Dunces with Wolves: The third volume of the Bernard Jones Investing Diaries

by Nick Louth

  “What investments, Bernard?” she responds

  “Your shares. You have hundreds of thousands of pounds tied up in shares that are going down.”

  “No I don’t. My money’s in the Post Office. Anyway, going down where?

  “Look, Mum, you have a portfolio at the stockbrokers, don’t you? You know, Marks & Spencer and British Airways? Shares traded on the stock market. And prices are falling very fast.”

  “Ooh, has Marks got a sale on then? I could do with a new cardy. This one’s starting to pill on the sleeves. Still, that’s British Home Stores for you, they never quite had the quality”

  “Mum, please listen. This isn’t about shopping, it’s about your savings. If you don’t believe me call Mary Asterby of the WI, she’ll explain it to you. Only please do something, because you are losing thousands of pounds every day.”

  Friday 18th January: Severe Handbagging

  The FTSE plunged below 5600 this morning. Suddenly feel a little nervous about my mother’s retail-heavy portfolio. Rang Mary Asterby, Dot’s investment guru from the WI. After receiving five minutes of severe hectoring I wish I hadn’t bothered.

  “Well really, Mr Jones. I really don’t think it is any business of yours how your mother’s investments are arranged. She came to us because you were bullying her, and now you are at it again.”

  “Look, what you did was very good initially, I’ll admit that,” I said. “You got her to spread her investments over a wide range of shares, but you just overdid it on the retailers. The portfolio has underperformed the FTSE 100 by 10% since the summer.”

  “How would you know, Mr Jones? I’m not aware you are privy to the current constituents of the portfolio.”

  “Er...no. I just assumed that what was in it in July is still in it.”

  “Let me tell you something, Mr Jones. The Knott’s Green WI share club, of which I am the chair, has outperformed the FTSE All-share by an average 2% every year since inception in 1957. We know what we are doing. I have taken your mother under my wing, and I will look after her. Your self-serving ‘help’ is not appreciated. Are we perfectly clear?”

  Elevenses: After that I needed a jaffa cake, six squares of Aero and a shortbread to recover.

  Saturday 19th January: Hippopotamuses Manoeuvring

  Had a nightmare about being charged by a herd of hippopotamus wearing fishnet tights and fluffy slippers. Awake in panic from this horrific vision, and then realise what my unconscious is trying to tell me. There really is a herd on the way! Our anniversary is on the 29th, Eunice’s birthday, Feb 4th (I wonder if Harland and Wolff have a plaque commemorating their most durable dreadnought) and then Valentine’s Day itself. I thought that as the years wore on (and my lower vertebrae wore out) the physical act would gradually be consigned to the cupboard of our marriage along with the silly love letters and noisome endearments. Not a bit of it. Led on by Irmgard, that rabid feminist, Eunice is demanding that I spend valuable railway modelling time exploring obscure new erogenous zones. There are apparently such a profusion of them (are they downloadable from the Internet?) that they now denote them just with letters. Now we’re up to ‘G’ and this one’s so tiny it is just called a ‘spot’. Unable to find it so far. I suspect it’s lurking near a mini-roundabout in West Bromwich. It’s certainly not on my 1988 AA road atlas. Perhaps they have directions on satnav?

  Sunday 20th January: Tax Demands

  Oh God, Oh God. I’ve forgotten to do my tax return and it has to be with them, plus the money, by the end of the month. Can’t find the damn form anywhere. Perhaps the easiest thing would be to do it online. I know I did sign up last year and didn’t use it. Cannot find the password anywhere. Phone up the help desk, spent a long while waiting listening to bloody Vivaldi, finally got through. With new password I get online, but the little wavy Windows flag thingy on Internet Explorer just waves and nothing happens. After half an hour I ring up again. More Vivaldi. Finally I get to speak to someone. The website’s apparently busy. Well, there’s a surprise at the height of tax panic season. There’s no planning is there? It’s just like going to the damn Post Office at lunchtime. Finally at 11.17pm, six hours later, I finish inputting my meagre figures. The resultant bill is £1430.16, less than I’d feared but still unaffordable.

