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

by Nick Louth

  “But it’s late and I’m tired.”

  “It’s our anniversary. It really isn’t too much to ask, is it, that a wife can expect her husband to make love to her on the day which celebrates their marriage?”

  “I’m sorry, I really am trying, for your sake. But it’s a quarter to two, I’m dog tired and I’ve had three glasses of wine and a port.”

  “Well, I’ve had four glasses, two G&Ts, and a port, and I’m more than ready.”

  “But you’re always more than ready, regardless of circumstances. Anyway, everyone knows alcohol has the opposite effect on women than on men.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have drunk so much then, if you knew it was going to inhibit your erection. You have this problem time and again, and won’t do anything about it.”

  “The only problem I have is trying to get my fair share of a bottle of Barolo,” I retorted.

  “And another thing. I make a huge effort to arouse you, and you do absolutely nothing to reciprocate. I mean I’ve got a new outfit, I wear stockings which is what I read that men always find sexy, but there you are in a pair of worn-out British Home Stores pyjamas that you’ve had since the Reformation. I give up, really I do.”

  Well, thank God for that.

  Monday 4th February: Generations Apart

  Eunice is 60 today. I have, as requested, bought her a green leotard (Size 16, Age Concern £2!) “Look, I’m the Green Goddess,” she says, with a twirl that threatens to send acres of mottled cellulite into orbit.

  “Well, you’ll certainly be a great help if the fire brigade goes out on strike again,” I reply.

  Eunice is distracted from considering my reply by the arrival of a four-foot long parcel. While I sip my coffee, she tears apart the packaging to reveal a series of metal tubes.

  “Oh. Decided to retrain as a scaffolder?” I ask.

  “No, Bernard. I’m going to pole dance my way to fitness.”

  “You’re going to what?”

  “It’s the ‘in’ thing. All the moves that these burlesque dancers do are the perfect way to achieve true fitness. I want to sculpt by body back to youthful perfection. Look, here’s the DVD which shows you how to do it.”

  “Eunice, dearest,” I say in my softest tones. “You are 60 today. Not sixteen. Perhaps something a little less demanding?”

  “Bernard, I sometimes think you’d like me to be gradually embalmed in sweet sherry in front of the test card, like your mother. You may be resigned to slipping into a cardigan-shrouded old age, but I am not. I read an article in the Mail the other day that a non-smoking woman of my age can expect to live until she’s almost 90. That’s another 50% more life than I’ve lived already. I’m determined to do it with style. We’re at peace, aren’t we? We can afford to travel the world and we have our health. We shouldn’t squander our good luck! I shall lose two stone in the next two months. Once I am trim again, believe me, I shall turn heads.”

  Turn heads? Probably not. Stomachs, certainly. It’s all very well to live life to the full, but that costs money and our pension arrangements are stretched funding a frugal old age, the odd cruise to the Canaries, new cane furniture for the conservatory and motoring holidays in the Dordogne. The bewhiskered actuaries at Norwich Union would be appalled to see that the nation’s thin gruel of with-profits and annuity income is actually being used by over-ambitious matrons to fund Raymond Revue Bar callisthenics, Caribbean paragliding lessons and scuba-diving adventures.

  “So was this what all this grunting and banging upstairs was about? Were you doing exercises?”

  “Yes. I’m strengthening my pelvic floor.”

  “If I were you, I’d concentrate on strengthening the bedroom floor first. We don’t want it to turn this into a trapeze show on the dining room light fitting do we?”

  Chapter Nine: A Tough Delivery

  Friday 8th February: BHP Not High Enough

  The share club’s one successful pick, mining company BHP Billiton, has today been labelled as ‘high enough’ by Chronic Investor magazine. High enough? Not for us. It was 1900p a few months back, and is only 1650p now. Given China’s hunger for metals that’s surely not nearly high enough. We bought it for 1155p back in 2006, and are hoping for a crisp twenty quid.

