Funny Money: The (Investment) Diary of Bernard Jones (Bernard Jones Diaries)

by Louth Nick

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Political Correctness

  Wednesday 12 July: FTSE leads the way

  FTSE going sideways again, can’t seem to reach 5,900. Been like this for a few days. Still feeling a bit more optimistic, until I hear that Lebanon is flaring up again. What will this do for oil prices, I wonder?

  Share club at the Ring o’Bells, and at last we have a few hundred to spend. Mike Delaney argues that we should wait until it’s a thousand for an economic holding, and there’s general agreement. Chantelle, today sporting pink hair, is serving behind the bar, but shouts across that we should go for something that won’t “wobble with the price of oil”. Have to admit that the two existing stocks have done exactly that. Not much of a portfolio, if everything moves together.

  K.P. Sharma suggested we should have a ‘theme’ discussion, each arguing the corner for a person who embodied a powerful brand. Martin Gale went for Richard Branson (“Made personal service matter”), Mike Delaney went for Nelson Mandela (“The Teflon Terrorist”), and I went for Delia Smith, patron saint of traditional cooking. Harry Staines went for Raquel Welch, though seemed to miss the point, but Chantelle had the best: David Attenborough. We had to agree that if he launched a range of environmentally-friendly foods or garden products he’d make a mint.

  Get back at 3pm to find Eunice has taken to her bed with a migraine. Still, she’s well enough to give me a vast to-do list. Laundry. Vacuuming. Waitrose. Buy card for Dot’s birthday on Tuesday. It goes on and on, with sub-clauses and sub-lists for each category. E.g. Waitrose: “Wholemeal fusilli pasta (not farfalle), honey roast ham from the counter (not packet) etc, etc.

  She’s clearly taken the opportunity to dump a whole week’s housework on me.

  Close of play: Exhausted by this shopping business. Quick glance at FTSE shows it sagged late on, just as I have.

  Thursday 13th July: Shopper’s revenge

  8am: News shows footage of huge Israeli reprisals on Lebanon for Hezbollah capture of two soldiers. Bridges, factories, roads, apartment blocks. Loads of civilian deaths. God, this is awful. Feel guilty for thinking about portfolio at such a time. Can’t think it affects anything directly, but share prices are weaker all round. Even defence firms BAE and Qinetiq, weirdly enough.

  Reprisals aren’t confined to Middle East. Eunice bounces out of bed in a foul mood. No thanks offered to yours truly for yesterday’s efforts: I got the wrong pasta, the wrong ham, not enough kiwis (one), the laundry was left in the machine overnight (do I have to remember everything?), I didn’t vacuum the en suite properly because she can see there’s floss on the floor, and to cap it all I didn’t wind the bloody Dyson cable the correct way. “Bernard, this is why women are never ill,” she tells me. “They have to do it all again the next day.”

  Elevenses: Two Waitrose chocolate cup cakes. Ha ha ha! Who says I got the wrong food. There’s a carrier bag in the garage, and it’s full of chocolate muffins, crisps, eccles cakes, and a tin of spotted dick.

  Close of play: Market weaker again. Oh Lord, I’m getting seasick staring at the screen. What is the point? Made me think of Friday’s sit down in the park. ‘What is this life, if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.’ Looked the poem up. Smelly Vic was right. It was written by a tramp. William Davies, 1871-1940.

  Thursday 14th July: The bloody O’Riordans

  Eurotunnel looks like it will be disappearing up its own dark passageway shortly. Glad I never had shares in it, but as I recall Peter so-bloody-perfect Edgington did, just so he could get a discount going to his chateau in the Gironde. Funny he never brags about that investment. Best thing about it now is that almost all the shareholders left from the umpteenth refinancing are French. Perhaps I am getting old and bitter. Eunice called me a xenophobe the other day. “I’m certainly not”, I replied. “My disdain is shared equally amongst all races, creeds and colours, regardless of disability, age, socio-economic grouping, size and sexual orientation.” I suppose that makes me a misanthrope, the most politically correct of all old miseries.

