Relax and stand down: I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to rant about. But there are still histamines and just how loose use of the word ‘genius’ has become. So still room enough to waffle

Well, there you have it, a perfect example of Sod’s Law: I post a blog entry warning that the subsequent entry I shall be sounding off and how, then when I come to write that entry, I can’t for the life of me remember what I was going to sound off about.

Actually, that’s not quite true: I intended a fully blown self-righteous rant about how folk in what we condescendingly call ‘developing democracies’ are so pleased to be able to have a say in who has them beaten up that they will queue for hours, days even, outside polling stations and compare it with the pitiful credentials in the West where we take so much for granted. So I looked up figures (it’s called ‘research’ in more pretentious blogs) for turnout in elections over these past ten years, only to find that although not up there in the 99pc level we find in North Korea and Kazakhstan, all of whom also are so pleased with their current dictator that they vote him back into office, it has not just been holding steady, but has often gone up. Oh, well.

But I don’t necessarily give up that easily (i.e. sometimes I do give up very easily): according to this site which has a graph listing electoral turnout in the EU overall and in the UK for every EU election from 1979 to 2014, turnout is declining rather sadly. In the EU it was above 60pc and has dropped to just above 40pc; and here in the UK - never quite the EU cheerleader of popular myth, of course - it has remained more or less steady at just around the mid-30s. OK, I’ll be honest: here in the UK it has risen slightly. If you look at the site I have linked to above, you will see it was around 32/33pc in 1979, then fell to a pretty catastrophic 25pc in 1999, but at the most recent election, in 2014, it went up to 35/36pc, thereby wrecking my thesis and making an outraged rant just that much more difficult. Oh, well. So I’d better swiftly move on to hives.

. . .

I’ve done a bit of scouting around - call it ‘research’ if you must insist on doing so, although I don’t being the unpretentious, down-to-earth, meat-and-potatoes Cornish hillbilly who likes to call a spade a fucking shovel - and have come up with this: our cells produce a substance called histamine which is related to our immune system and white blood cells.

This is what causes all those nasty symptoms such as headaches, a runny nose, thick throat and, in my case, itching and tickling. These are usually useful immune responses, for example a runny nose is intended to clear whatever shouldn’t be there out of your nose. But often histamine production gets out of control.

Our bodies also produce a substance called diamine oxidase, one of whose functions is to keep histamine production in check, but in some circumstances it sometimes doesn’t keep histamine in balance, so histamine builds up in our bodies. And that’s when you get, as I am getting, some of those nasty symptoms for no obvious reason. So, hayfever sufferers will get runny noses and eyes because the histamine is going into overdrive trying to clear the pollen from noses and eyes. I’ve also come across lists of several foods we are advised to avoid as they contribute - or are said to contribute - to the amount of histamine produced. Some also contain it, apparently. And here it is Sod’s Law for the second time: many of them are pretty much what I eat regularly.

It isn’t just that I like them, but they are said to be good for you. So, for example, the German in my is partial to herrings - remember all the health advice about eating ‘oily fish’? Sometimes I get a jar of rollmops, but more often I buy tins of herring and mackerel. They, I’m now told, are no-no as far as keeping the lid on histamine in your body is concerned.

Then there’s yoghurt. And I don’t mean the sweetened, flavoured shite which is crammed full of E numbers to ‘prolong shelf life’. I’m talking about the original, unsweetened Greek and Turkish yoghurt. I had it once when I was very young, and I didn’t like it, so I never had it again. But a few weeks ago desperately casting about to find some way to end this bout of hives, I began eating half a 500g tub of Greek yoghurt with three chopped-up satsumas for breakfast.

Yes, my skin cleared up in a matter of days, although the itching continued. Not only that, but I found I actually liked the stuff (though I do sprinkle a little sugar over it). And aren’t we always told to eat natural yoghurt and that a lifetime’s diet of the bloody stuff, both as a sweet and savoury element of their meals has ensured that any number of Greeks and Turks (and I don’t doubt other Middle Easterners) live until they are well over a century old. Healthy or what?

Well, possibly, except that the pages of foods to avoid to keep a check on histamines includes - well, you guessed it. Also listed are nuts - I eat them all the time and we’re always told they are healthy; legumes - ditto; salami and other processed meats - ditto and possibly the only meat I eat in an otherwise pretty vegetarian diet (though not for political reasons or out of principle. I happen not to eat that much meat); alcohol - so what does that say about drinking a glass of red wine a day, which is pretty much what I do, is good for ‘cardiovascular health’? And on it goes: pretty much my whole diet is a no-no as far as histamine is concerned. But...

