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

by Nick Louth

  Anyway, speaking of criminal investigations, it is Digby’s tenth birthday today. The malevolent mite has been wheedling me for weeks, demanding to have ‘a wee.’ This was not a request for a visit to the loo as I’d first thought, but some piece of highly expensive computer kit. What Wii does, I cannot tell you, but apparently there have been lots of them sold. If it keeps him out of mischief, so much the better.

  Tuesday 20th May: Planning For The Future

  Apart from getting the Antichrist a ‘Wii’ for his birthday, I’ve made good on my plan to start him up a stakeholder pension. I’ll be paying in £1 a week, on which I’ll get tax relief, and he won’t be able to lay hands on it for at least 50 years. Using the ready-reckoner spreadsheet that Peter gave me, and assuming 7.5% a year returns, the first year’s contribution alone will be worth £6300 by 2058. Hopefully by then he will be less like a scheming third-world despot and more like a civilised human being. If not, there’ll probably be enough money in his pot for him to buy a tropical island tax haven from which he can pillage the world through Internet viruses. By then I’ll be long gone, but all I can vainly hope is he appreciates his old grandad who laboured long and hard under the MoD yoke to earn his own pension, only to see it frittered away by his wife, daughter and Gordon Brown. Perhaps if they’ve invented time machines by then, Digby can bring me some of the cash back!

  Elevenses: In maudlin mood, I eat two lemon-iced cupcakes, a taste redolent of youth. Proust would have approved.

  Thursday 22nd May: Question And Answer

  Brian rings me to tell me the latest crisis in Britain’s education system. I’ve long thought that GCSEs were handed out free with petrol or as consolation prizes on scratch cards, because there is no other way to explain why a nation of ignorant knife-wielding hoodies can get ever-higher marks. Now however, we hear the truth, as demonstrated by the GCSE music paper, that the answers are printed on the back of the exam papers.

  Considering my own modest success in the General Certificate of Education, as it was then, I feel I can hold up my head proudly among today’s over-qualified media studies ‘yoof’ who can’t knot a tie, can’t polish a pair of shoes, can’t distinguish the circumstances when to use ‘yours sincerely’ and ‘yours faithfully’ nor manage a ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. I can’t see it will be long before pandering to the young will allow the first A-level in texting to enter the national curriculum.

  Saturday 24th May: Ethics Girl

  While looking up some investment funds on Trustnet, I stumbled across M&S Ethical. This is the fund into which, despite my protestations, Eunice plonked the remaining £4500 from her mini-cash ISA in March last year. Well, over that time the fund has fallen by 14.6%. That serves her right, quite frankly. Of course, if she’d invested it my own portfolio, I’d have lost her rather more. But they would have been good honest losses, not trendy ecological idealistic losses. At least I’m aiming to make money first, last and in between. Ethical funds have other priorities. I had assumed that the fund must have missed out on the minerals boom, because there’s nothing these Guardian-reading types hate so much as mines in pristine rain forests, particularly when half the executives are either mates of George W. Bush or unrepentant white South Africans. However, I see that one of the largest holdings in the fund is RioTinto, which I’m sure I recall as being the most pilloried and hated of all the miners. Have things really changed so much that RioTinto has become winsomely ethical, or do we just have a new set of ethics? I remain baffled.

  Elevenses: I’m just about to reach for my last cup cake in the Hornby drawer, when Eunice walks into Lemon Curdistan, completely uninvited. I quickly slam the drawer shut, and turn to face the invader who is armed with a J-cloth and Mr Sheen.

  “Do you have a visa, Madam? Cleaning services aren’t expected until Monday.”

  “Don’t be tiresome, Bernard. I’ve got to dust today. I’ve got an appointment at the hospital on Monday.”

  “But I’m busy, can’t you see?”

  “Surely losing more of our money can be postponed until this afternoon. While I’m busy here, trying to keep this household from dissolving in filth, you could make yourself useful by putting away those clothes you left all over the bed.”

  “Can’t you just give me a few minutes?”

  My plea was cut off as Eunice stacked all my papers into a heap, dropped them on the floor and squirted her spray everywhere. Under such determined chemical attack, the forces of Lemon Curdistan were forced to regroup.