  Case in point. Gorgeous weather. Sat in garden until driven out by the O’Riordan’s music. Two huge speakers on their patio blasting out gibberish (rat music, I think it’s called, perfect for those vermin next door) but no one actually listening, even if it could be understood. They only moved in six months ago, but it’s already turning into a council estate. Ken’s a ‘residential developer’ from Essex, but clearly just a jumped-up builder. His skinny bottle-blonde wife Lisa (number two apparently) has a voice like a band saw and arrived pre-packaged with three vile, screechy, ginger kids. Bethany, fifteen, is already a little trollop with a pierced navel and language that would shock a Millwall supporter. Then there’s Liam, twelve, a hyperactive dimwit who worships David Beckham, but who can only ‘bend it’ into my bloody greenhouse. Finally there’s a snivelling child of four who seems to be called You Little Tosser. For God’s sake we know these people exist, but why do they have to have money? That house went for £425,000! Oh, I so regret Dr and Myfanwy Davies moving out, even though we fell out about my leylandii hedge. I feel we’ve been cursed. Bloody Welsh!

  Friday 15th July: Slow coach

  7.30am: Life coach Josh Fenderbrun, the world’s most irritating person, rings up and asks me to describe the progress I have made in ‘hugging the inner me’.

  “The major progress so far is controlling my temper with you. There’s actually nothing wrong with my self-regard. It’s you I find difficulty with. Your absurd exercise ideas, your silly epithets and corporate mumbo jumbo over all these weeks of our unfortunate and extended acquaintance haven’t really changed anything except the relative sizes of our respective bank balances.”

  “Wow, B’nard. I have to say that you are my most challenging client, period. Your refusal, even after all these weeks, to get with the programme, to overview the visual aids I provided or eyeball the documentation, make it seriously challenging to get you to engage with the Inner You philosophy. Don’t despair though, B’nard. I rise to a challenge, however difficult.”

  “Slow learning seems to going in both directions. Time and time again, Mr Fenderbrun, I have requested that you pronounce my name properly. It is BERnud not BerNARD.”

  “Got it. Brrrrrrnud. Brrrrrnud.”

  “Yes, very good. But would you mind practising in your own time? I’m not paying for an open-ended course in teaching Americans how to speak.” At which point I replaced the receiver.

  Elevenses: Half a lemon and lime jaffa cake, purchased in a colossal two-for-the-price-of-one error from the discount bin at Kwik Save. I don’t like lemon and lime. It’s wrong in a jaffa cake. It belongs in a bloody drink! Time was that you couldn’t make this kind of mistake. Jaffa cakes were jaffa cakes, which meant orange flavour. Now I’ll have to read the small print to make sure that I don’t pick up a Ponguin, Spammy Dodgers, Wigan Wheels, that ginger-flavoured horror known as the freckles cake, or the chiropodist’s nightmare: twisted toecakes.

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Bat out of Hell

  Monday 17th July: Batty Dot proved right

  Decided to poke through my mother’s attic to see if we can prove that my dear departed father G. V. Jones actually did live at 63, Downland Terrace in the 1930s, and someone called G.W. Jones did not. That would allow Dot, with any luck, to claim £600,000 worth of BAE shares. Put on overalls, climbed the rickety stepladder and tried to lift the trapdoor. Very heavy, wouldn’t shift.

  “Do be careful, Bernard,” says Dot. “There could be bats up there. They’ll be in your hair in no time.”

  Doesn’t leave me too much to worry about, I thought, as I give the lid a hefty shove. It flies open with a bang, and releases a blizzard of sooty newspapers onto my head. Restraining my Anglo-Saxon vernacular, and looking down to see that Dot was alright, I am caught unawares by a tennis racquet, still in its press, which clonks me on the back of the head.

  “Told you there was bats,” Dot said.

  Took most of the afternoon to clea
r up the soot, and to actually find room to stand in the attic. Enough old newspapers up there to wrap a nation’s fish and chips. Parchment fragments of forgotten England: Hore-Belisha and his beacons, Sir Gerald Nabarro and his road accidents, Profumo and his indiscretions, George Brown and his bottle. Then there was foreign policy: Malaya, Suez, Aden, Rhodesia. All forgotten now. Bundled up a few likely looking files of papers and set off home. Mother is 90 tomorrow. Would be wonderful if I could get her some good news by then.