But, and there has to be a ‘but’, why did it start about seven months ago when I have eaten the same diet for years? (I forgot to add that I eat very, very few wheat products, again not out of principle or for political reasons - if you know what I mean - but simply because I just feel better.) Members of the jury, retire now and consider your verdict. Because I’m buggered if I know what’s going on, despite all my ‘research’.

. . .

Last Monday, I was sitting at work when I was rung by the assistant to our paper’s astrologer to be told the great man had died. (Incidentally, the assistant is a semi-retired journalist who supplemented his income by assisting the great man in his worldwide operation - his predictions were carried by a great many newspapers from here to Patagonia, all of them, it has to be said, 24-carat bollocks, but more of that later (©Geoffrey Levy).

David N, for it was he, told me that our astrologer had been found dead early in the morning by his wife. He had suffered a heart attack, apparently his third. He had not been feeling well for a year or two since the second. Now, although I am about to poke as much fun as I can at the great man, Jonathan Cainer, I shall first mention that I do feel for his wife and, particularly, his seven children (by three different women). For them it’s a personal thing and they have lost a partner/father. I should also add that Cainer did actually believe the twaddle he was selling.

Apparently, he wasn’t paid by the Daily Mail, but his personal predictions - suckers could call a phoneline for their start in which Cainer would give a more tailored reading - made him his money. He had also, over several years, so it was some operation, painstakingly built up a database of based on the exact time and the place of your birth. David sent me mine and it was a substantial piece, about 60 pages of A4. I was given mine to be shown quite how extensive Cainer’s operation was. Everyone else had to pay for them, and they were not cheap.

Here is a screenshot of his price list:

What you got for your £24 to £39 might seem quite impressive. In fact, if the child born in the same hospital within minutes of your also sent off for his or hers, it would be identical. Jonathan Cainer had built himself quite a reputation, and the Daily Mail made the most of him as a ‘brand’. But there will not be one hack in Northcliffe Towers in West London where the great paper is produced who did not agree with me that astrological predictions generally and the stuff Cainer produced in particular was complete bollocks. You might as well read a First Great Western rail timetable to get an idea of your day today will be a good one and whether the stars are favourable for you to apply for a mortgage. So the front page the day after his death says more about the Mail - and, to be fair, papers in general - than about Cainer. Here it is - note mention of the man’s ‘genius’:

I shall concede that in one way Cainer was clever: his schtick was simple. He was always, always, always upbeat. Not once, as in never, did he ‘predict’ anything negative or sad or bad. So it’s no wonder that the gullible of the world made him one of their first ports of call.

Me? Scorpio, if you were wondering. They do say about Scorpios that they are the star sign most likely to laugh during a funeral and to die by being stabbed in back.

I give you due warning that in the next few entries I shall be sounding off. So don’t complain: you have been warned

This is is a short posting only because it is one by way of introduction and also so that I can remind myself of one or two things.

Every week, I leave work in London and home west for just over two hours. I then stip off at the Brewers Arms in South Petherton for a break, to have a drink and a smoke and, if there’s any football on - usually Champions League matches - to watch some on Sky or BT Sport on the net. With a bit of luck, bosses letting me go and traffic permitting - both being as predictable as a next year’s weather - I am there by about 9pm and stay till pub shuts at 11pm.

Then it’s further on towards home in North Cornwall, down the A303, through the Blackdown Hills, where the road, the next 14 miles, becomes a winding single carriageway and along which, because I have done the journey more than 10,000 times and I know every stretch of road, I in my modest 1.6 litre 1998 Astra automatic - that is a car which is almost 18 years old - can overtake more timid drivers in their two-year-old 2.5 litre SUVs with impunity. They usually hate it: a bloody T-reg overtaking me in my 5-litre black Porsche/Rover/Nissan SUV? Bastard, I’ll get the cunt!