  There’s only one thing for it. Instead of paying for Eunice’s credit card bill with cash, I’ll use the cash in my account to settle the tax bill, and pay Eunice’s Barclaycard bill with one of those cunning but dangerous credit card cheques I got with my gold card. It’s a cash advance that looks like proper money, and the start of a very slippery slope. I hope I don’t end up like Martin Gale, running round in ever decreasing financial circles with only an IVA to look forward to. Finally get to bed at 2.15am, waking Eunice.

  “Bernard, where on earth have you been? It’s gone two.”

  “Doing our taxes.”

  “I thought you did them before.”

  “Clearly not. We have a major financial crisis.”

  “Really?” she yawned. “I hope you’ve not been investing in odd loans like that Beryl Lynch,” she yawned.

  “It’s Merrill not Beryl and no I haven’t. Perhaps if you invested in fewer cars or didn’t crash them so often we’d be okay.”

  “What about you? Spending our pension money drinking at the Ring o’Bells and frittering away on shares the cash that we could put in the Halifax.” Eunice adjusted her eye mask, reinserted her earplugs and switched out the light. End of conversation.

  There you have it. The meeting of minds that is a marriage.

  Chapter Eight: Chinese Ordeal

  Monday 21st January: Tanking Shares

  Unbelievably grim morning in the market. No one really has a clue what’s going on. There is all sorts of talk about the emerging markets no longer being able to decouple. It had never seemed likely to me that they could. FTSE is under 5400. There won’t be any guidance from Wall Street because it’s closed for Martin Luther King Day. Martin Gale phones me to ask what we should do. I don’t know. Chantelle rings and asks the same. No one can get hold of K.P. Sharma. Reluctantly, I ring Peter Edgington who was blissfully unaware of all the shenanigans.

  “I really shouldn’t panic, Bernard,” he tells me. “I presume by now you have plenty of your portfolio in cash?”

  “Well, I sold all my shares in Bovis. But most of the money I raised I used to settle the excess on Eunice’s car prang and some of the stuff that wasn’t covered in the so-called comprehensive cover. I’ve probably got £400 spare.”

  “Goodness me, Bernard. I had no idea you invested on such a shoestring. Haven’t you had any luck with your mother’s holdings? I thought she was quite wealthy.”

  “Don’t get me started on that, Peter. She’s being totally obtuse. I’m sure she’ll eventually leave the whole lot to a refuge for incontinent badgers in Ormskirk.”

  ‘Perfect’ Peter is so casually superior, and so unconcerned by the market that I get very irritated. Do we not inhabit the same planet? I return to Lemon Curdistan to fret and to eat.

  Elevenses: Half a bar of Aero and two jaffa cakes.

  5pm. Hear that Jeremy Paxman has the same trouble with M&S underwear as I have. His gusset gripe earns him a meal with Stuart Rose, whereas my complaint about those bloody ridiculous tartan boxer shorts that Jem got me a couple of Christmases ago earned me nothing but sarcasm and derision.

  Tuesday 22nd January: Dungeons And Dragons

  Martin Gale rings at 8.15am to let me know what I can already see: that the market is dropping like a stone again. Definitely panicking, he wants the share club to sell everything immediately.

  “But look, Martin, we might already be near the bottom.”

  “I don’t think so. I was looking at these charts in Chronic Investor magazine, and they reckon the FTSE may hit 4900.”

  I manage to dissuade him from trying to arrange an emergency share club meeting. Once he is gone I look at my own shares, expecting carnage. Actually, it’s not t
oo bad. QinetiQ, Compass and Domino’s Pizza are all steady to improving. Hornby is miserable, but fortunately I don’t have many. Lloyds TSB is depressed, but at least I can look forward to a big dividend. However, the one thing which really enrages me is Bovis. This benighted house builder, which I sold at 490p earlier this month has jumped to 600p. Isn’t there supposed to be a housing crisis on? Falling prices, loan problems? The indebted British consumer? Looks like the market professionals just wait for all the country’s amateur Bernards to capitulate and then they buy. I feel cheated.