  Elevenses: Two jaffa cakes while waiting in for a delivery. I ordered Eunice a Valentine’s Day gift online, a book originally published in 1896, called A Gentlewife’s Guide To Pleasing Her Spouse , by Lady Lucinder Mockett. I hope it might rebalance Eunice’s views on the purpose of marriage. There is plenty about hiring domestic staff, arranging tissue paper when packing suitcases, and the correct way to iron spats. The nearest it has to coverage of sexual congress is an instruction of how to faint in style upon discovery of a gentleman’s ‘disarrayed cummerbund’.

  5pm. No sign of the delivery. Damn!

  Tuesday 12th February: Car Chase

  Still no sign of that book. Rang the publisher who said a copy would definitely arrive tomorrow. Ten minutes later, just as I was getting the car out of the garage to go to the Ring o’Bells, I saw a City Link delivery van pulling away from the front of the house. I rushed back inside to find a note saying they had been ‘unable to deliver a package because there was no reply’! I leapt into the car, and squealed out of the drive like Kojak heading for a wig fitting. The van was still in sight at the junction, but pulled out into the main road as I arrived. I tailed the vehicle for five miles, during which time it shot two sets of lights on amber, drove half on the pavement to avoid giving way to a cyclist and scattered two pram-pushing mums from a zebra crossing. Flashing my lights had no effect, but I finally cornered it at a council estate. The driver, a skinny youth who looked about 12 and had a Bluetooth earpiece, looked at me as if intended to rob him.

  “Excuse me, I believe you have a parcel for me.”

  “S’number?”

  “Number 17, Endsleigh Gardens.”

  “No mate, the delivery number of the package, like.”

  “How should I know? You haven’t bloody delivered it. How can I give…?”

  “It’s on the card. The one I put ‘froo the door.”

  “I haven’t got that, I left it behind trying to catch you. Look. The parcel is for my wife, Eunice Jones of number 17…”

  “Sorry mate. Phone the depot, and we’ll deliver it tomorrow.”

  “But it’s here in this van, right now! I can save you a journey.”

  “Sorry mate. I can’t give you a package addressed to someone else. It’s data protection, like.”

  “But you’d do it at the door!” I bellowed.

  “Ah yes, but then we know that’s the address n’all.”

  “But I’ve already TOLD YOU the address. Okay, here’s proof,” I fumbled in my pocket for my wallet, and eventually found my video hire card.

  “Sorry mate. I can’t do deliveries in the street.”

  “But I’ve just shown you my address!”

  “It’s not proof. You could just have mugged someone.”

  “How would I know that there was a parcel?”

  “Now, if you had the card, it might be different,” he said.

  “How? I could still have mugged someone!”

  “Yeah, but you’d have the delivery number.”

  “So it’s alright to mug someone so long as you get the bloody delivery number, is it?” I shouted.

  “Now you’ve adopted a threatening attitude. We can’t deliver to customers who adopt a threatening attitude,” the youth said.

  “But you’ve already refused to deliver to me!”

  “Keep your hair on, mate. We’ll deliver it tomorrow.”

  Absolutely fuming, I returned to my car while the van containing Eunice’s parcel pulled away to continue its mystery tour of Kent.

  Wednesday 13th February: Failure To Deliver

  Notice that Domino’s Pizza has recovered quite well to 220p after the scare about the cheese price which hit it in November. To my view this is a stock that should do well in rec
essionary times. Britons now spend more on getting others to cook for us than we do on food we prepare ourselves, and Domino’s represents the most affordable end of this marketplace.

  Speaking of deliveries, by the time I go off to share club, there is still no sign of the damn parcel. I look up City Link’s website and discover it is part of Rentokil. This is adding insult to injury! I had a painful share foray into that company’s shares in 1998, which ended in loss-making ignominy in the market bubble of 2000. As far as I’m concerned Rentokil never seems to be able to deliver.

  Thursday 14th February: Rentokilled

  9.30am. It is now Valentine’s Day and the book for Eunice has still not arrived. She’s doing some last minute grocery shopping (for God-knows-what reason, as we’re eating out tonight) and I’m twitching the curtains like Thora Hird waiting for the green and yellow City Link van that I was faithfully promised would be here.

  Elevenses: Two jaffa cakes, no book.