  Elevenses: Three slices of battenburg, provided by Dot. Marvellous! Eunice need never know.

  Close of play: Market teetering around 5700. I thought this correction was over, but FTSE is looking dodgy. I’m well down for the year, thanks to Spirent and other dogs. Only Domino’s Pizza seems to have done well, up ten per cent since correction began. Portfolio’s topping is doing OK, it’s just the base that is thin and soggy.

  Tuesday 18th July: Birthday bash

  All the family planned to gather at Dot’s at 5pm. Arrived to find my sister Yvonne from Stockport waiting, huge iced cake balanced on a silver board, outside the door in the rain.

  “I let my taxi go, and she won’t let me in,” Yvonne said. “Says she doesn’t want any.”

  Any what? I rang the bell and heard Dot’s muffled shout. “Go away, or I’ll call the police. I don’t want any witnesses, Jehovah or otherwise. I’m C of E.”

  “It’s me, Mum, Bernard.”

  Finally, she let us in but still eyed Yvonne warily. “Who’s that?” she whispered to me.

  “It’s Yvonne, Mum, my little sister, your daughter. Remember?”

  “What about him? Is he here somewhere. The insurance man. I never liked him.”

  “Lance? They divorced in 1993.” Finally, Dot and Yvonne got talking and within a few minutes they were laughing away as the rest of the family trooped in from far and wide. While Brian and Janet did their best to stop the Antichrist pinching all the icing off the cake, I was cornered by creepy cousin Melvin, the carpet salesman from Rhyl.

  “Hey, Bernie. I hear Dot’s loaded. Hundreds of thousands, Yvonne told me.”

  Melvin, subtle as a Jarvis profit warning, rarely hid his intentions. Dad, who died in 1988, had left a tenth of his estate, a few thousand, to his impoverished sister-in-law, Aunty Vi. Melvin had made the long trip purely to renew his late mother’s percentage claim on newly discovered Jones family assets. While I tried to pour cold water on the chances of the money emerging, he wheedled about his wife’s failing health, the terrible state of the carpet market, and the ruinously expensive underpinning they had to have on their home. Oh God, what a pain.

  Elevenses: Eunice watched me like a hawk throughout the afternoon. While dishing out Dot’s cake, she gave me a slice so thin the bloody icing fell off onto the floor. When Yvonne tried to give me another, Eunice stayed her arm.

  “I don’t think so. We have to watch out for type II diabetes, don’t we Bernard?”

  Wednesday 19th July: Rabid reaction force

  New unisex hairdressers opened in town. Thought I’d give it a try. Unlike the barber’s, they wash your hair first. Quite pleasant until the girl bashed my cut. “Ere. Wot you done to your ‘ed?”

  “I was attacked. By a bat,” I reply.

  “Urrgh,” she says. “You wanna get a jab. Might get somefink.”

  She calls her mate over, who was finishing drying some member of the blue rinse battalion. “Uurgh. That’s disgusting,” she opines, reassuringly.

  “It’s only a bloody bruise,” I retorted testily. By now the OAP has limped over to add her tuppence-worth.

  “Ooh, it’s all septic, dear.” She turns to the hairdresser. “My Henry got bitten by a dog in 1953. Rabid, it was. Well, that was the last time we went to Frinton, I can tell you.”

  Thursday 20th July: O’Riordan

  Sat out to take advantage of the wonderful weather. However, no sooner did I drop myself into the sun lounger, sun hat and Telegraph ready, when I hear the sound of an engine next door. At first it sounds like a chainsaw or similar, but no, it’s twelve-year-old Liam O’Riordan riding a mini-motorbike up and down their drive. This goes on and on for 30 minutes. Fuming, I go round to have a word. Almost get run over by the child, who is using the street as one end of his loop and expects me to shift.

  “Would you mind…,” I begin, but the ginger daredevil ignores me utterly. So I ring the doorbell. For two minutes nothing happens, though I can hear the sound of loud music from within. Finally the door opens and there is sullen-faced Bethany O’Riordan, with a love bite on her neck the size of the Isle of Wight.

  “Can I speak to your Mum or Dad?”

  “Nah. Ken’s wiv his ex today, and Mum’s shopping.”

  “Look. It’s about the motorbike.”

