has
become something like cross–country running was when I went to
St Crispin’s: Something I have been told to do for my own good,
which I rarely enjoy, and which requires rather more stamina
than I had bargained for. And one more thing about investing:
Like cross-country I always seem to come last. The
trouble with owning shares is actually quite simple. It’s great
fun when prices are going up, and awful when they’re going down.
Despite what I’ve been told by those who supposedly know better,
there’s nothing whatever you can do to influence which of those
experiences you get. Look at Railtrack for example. Seemed a
fantastic bet when John Major privatised it along with the rest
of the railways in 1993. No-one cared about the railway
infrastructure it owned, it was the brownfield land that got
investors salivating. All that undeveloped waste land around the
sidings and marshalling yards, the old disused tunnels, the
rights of way, the forgotten weed-strewn acres. Then what
happened? October 2001, down comes the whole edifice, pulled
into administration when Stephen Byers refused it any more
government money. I paid 360p for the shares in 1993, could have
sold them for £17 at the peak of the market (why didn’t I? I
have no idea) and then they were suspended at 276p. I got most
of this back eventually, but that was a big comedown from the
compensation we should have had.
That was merely a typical
experience. My portfolio of shares in 1999 was worth £130,000.
Now, six years later it’s down to £82,000. Almost every disaster
during the great bear market has come to visit me: The split cap
debacle, Equitable Life, Railtrack, plus a mis-sold endowment
mortgage. Thank God for the MoD index-linked pension.
Perhaps
the most irritating thing is the hours I have spent, writing
down the closing prices, using my old slide rule to calculate
returns, jotting down when the dividends are due and all that. I
should just have done what my mother does and stick it in Aunty
Vi’s Burmese teapot.
Wednesday 6th April: Taxing conversations
First day of the new tax year.
Plenty of capital losses in the old one to set against future
gains, should I ever have any future gains. Eunice has been on
at me again about cholesterol, having caught me in the den
inflagrante with a packet of Scottish shortbread. I had
secreted them in the lockable desk drawer where I keep my Hornby
catalogues, but once the door opened I was caught like a
startled rabbit.
“Bernard, what are you
eating?”
“Just a meagre biscuit, Dear,
to keep body and soul together.”
“There’s nothing meagre about
that. Do you know how much fat there is in a shortbread biscuit?
It’s 28 per cent! Come on, you remember what the doctor said.
You don’t want to end up like my Uncle Giles.”
“What, you mean having to move
to Slough?”
“No, I mean having a
coronary.”
“The heart attack that killed
him was brought on by a road accident, not by a Walker’s
shortbread!”
“Well yes, but it was a clot
that blocked off his blood vessels.”
“The clot in question was the
one in the Astra that shot the lights on the Hanger Lane
Gyratory System and bent Giles’s Peugeot.”
“It’s not funny, Bernard.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“You could easily die, and I’d
be a widow!”
Hm. Yes, that would make you
think, wouldn’t it?
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