I must admit that I didn’t quite get the details right when I was first invited to join the gang – last summer – and have spent the past few months looking forward to a week of ligging, camping out by a nice pool supping an inexhaustible supply of Moroccan gin and tonics, but it was not to be. My brother alerted me to the tour element of it all a few weeks ago, and when I expressed my surprise, he chided me, in the way younger brothers can have glad to get their own back for some long-forgotten slight – well, obviously only long-forgotten by me – for ‘not paying attention to the details’. Well, I can take it.
Quite apart from having a rhino’s skin, developed by necessity I should add, my brother is the lad who, though more generous than many, spends little on himself and always has an eye out for a bargain. So not spending much of his pay working for some odd little outfit in Old Moulton St (or Great Moulton St or some such. NB Later: South Moulton St - I remembered this morning) central London, he saved enough and, crucially, invested in various shares in the early 1990s and struck gold.
For a while he thought as himself as something of a dab hand with finances and picking stocks even though I pointed out again and again that in the years he was buying the market rose and rose and rose, and pretty much everyone was quids in. Luck is more the case than skill. But the wheels came off the cart when he lent his employer, a charming Indian semi-crook called Vidia, £10,000 of the money he had made (and to this day I am astonished by the sum: he must have invested quite a bit in order to have the amount lying around waiting to be lent out. (Vidia, and I don’t know his surname or else I would give it here, also owned several old peoples’ homes – sorry, retirement communities – along the South Coast). Came the time my brother wanted his money back so he could buy a flat at auction (you can get bargains, apparently, though most need quite a bit of work), charming Vidia asked innocently: ‘What £10,000?’ Mr Attention-to-Detail had not got anything down on paper at all and was fucked big time. He never got his money back.
Still we live and learn, and we are all ill-advised to crow. I, myself, have most probably been rooked to the tune of £76 by a gang of Chinese (I would write ‘Chinks’ but I understand doing so might well land my in prison for up to five years of hard labour for racial intolerance, though the temptation is great, but wisdom will here prevail) after answering one of those many ads which seemed to be taking over Facebook. On offer was a Zoom R24 digital recorder for just £76, but with a recommended retail price of around £250. Too good to be true? Most certainly, but I went for it anyway.
In my defence I should add that I did have my suspicions and rather than paying by debit card, with the money irretrievably taken out of my bank account, I opted of using a credit card, knowing that under rather useful financial legislation here in the UK, if one is subject to fraud – which I rather think I was – I can claim the money back from the credit card company, and the hassle of getting the money from the crooks is all down to them. I discovered the seller was Chinese when I went on the credit cared company website to look at my account and spotted AIP*YUHNZJ CO of Shenzen, China. ‘Not good news,’ I distinctly remember myself thinking. ‘Thank God I listened to myself and paid by credit card.’ But, as I say, here is not the time to crow, in fact, to be frank never it the time to crow (though £76 to a gang of Chinese crooks is easier to take than £10,000 to an Indian crook. Get my drift?
. . .
The flight to Agadir leaves Düsseldorf at 08.15 on Tuesday (December 5), so I am obliged to get my arse over to Düsseldorf tomorrow and am taking the 15.50 BA flight from Heathrow. And that’s another story. It seems BA have taken to heart the lessons taught by Ryanair and passengers now pretty much have to pay for everything. ‘Will you be wanting a seat, sir? That will be another £11. Oh, and because of rising costs [funny how costs never fall] we are now obliged to charge you for the air you breathe while in flight, at £1 minute of oxygen used. And didn’t we tell you about renting the upholstery on your seat? Sorry, we should have done, and we’re sorry to inform you that the use of an upholstered seat is now a Air Transportation Agency safety requirement, so that will be another £20.’ And so it goes on. ‘Do think you might want to relieve yourself in flight, sir? Because if you do, we are now sadly obliged to charge for the use of our toilets, safety again I’m afraid. But never mind, I’m sure you will enjoy one of sandwiches from our in-flight menu, very tasty they are, too, and at just £15 for a cheese n’ pickle de luxe special well worth the price, even though we say so ourselves.’
To make sure passengers shell out for as much as possible, you can now only check in 24 hours before your flight is due to leave. Bastards.
In Germany I have booked myself into a hotel barely a stone’s throw form the airport, close as I could get seeing as I shall have to be in the terminal at least two hours early to the various instructions the Germans like to give passengers. But still, a week in a place rather less damp and cold than Old Blighty is for ten months of the year, so mustn’t grumble.
. . .
After that it will be just two weeks to Christmas with all the trimmings (my wife and I are currently negotiating what we can fall out about. At the moment, it is the ‘cordless hedge trimmer’ she told me she would like when I asked her what she wanted. Fair enough, I thought, and looked up various models. You can get very good ones for about £90, but you can also push the boat out and get some for £130/150.
Shit, I thought, it is Christmas and decided to be a little more generous. Then she informed me of the one she wanted: one with an ‘extendible’ reach which will deal with all those hard to get to corners of hedges. Made by some outfit called Stihl, apparently the Rolls Royce of hedge trimmer makers, the one she has set her heart on comes in at a cool £385 – without Vat. Well, fuck me, I’m a spendthrift, but surely not that much of a spendthrift. So, in parallel to the tortuous Brexit negotiations we have reached stalemate. I’ll keep you informed.
. . .
After Christmas it will be a gentle rundown until the beginning of April when I shall finally hang up my pen and hand back my Oxford Book of Cliches and call it a day. I must admit that I am still apprehensive, despite my ambitions to keep myself out of harms way by writing the Great Cornish Novel, because push will most certainly then really come to shove.
Incidentally, my cherished den which I bragged about in the summer is now not quite as much mine as I should like as it has cunningly already been filled with prams and cots and all the rest of the paraphernalia demanded by women when they are about due to give birth to their first child.
The woman in question is my daughter, just 21, and the baby was not planned, but happily she is in a steady relationship with a pleasant and hardworking lad who is successfully setting himself up in business as a tree surgeon. But more, quite probably much more of that, another time.
Pip, pip.
. . .
BTW There is a very good joke about Noah Webster, he of the
famous dictionary. Apparently, he was in his study beavering away at writing
his dictionary – or so his wife thought, and decided to bring him a cup of
coffee. But when she opened the door, she found him on his sofa rogering his pretty
young secretary.
‘Dr Webster,’ his wife exclaimed, ‘I am surprised!’
‘No, dear,’ the good doctor responded, ‘we are surprised,
you are astonished.’