  At this moment Eunice pads in eating toast and jam. She is draped in a pink housecoat, has rollers in her hair and a hideous orange varnish on her toenails.

  “And how are things in the hallowed halls of high finance?” she smirks, leaning over to look at the screen while dropping blobs of greengage jam into the keyboard of the PC.

  “Well, not too bad,” I say, looking her up and down. “And how are things in the London Dungeon?”

  I cringe for the clout that never comes. Eunice’s mind is instead on high culture.

  “Don’t forget, Bernard. We’re going to see a show tonight.”

  “What? I don’t remember this.”

  “Yes you do. In told you in October. We’ve got tickets for Qing Wao Tsao at Tunbridge Wells with Irmgard and Nils.

  “Oh how absolutely thrilling,” I murmur. “What is it?”

  “It’s a rustic Chinese opera about Mao’s long march in 1934. It got absolutely rave reviews in Time Out.”

  “So did picketing Grunwick, gay rights and comprehensive schooling. Now look at the state the country’s in.”

  “Bernard, really. You’d make Mussolini seem progressive.”

  Wednesday 23rd January: Oriental Ordeal

  2am. This cannot wait until the morning. Just back from four hours of torture at the so-called Chinese opera. The programme (£3 a copy!) described it as ‘…a poignant loss of rural innocence, set against a backdrop of proletarian struggle.’ The proletarian struggle in question was presumably to afford the £40 cost per ticket plus five quid booking fee. The ‘singing’ was more like a warm-up for national cat-strangling week. No wonder China’s economy is booming, taking us westerners for suckers at every turn.

  8.45am. Get up this morning to find that the Fed cut rates by three-quarters of a point to 3.5% yesterday, and the markets have rallied strongly. This is clearly strong medicine, but I don’t really see how it will help. The global economy has overdone it on cheap loans, and has awoken with a paralysing credit hangover. However cheap the Fed makes borrowing, it won’t want to glug any more down for a while. Just as with alcohol, it’s time, not extra imbibing, that will restore health. It does, however, show that the Greenspan ‘put’ is alive and well in the days of Bernanke. Inflation worries, it seems, can go hang. Speaking of which, my MoD pension payment has cleared and I can am flush for a week or two.

  At share club, we have a full house.

  “So is it all over then?” Martin Gale asks.

  “I think it’s barely begun,” K.P. Sharma says. “There is supposed to be a European bank in trouble.”

  Chantelle, today in ripped and re-stitched mini-skirt, black eye shadow and black spider-web tights, says the metals market is sagging. Her father, a scrap metal dealer, is not getting the price for copper he was three months ago, though lead is still going well.

  “Which church roof is he off to strip today?” asks Harry.

  “He isn’t like that, “ she retorts. “You’re just prejudiced!”

  “Perhaps Harry is suffering from ferroemporiphobia,” I suggest. “Fear of those who trade iron.”

  With our accumulated dues we now have £2000 to spend, but we agree to keep it in cash until prices have fallen further.

  Thursday 24th January: Derivative Dingbat

  France’s Société Générale has come a €5 billion cropper this morning in a rogue trader scandal. Using managers’ passwords, false-hedges and delayed margin calls this financial Spiderman has apparently woven a clever web for his employers to struggle in. Just one skill missing though: an ability to make money from it.

  My tyrant grandson Digby will undoubtedly aspire to this one day, with his malevolent intelligence and cunning. I taught him to play chess last weekend. By the third game he was beating me, and by the fourth giving me advice. He may still be nine, but I can see him in fifty years time sitting in a winged armchair stroking a cat and plotted the destruction of global civilisation.

  Elevenses: No matter that the border of Lemon Curdistan is officially closed, Eunice mounts an incursion armed with rubber gloves while I am eating the last of my Aero.

  “Excuse me. The sign says ‘do not disturb’,” I say.

  “Bernard, I’ve come to do the windows. They’re as filthy as you are,” Eunice retorts, pushing past me with a J-cloth in one hand and a Windolene spray in the other. She dumps Prescott the suede pig on my lap, shoves aside a pile of annual reports, and clambers onto the desk to open the window.