  11.45am. Try to phone City Link, which must surely be the worst performing part of the Rentokil empire. Nonsensical automated voicemail system. After two minutes keying in my inside leg measurement or something, I slam the phone down in disgust and walk into the hall. There, on the doormat, is a delivery card: ‘We called but you were out.’ In the middle of my fury (akin to something tested on Christmas Island in 1957) the doorbell rings. I snatch up the nearest weapon, Jemima’s pink polka-dot umbrella, and just pray that it is a Rentokil employee, who I intend to dispatch with Ninja-like efficiency.

  I open the door to see Eunice, laden with bags, and presumably unable to find her key. “Bernard, What are you doing with that? It isn’t raining, you know.”

  “I’m premeditating murder,” I say, as I help with the bags.

  “On Valentine’s Day too, you old romantic! What did I do?”

  I explain about the parcel and get a sympathetic hearing.

  7.30pm. Dinner at a trendy Greek restaurant in the West End, recommended to us by Irmgard and Nils. Highlights were getting olive oil on my best blazer, a piece of kleftiko bone which chipped a filling, and a whopping great bill which included a hitherto undisclosed £6.75 per head ‘cover charge’. While paying I offered my hope that as well as covering the cost of the stale pitta bread and teaspoon of humous and olives served, this would be put toward the cost of a course in civility for the waiting staff. While the manager scowled, Eunice told him to ignore me because I was going through the ‘male menopause.’

  11pm. Eunice had already had four big glasses of Chablis, but insisted we dip into the Duke of Abercrumble, or whatever, next door for a ‘nightcap’. The noise hit us like a wall, the moment the door was opened. Like many West End pubs, it was festooned with signed black and white pictures of old time theatrical alcoholics. Peering at this legion of the forgotten and the forgettable, who had undoubtedly never visited this hostelry or at least never remembered, I marvelled they still had the nous to write “To my dearest landlady Violet” and other such tosh. Hacking my way to the bar, through thousands of baffled looking Korean tourists drinking half pints of Guinness, I reached an immovable obstacle: a ruck of bullet-headed South Africans in rugby shirts, none less than six feet tall, and in deafening good humour. Attracting the attention of the only barmaid, a dull-eyed Estonian stick insect of sullen countenance, proved quite impossible from this scrum half position, so I was forced to insinuate myself into the sweaty canyon between two gigantic voortrekkers.

  “Hey, man. What about an ‘igscuse me’,” boomed one, as I nudged my way under his armpit.

  “I’ve been saying nothing else for five minutes,” I responded. “I even tapped you on the back, but all you did was scratch it.”

  “Just thought I’d got a gogga bug on me shoulder,” he laughed “Tell ya what, tell me what you want and I’ll order.”

  I told him we wanted a small whisky and ginger and a brandy. “Ach, bra, they’re all small here. Still, let’s get you fixed up right.” He leaned over the bar, grabbed the barmaid by the shoulder and shouted something in her ear. He then took my twenty and passed it over the bar. The glasses passed back to me were full. “That’s a double Courvoisier for your lady wife and this is for you, it’s bladdy lekker.”

  “Look, that’s very kind but I just wanted...”

  “Here’s your change, man.” He gave me a fiver and a few coppers.

  “Is that it? For two drinks?” I exclaimed.

  “Ya, London’s ixpensive, isn’t it?” he said, and turned away.

  At times like this, you have a simple choice. Either stand on principle and get your face re-arranged, or learn to like whatever it was you’ve been given. I took a sip of mine, which wasn’t Scotch, but was quite tasty and handed Eunice her brandy.

  “It’s Courvoisier,” I said. “A double.”

  “Ooh, Bernard. Are you trying to get me squiffy?” Eunice said, batted her eyelids at me in a highly unsubtle fashion.

  “Trying? It’s stopping you that would be the achievement.”

  It took me half an hour to steer a giggly Eunice back to the hotel. It was one of those supposedly genteel places just off Russell Square which charge £150 a night, but in fact wouldn’t rate much above a B&B in Birmingham or Blackpool. Squeaky taps, hair still clogging the plughole, and (I’m pretty sure) a cockroach in the seal of the mini-bar. Feeling sober and broke, I started cleaning my teeth, knowing that a Valentine’s Day hippopotamus manoeuvre was, barring miracles, only a few minutes away.