  “As for losing money,” I sniped from the safety of the hall. “You perhaps want to see what Marks & Spencer’s ethical funds have done for you. I think you’ll find that you’ve lost enough to buy a dozen pairs of St Michael elasticated trousers, twenty flowery blouses and a pile of underwear the size of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.”

  Chapter Sixteen: Hug A Hoodie

  Monday 26th May: Tradesmen’s Entrance

  Oh thank you, Lord! An estate agent’s board has appeared in the front garden of the O’Riordans, our troublesome neighbours. The moment I see it I feel like falling on my knees and prostrating myself to every known deity for this stroke of good fortune. I may not be a great fan of estate agents, but I wish them God’s speed on this one. They will certainly be earning their commission. When I think of the O’Riordan’s noisy parties, always rounded off at 5am with a 500 decibel karaoke rendition of Una Paloma Blanca, the behaviour of their horde of ginger children, and their abuse of that lovely au pair Astrid, I can’t wait for them to go. Certainly, that bloody trampoline alone, with the vile screeching language of the catapulted occupants right next to our hedge, must have knocked more off the value of our home than the entire sub-prime mortgage crisis.

  I recall one Saturday night at about 3am hearing a commotion in the garden, our garden. Armed only with a rolled-up copy of The Spectator I chased out several hooded youths from behind the shed. There I discovered the recumbent and barely conscious form of Bethany O’Riordan, surrounded by a half dozen empty bottles of Diamond White Cider. Still only sixteen, but like her friends she was clearly capable of supporting the drink sales of Matthew Clarke, and indeed its parent company Constellation Brands, throughout any recession. If only its other customers could be so resolute. Once I’d awoken her, and she’d been violently ill all over my courgette patch, it became clear from her dishevelled clothing that she’d taken David Cameron’s advice about what to do with hoodies to a rather literal and extreme conclusion.

  Now that it’s clear we are losing our neighbours from hell I rush off to tell Eunice the good news.

  “Yes, yes, Ken’s run off with another woman. Didn’t you know?” Eunice responds, flicking through the Radio Times.

  “No, how was I supposed to know?”

  “Come on, Bernard, keep up. Ken’s car hasn’t been there for months, has it? Lisa’s going out with Shaft King Exhaust Replacements now.

  “Pardon?”

  “Shaft King. You see the van there all the time. He’s the dark fellow with the hairy chest. Much better than the Kev’s Carpet Tiles and Underlay, I reckon, though Daphne disagrees. She doesn’t mind bald ones, so long as they don’t have tattoos above the shoulders. The best though was that hunky young fellow from Rigby’s Rod’n’Drain, but he only stayed for one weekend.

  “I can’t begin to understand how you know all this. Do you hide all day behind the azalea with binoculars, like Bill Oddie?”

  “It’s the only excitement I get, Bernard. Vicarious thrills are better than none. Besides, I’m quite restrained. Daphne says that from the skylight over her linen cupboard you can see Lisa’s water bed. Apparently it’s rough seas, most nights.”

  I immediately steer away from that subject. Still, the most baffling part of all this is why Lisa O’Riordan thinks Yellow Pages is a dating agency. No VAT of course, cash-only. The biggest question is who pays whom.

  Tuesday 27th May: Market Knowledge

  I walk into Lemon Curdistan after my morning constitutional t
o find Eunice at my computer, squinting over the top of her reading glasses at estate agents’ websites.

  “Excuse me, can I ask what you’re doing?”

  “Obviously, Bernard, I’ve been finding out what the O’Riordan’s house is going for,” she replied.

  “Are you planning to buy it? Or are you just being nosey?”

  Eunice turned around on the chair and stared at me. “It isn’t nosey, Bernard, to establish the value of assets adjacent to your own. It’s sensible. It adds to market knowledge, I thought you would understand that as an investor.”

  “And what have you discovered?”

  “Five seven five. How much did they pay?”

  “£425,000, I think. Two years ago.”

  “Well, they’ll never get that, will they?” Eunice declared. “That would mean chez nous must be worth £600,000, because our conservatory’s hardwood, not nasty cheap UPVC.”