Yes, if they are also heading for Exeter, they can eventually overtake me on the 14-mile Honiton to Exeter dual carriageway, but they will have had to have been travelling at some lick on the previous few miles to catch me up. It’s what passes for one when you will not see 65 again and pissing takes ten times as long as once it used to be. (If I can be so crude, years ago when I was still a young thing and went out on the piss, then home again for a night’s shagging, the problem was different: then it used to take several minutes to piss because I still had a rock-hard hard-on. Ah, the glory days. Give me a minute. Right.)

Anyway.

The point is that I almost always spend the second half of my journey home, from the Brewers Arms to Higher Lanke, St Breward, rather less sober than I was when I set out from London. Not drunk, you understand, but after two modern 2016 pub large glasses of red wine - I stopped drinking pints of cider because I got fed up having to stop to take a leak - one has drunk the best of three-quarters of a bottle of wine and any pretence to being stone-cold sober is dishonest. I listen to the 10 o’clock news on the radio and much occurs to me. And that, the occurring to me is the point of it. I think ‘well, that might be something I could record in my blog (for which read diary/commonplace book)’, but invariably arriving home at 1pm I usually forget what I wanted to write.

So now, dear friend, I have decided to write this short entry to try to remind myself, at least to remind myself of what occurred to me tonight: There was a report on the new ‘deal’ between the EU and Turkey under which Turkey will lock up as many would-be immigrants to Europe as it can catch and stop them sullying the good lands of Western Europe in return for Turkish citizens being allowed to visit Schengen area countries without a visa. What appalls me is the cynicism of it all and how a once perfectly good idea - the EU - is being comprehensively ruined.

Then there was a piece about the local elections in Britain - today as it happens because the clock has just struck 2am - and specifically about the elections to the Welsh Assembly. More specifically the report was about how a large part of Wales is either uninterested in the elections or, more to the point, even unaware that they are being asked to elect members to their Assembly. Turnout is not just low, but is expected to be pretty much non-existent.

So what’s my beef? It’s this: is many parts of the world folk are living often quite shitty lives in unfree societies and would give their left arm to be able to live in a state where they, for a change, can elect to their government those they would like to see calling the shots. A good example is China - a good example - because it is a bloody huge country rules by a one-party state. Yet we here in the ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ western world who can now do so and have been able to do so widely for the past 70 years just can’t be arsed anymore to exercise our right to self-determination. But I shall first

like to do a bit of looking up on the web on both matters before I choose to add my two ha’porht worth here. Then there is the news that all things being equall one Donald Rutherford Surbiton Trump III has seen off all his Republican rivals and is most probably the chap to stand against one Hillary Rodham Clinton VII for leadership of the free world. And he might well win.

The sole point of this, my most recent, entry is 1) to give you due warning that at some point in the next few days I shall be sounding off; and 2) to remind myself that I am fully prepared to sound off. Now to bed. It is, after all 2am - actually 2.08am - and I am knackered. Not least because I had an extra additional small glass of wine on top of my two large ones. Bon nuit.

No more EU for now (except, of course, to mention ‘no more EU for now’), but the eternal, infrenal itching now has a name - great! - and I plan my next invasion of Europe. Sorry, wan’t going to mention Europe, was I?

I have to say that for some odd reason I have held off posting here for several weeks because my main urge was simply to repeat how insufferable the whole should we/shouldn’t we stick it up the EU/cement the sacred relationship we have with our European cousins? campaign has been. But as I would merely be repeating what I said in an earlier post - a plague on both their houses - it seemed rather pointless.

Were I to do such a post, there would be much to report, for example the fury of the Fuck The EU camp when President Obama warned the U.S. would stop sending tourists to London if Britain left the EU, which naturally roused the Brexiteers to fury even had one Boris Johnson - not my favourite person and something of a nine-bob note - rather gracelessly refer to Obama as ‘half-Kenyan’.

Then there’s the strange alliance of God and Satan who have temporarily come to a truce and jointly come out to warn that if Britain does not vote to remain in the EU, that’s it - Armageddon (to which both, of course, though for their different reasons, are looking forward with some pleasure. (So why aren’t they supporting Brexit? You didn’t think that one throught, did you, Patrick? Ed.) So, for the time being, no more EU in these hallowed pages.

. . .

Well, the itching which has been the bane of my life since last October has got a name: hives, or if you want to use the posh medial term uritcaria. And if you want to use another posh medical term and make as though you know what you are talking about, call it idiopathic urticaria.