  “For goodness sake woman, everything’s blowing around!”

  “I’m sorry, but I will not put up with this mess anymore,” she says. “Look at the crumbs everywhere, the coffee rings, the old cake wrappers behind the desk which you think I can’t see. Didn’t you read that research which found more germs on workplace desks than on toilet seats? Now call me picky, but I don’t want to be blamed for Endsleigh Gardens’ first outbreak of ebola.”

  After finishing scrubbing at the windows, she laid into the PC screen, squirting Windolene on it and scrubbing it vigorously. Finally she turned to face me. “Give me those,” she said, pointing to my reading glasses.

  “Oh for goodness sake. Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  “Bernard, they’re filthy and you can’t possibly see a thing.” She reaches out, I dodge and then get sprayed in the eyes.

  “Aaarggh!” I squeal, quite reasonably.

  “Stop fussing. None of this would have happened if you’d stayed still. Don’t be a cry-baby”.

  I crawl on hands and knees to the bathroom, where I rinse the damn stuff out of my eyes and wonder where the nearest refuge for battered investors is.

  Saturday 26th January: Checkmate

  Brian has some function at school, and he and Janet have dumped the Antichrist with us for the day. Entertaining this rude child was never easy, but in chess I at least thought I had an answer. Nevertheless, after eight minutes this mini-master is a queen, a knight and a battalion of pawns ahead and complains he is bored. Between moves, he either fiddles with his mobile phone or yawns loudly. I’ve an idea. I’ll get him to play Perfect Peter. Peter is in a chess club, I believe. That should be a good challenge. Besides, whoever loses, somebody who richly deserves it will be taken down a peg or two.

  Monday 28th January: Profits Hit The Buffers

  Hornby’s results today a little disappointing. Delays in delivering new products into the European market are expected to hit profits by £1 million. A little alarmed to see that hefty inflation-busting price increases are being planned. What was the point of moving to China if costs don’t come down? In any case, I might race down and get that new set of coal trucks before the rise takes effect.

  Elevenses: A Crunchie bar. I don’t know whether it is a phoney war or not, but there has been no trace of Eunice nosing through the Hornby drawer for months now. Instead, she seems to be rearranging our bedroom. There have been some very loud thumping and banging noises, and she later emerges with a flushed face. I dread to think what she is doing up there.

  Wednesday 30th January: Anniversary Antics

  Eunice has booked a room at Boarfield Priory, a five star hotel on the Weald which also boasts a haunted cellar. Perhaps she is hoping to commune with some of her more eccentric ancestors. Great aunt Gladys, for example, was known as Glad the Impaler after her dreaded soirées in which every known food (and a few unknown ones) were served on cocktail sticks. Then there was uncle Horace, who had six P&O steamer trunks (
later discovered to be stuffed with Health & Efficiency magazines), but whose only boating experience was crossing Tooting Bec Lido in a pedalo.

  We arrive to find the room is excellent and, courtesy of winter rates, not too expensive. After a first rate meal and a bottle of excellent Barolo, we follow with port. Eunice is now, as she describes it ‘squiffy’ and that undoubtedly means the hippos are being marshalled for manoeuvre. In the bedroom, I get into bed and feign (indeed, would now embrace) death, while Eunice takes two bulging carrier bags into the bathroom. I am genuinely asleep by the time she emerges, but as thirteen stone of spouse crashes onto the bed it is the squeal of PVC that truly frightens me. Pinioned beneath the covers, I look up to see what appears to be a crimson blancmange unbuttoning my pyjama top. With apparitions like this to haunt you, who needs ghosts? Next I am turfed out of my pyjama bottoms. This process is conducted with all the gentleness of a Mount Pleasant shop steward emptying mailbags at the end of an unofficial strike. Eunice doesn’t remove her plasticised ensemble, but from the squealing and creaking, it seems close to making its own decision. A cold arm then snakes beneath the covers for five minutes of clumsy fumbling and groping. Eventually, Eunice sticks her head under the covers and declares: “Is that the best you can do? Oh come on Bernard, make an effort.”