  The amazing thing about all this is the sheer confidence of value embodied in Eunice’s views. This from a woman who was gulled into paying £185 by a market trader in Oporto for a Louis Vuitton handbag which not only turned out to be fake, but whose handles dropped off after she’d loaded it with her cosmetics, curling tongs, eyelash benders, loose change and what-not. As I said at the time, it’s just a shame that you can’t buy an Eddie Stobart handbag. It may not have the cachet, but at least it can handle the load.

  Thursday 29th May: The Plastic Fantastic

  Daphne Hanson-Hart, the wheelie bin witch of Endsleigh Gardens, has now finally found something to take her mind of the state of council refuse disposal. She’s come over for coffee with Eunice and they’ve been gabbling away about little else but the goings on at the O’Riordan house. I can hear them yakking away quite clearly in the kitchen, even from the den.

  “Did you see the other morning?” Daphne said. “I was putting the blasted recycling bin out at 7.30, and there was a young man just emerging from Lisa’s front door. He didn’t look a day over seventeen. I mean, does she have no limits at all?”

  “It wasn’t the paper boy, was it?” Eunice replied. “You know that Bethany’s been going through them like a dose of salts, don’t you? She invited four of them in to watch Ken’s old pornography collection when Lisa was out. That Joshua, you know he’s only thirteen, looks a bit like Harry Potter. Well, his mother went round to complain to Lisa in high dudgeon, brandishing these DVDs which Bethany had let him borrow.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. She showed me them: Surrey Sluts II: Confessions of a Woking Girl and Nymphomaniac Vampires of Chislehurst.”

  “Good grief. That sounds a bit worse than Confessions of a Window Cleaner,” giggled Daphne.

  “Well it’s all so artless, isn’t it? One could get quite, you know, energised by seeing some bronzed and beautifully-filmed Italian couple making frenzied love in the dappled half-light of a Tuscan dawn on the sanded floorboards of their tastefully-furnished mediaeval villa, as the bells of the Capella di San Giorgio toll solemnly in the background. By contrast, the mechanical pool-side copulations and mock orgasms of plasticised Californians rather leave me cold. It’s about as affectionately delivered as American foreign policy.”

  Daphne’s guffawing now turned into a fit of uncontrollable honking, like some incontinent goose. When she’d finally recovered, she whispered: “So, what about Bernard, then Eunice? How does he perform on the sanded floorboards?”

  “Nul points, as they say in Eurovision. I’m afraid to say that Bernard is terrified of sex. He’d rather scuttle away into the loft to play with his train set or hunch over some tedious share price screen on the damn computer.”

  “Oh dear. Have you tried...?”

  “Daphne, to be honest I have really tried everything. You know the O’Riordan’s au pair Astrid who he had a thing for? After that obsession I even offered to dress as a schoolgirl if that’s what tinkled his ivories. However, when I suggested it, he looked like he was going to be sick.”

  “It must have been good with him once, though, surely? Back when you first met.”

  “Not really. Enthusiasm counts for a lot, but you’d find more passion in the keynote speech at the AGM of the Daventry Actuarial Society. He always did suffer terribly from premature... you know.”

  “Well, that’s quite common,” Daphne sympathised.

  “Not in the bloody taxi on the way back from the cinema, it isn’t. He’s lost his deposit more often than UKIP.”

  Daphne’s tittering could not stop Eunice, whose character assassination was in full flow.

  “And as for the mechanics, well he never had a clue. Poor lamb couldn’t find a clitoris if it was lit up like the Statue of Liberty on 4 July and encircled by tug boats broadcasting the Star Spangled Banner. His idea of foreplay is to tell me about his latest Hornby shunting engine, or what the P/E ratio of Vodafone shares is. I tried to get him to stimulate my ‘G’ spot once, and after five seconds he complained of a sprained wrist. The only time I manage to get close to climax is when I’m on top, but after two minutes he’s complaining he can’t breathe, and gets all red in the face. Maybe that’s what actually does it for me, I don’t know.”

  Daphne was chuckling mightily by this time.

  “Still, I don’t have to worry too much these days,” Eunice added in a whisper. “Ever since I’ve got my little furry friend.”