  When I returned to the bedroom, Eunice was sprawled on the bed wearing, or let us more accurately say ‘largely contained within’, a French maid’s outfit. “Ooh. M’sieur. I sink I forgot to clean ze room. How can I, ‘ow you say, apologise? I promise I’ll do any sink you want, “she slurred in her best ‘Allo ‘Allo accent.

  “Well, that’s handy because there is indeed plenty of grime around the hand basin. And I’m afraid I found a toenail clipping on the cistern...”

  “Oh, Bernard. Keep up the make-believe. Don’t be a misery,” Eunice pouted. “Alright, come here. Tell me your fantasies.”

  “Well, I’m not sure you want...”

  “Come on, I’m open minded. It’s Valentine’s Day and I really don’t care how dirty it is.”

  “Well, what I really like to imagine is,”

  “Yes?”

  “I imagine I’m in an enormous room, with dappled sunlight filtering through a skylight. There’s a little smoke in the air, and a gentle vibration in the distance. Finally, there’s a gentle ringing of bells as the 4.13 Great Western Express from Bristol Temple Meads crosses the beautifully constructed box-girder bridge in perfect double ‘O’ scale...”

  “Bernard! Not that kind of fantasy. You know...sexual.”

  “I’m long past those, I’m afraid.”

  “No you’re not...”

  “I am.”

  “So what was it you were thinking about doing with that au pair, then?”

  “With Astrid? What do you mean?”

  “Don’t try that innocent look with me. When you were a peeping Tom on her nude sunbathing in the O’Riordan’s garden. Were you anticipating discussing the latest Hornby accessories?”

  “I did not peep. I was repairing the light, and I fell.”

  “Nonsense. You’re a voyeur and you well know it!”

  “I am not. I happened to casually glance...”

  “Bernard, you need the spinal flexibility of an anaconda to see out of that skylight. You did not glance, you risked your life on a rickety stool so that you could ogle like an old pervert. I wouldn’t mind so much, but you never ogle me. You don’t even...look. It’s as if I don’t exist for you,” Eunice sobbed.

  And so with sheer inevitability, another Valentine’s Day, all expense and expectation, collapses into a furious row. This is so frustrating. We could have had a perfectly sensible and pleasant evening, like the rest of the grey generation, eating a quiet meal with a glass of wine. Then we could stroll back to our hotel room at 10pm to watch
a film, or even repeats of Last of the Summer Wine . But no, Eunice constantly attempts to rekindle the fires of teenage passion from cold ashes that, in my case, were long ago swept up and dumped into the green recycling bin of our marriage.

  Monday 18th February: Pole Vaulting

  I’ve been whiling away the hours waiting for the damn parcel by looking up Rentokil Initial’s annual report. What a rambling collection of businesses this is. Everything from rat poison to washroom servicing, interior plant landscaping, and in Asia “E-security”. I’d love to short-sell the shares, but my spread-betting account is moribund and bereft of cash for margin. Besides, it really didn’t work when I did the same with Marks & Spencer, I just succeeded in losing hundreds of pounds.

  Elevenses: I had been hoping for the alleged re-delivery before midday, but by the time I allow myself an eccles cake, there is no sign of City Link. There is however some banging coming from the dining room. Once I have swallowed my tuck, I wander in to see Eunice on her hands and knees, with the contents of her pole dancing package laid out on the floor.

  “I said I’d assemble that for you, dear.”

  “Yes, you also said in 1983 you would re-grout the kitchen tiles and in 2001 you solemnly promised to re-paper our bedroom. This, at least, I can do myself,” Eunice replies.

  “Yes, dear.” I retreat to the den and try to ignore the clangs and grunts. When I return in half an hour Eunice is nowhere to be seen, but the pole is up. Indeed, so far up that the tightly braced floor and ceiling plates have cracked the delicate plaster above.

  “For God’s sake woman,” I mutter as I try to ease the tension. However, I’ve only slackened a half-inch when the bottom half of the pole falls out of its sleeve with a ding, while above a chunk of plaster the size of a dustbin lid cracks away. The only thing stopping a ceiling collapse is the top half of the pole, which I am holding as firmly as I can.