  “Bovverin you is it?” She actually smiles a little crooked grin at this point.

  “Yes, it is actually. It’s very noisy. Can you persuade him to give it a rest?”

  “Alright. I’ll stop him.”

  Somewhat amazed at the ease of that I return to the garden, though the motorcycle noise still drones on for another five minutes. I’m just about to give up and go in when there is a god almighty crash, and the bike engine is raised to a scream. I rush back up to the front of the house, where 12-year old Liam is lying on his back, squealing like a demented piglet and holding his throat. The bike, throttle stuck open, is on its side. Bethany is in the process of untying a length of waist-high washing line she had stretched across the drive between the drainpipe and the gate.

  “What on earth’s going on?” I ask.

  “I stopped him for you,” she giggles. “Spectacular or wot?”

  “With that? You could have beheaded him!”

  “No such luck. Steve McQueen did it wiv a bit of wire on The Great Escape. That would’ve really hurt.”

  Regaining his composure, Liam leaps to his feet and tears after his sister into the back garden. Squeals, yells, shrieks and slams pierce the suburban peace for several minutes. Back on my chair, I leaf through the Telegraph, one ear cocked for the inevitable moment when minor affray becomes GBH, and intervention becomes necessary. How is it that I have become a de facto babysitter for these two mutant creatures?

  Friday 21st July: Hawaii do I bother?

  4.45am: Awoken from a deep slumber by the phone. “Hi Brrrrnud. It’s Josh here. I’m in Hawaii.”

  “For God’s sake man, do you realise what the time is?”

  “It’s a quarter of eight, right? Our usual time.”

  “For your information a quarter of eight is two, and our usual time is a quarter TO eight. The current time, for your information, is a quarter TO bloody five. In the morning. British Summer Time.”

  “Jeez, B’nard. I’m sorry. I guess I screwed up the time. But I gotta tell you, I’m on a coaching conference here that is genuinely life changing. I’m so excited….”

  I slammed the phone down.

  Eunice was staring hard at me. “Bernard, do you really have to shout? You woke me up.”

  “I didn’t! He did!”

  “I didn’t hear the phone. All I heard was your bellowing.”

  “I wasn’t bellowing!”

  “Yes you were, and you still are. You woke me up and spoiled a lovely dream. I was on a yacht with Mel Gibson and George Clooney, and you were being dragged behind on a rope. It was all right though, because you had a lifejacket on. We were off the coast of some Roman ruins, in gently lapping turquoise water. Mel and I were throwing you peanuts, which you were trying to catch in your mouth. Anyway, we got bored with that and we’d just got to the bit where Mel and George were arguing over which one was going to give me a bikini wax.”

  “What an unlikely idea. That’s enough work for two, easily.”

  “Don’t be rude. Besides, you’ve no idea. You never look.”

  “Why would I? I can barely shave my own face. You don’t ask a man who struggles to prune a rose bush to start clear felling the Amazonian rain forest,
do you?”

  “I don’t mean waxing, Bernard. I mean me. You don’t look at me. You avoid me. Especially at bedtime.”

  “Look, I really don’t feel like discussing this now. It’s not yet 5am, I’ve just been woken up by that appalling American, and you know it always puts me in a foul mood. And we’ve got that bloody dinner party tonight.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that every time we see Irmgard and Nils you all end up ganging up on me.”

  “Oh, poor Bernard,” Eunice mocked. “A big grown man, who can’t defend his own point of view.”

  “Of course I can, but you always side with them. It doesn’t seem to matter whether its about the wickedness of eating the odd cake or biscuit, the evils of capitalism, or the cardinal sin of shopping anywhere but Waitrose, it’s always Irmgard laying in to me, you nodding in vigorous agreement and Nils just watching and grinning.”

  Eunice clearly wasn’t having this. “Well, it’s better than dinner at the Edgingtons where you and Peter drone on about P/E ratios all the time. It’s not as if either of you did much in the way of games at school.”

  Elevenses: Tried topping one of those appalling lemon and lime jaffa cakes with marmalade. Not much improvement to the taste, and while struggling with it I dropped a large lump of Frank Cooper’s into the computer keyboard. For some reason, it seemed to make the internet connection faster.