  “Furry!” exclaimed Daphne. “What are you telling me?”

  “Well, not actually furry. It’s my randy little Rampant Rabbit from Ann Summers. Every time Bernard goes off to his share club on a Wednesday afternoon, I get him out of his hutch, and I get a couple of hours of real pleasure. I can highly recommend it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I could. It seems so, well, artificial,” Daphne said.

  “That’s how I felt for a long time. But in the end, if you’ve got the imagination you can roam the firmament of fantasy: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Sean Connery...”

  “Paul Newman, Robert Redford...” Daphne sighed.

  “Jean-Paul Belmondo, I had a particularly good session with him. He was so...urgent. And French, of course. Until the bloody batteries went flat. I’ll not buy Asda economy brand again, nearly ruined my afternoon.”

  “I’d like Gregory Peck, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson...”

  “The last two were gay, dear. You can’t have them, surely,” Eunice said.

  “I can if I want. In my fantasy they could be straight. Anyway, Montgomery was bi-sexual. I could have him on alternate days. And before he started on the drugs and things,” Daphne said.

  “Well, I suppose so. A fantasy’s a fantasy after all. There’s not too much choice in modern men, though. Spiky hair, bad breeding and not an ounce of gallantry. Instead of Cary Grant and Clark Gable we’ve got Bruce Willis and Alan Titchmarsh.”

  “True, they don’t make them like that any more. Footballers, though, Eunice. I’ve had a thing for Vinny Jones for a long time. Especially when he was in that bank robbery film.”

  “Oh, you can’t surely. He’s so...uncouth. And violent.”

  “I know. He’d be ever so rough, wouldn’t he?” Daphne purred. “He can fire his ‘two smoking barrels’ at me anytime.”

  “Steady on, Daphne. He’s young enough to be your son.”

  “Eunice, I’m 61. They’re all young enough to be my son, or were at the times they were famous. But in my fantasies I’m much younger too. A cross between Hayley Mills and Rita Tushingham.”

  “I think you’ve been at the Mills & Boon a bit too much, dear. Time for another coffee? Or is it too early to start on the Valpoli?”

  Chapter Seventeen: Dunces With Wolves

  Wednesday 4th June: Bradford & Bingley

  Share club at the Ring o’Bells suffers Martin Gale bemoaning his financial situation. The only part of his IVA where he’s not over-stepped the line is his mortgage. Now, though, he’s finished his fixed-rate deal and his bank, Bradford & Bingley, wants a lot more from him on the variable rate.


  “Have you tried looking around for a better deal?” K.P. Sharma says. “There a lots of websites offering better deals.”

  “I’ve looked, but we’ve got a problem,” Martin said. “It was a 95% mortgage when we started in 2006. But when we saw how prices were still going up in 2007, we added another fifteen grand secured loan to get Holly’s people carrier. Of course, she wrote that off last August when she pulled out in front of a Ford Fiesta from Pass First Time School of Motoring. As it was on third party, fire and theft, we didn’t get a bean apart from £260 scrap.”

  “My dad would have given you more than that,” said Chantelle. “Come to me if you ever have a car to scrap.”

  “Thanks, I’ll remember that. Anyway, so we’ve still got the secured loan, Holly’s driving a ten-year-old Fiat rot box, and we’re up to our neck. We applied to HSBC for one of their new cheap fixed-rate loans, but the valuation came in much lower than we thought. We’re actually just into negative equity, and nobody wants to know for a remortgage.”

  “You were bloody daft getting that extra loan, then, weren’t yer?” shouts Russell Traugh from the table by the jukebox. “And fancy not getting proper insurance, what a wazzock.”

  “Shut up Russ,” Harry shouts. “Don’t rub it in.”

  Martin’s attitude to his debt is utterly curious, though. The more trouble he’s in, the more he wants us to invest in speculative shares. Kazakh mining stocks, obscure Ofex-listed software firms, beaten-down house builders. It all seems like double or quits. He even suggested that we buy shares in Barratt.

  “It’s really cheap. It’s trading at much less than its net asset value. And look at the dividend! It’s paying 37p and the price is only 140p, that’s a yield of...quite a lot.”