We already know what uritcaria means. Idiopathic means - well, in a sense it doesn’t mean anything because doctors use it when they don’t know what is causing a disorder, illness, rash or, in my case, itch. After visiting my GP and being referred to a dermatologist, I have now been prescribed an anti-histamine. I was already taking one, but the new one, fexofenadine hydrochloride, was prescribed by the dermatologist and she said it ‘was better’. Well, better or worse, from folk who adopt posh-sounding pseudo-Latin words such as ‘idiopathic’ to hide the fact they don’t know what’s actually going on, I’ll take it with a pinch of salt.

As you can imagine, I have been scouring the internet for info and can tell you this: for most folk hives come and go in a few hours or a day. For some poor unfortunate schmucks such as me, the

are chronic (where chronic doesn’t mean ‘really bad’ as most people think, but ‘ongoing/long-lasting’). I have to say it isn’t half as bad as it was from last October to the end of February when a perfectly good and respectable weekend in Rome was ruined and consisted mainly of spending the very boring day at Fiumicino airport itching like fuck, waiting for a 10pm flight to Gatwick and wanting to be nowhere else but home. Maybe that’s the antihistamines.

I have also taken to eating a bowl of three chopped up satsumas and half a tub of Greek youghurt for breakfast, and although it hasn’t cured the itching, it has done wonders for the rough, red, dry skin I had on my arms and perhaps on my back, though I could never get around there to take a look. (NB Picture posed by model and for illustration purposes only. I’m a bit older than that.)

The odd thing is that for the past 50 years I thought I didn’t like yoghurt (and I’m talking about the natural, unblemished stuff, not the heavily sweetened and flavoured stuff which has enough e-numbers to form a Yorkshire chorus). Then I tried it and decided I do actually like it. Admittedly, it has an acquired taste, but it is a taste I have since acquired. I must be honest and add that I do sprinkle just a little sugar over it all, but I’m sure - we’re all liberal free-thinkers now, aren’t we? - you’ll find it in your hearts to forgive me. The odd thing is that given that the worst seems to be over - fingers crossed - and I am now reduced to slight tickling and itching all over my arms, scalp and torso, I realise I have been suffering from mild hives for some years, because I have long felt like this, though I didn’t think much of it.

. . .

My next holiday is booked: ten days in some ski resort in Austria which has a spa. It’s called Bad Gastein. I can’t for the life of me remember how I hit upon the place except that it had something to do with looking up possible quite spots in the Appennines for a break and then somehow travelling just a little further north on the map.

Then, using Expedia, and having settled on Bad Gastein, I hunted down some three/four start hotels and a flight and found Pension St Leonhard which isn’t exactly a hotel in that they only do breakfast (which, of course, many other hotels only do, too) and the front desk shuts at 6pm (understandable as it is ‘family-run’. It remains to be seen whether that is an Austrian Addams family - after all, they do have form).

After my experience of wasting a perfectly good weekend because of the bloody itching which ruined that trip to Rome, I had held of booking a proper holiday, as I dind’t want to spend several hundred pounds to fly somewhere far away, then spend ten days holed up in a hotel room, scratching and feeling very sorry for myself. But once the antihistamines began doing their bit and I was once again sleeping through the night (although two nights ago was something of an ordeal) and when I discovered that at work available weeks to be taken off were rapidly diminishing, I there and then got on my computer and booked. And it’s great to have something to look forward to.

As usual I am making no plans. I shall be taking with me two or three books (of which one is Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx if I can find it again) and enought underwear to keep me respectable and that is it: as far as I am concerned the whole point of holiday is to have no duties,

no plans, no schedule, no obligations, just time off to do what the bloody hell you like, and if that means sitting in an Alpine field surrounded by cows with bells doing absolutely fuck all, so be it. My one stipulation when finding a hotel was that it had wifi internet (and not only because I have to carry on doing the puzzles for the Mail while I am away, but also because courtesy of a useful browser extension I shall also be able to watch Sky Sports while abroad).

Apart from that it was just a question of looking at the reviews. I pay particular attention to the one-star reviews if there are any and gauge from what is said and what is complained of whether there is any reason for giving just one star or whether the complainant is just another bad-tempered perpetual whinger who would find fault with the Second Coming (and that would be someone like my wife). And I have to add the Pension St Leonhard, on Tripadvisor, gets 25 excellents and 10 very goods, and no review is below four-star. So I’m rather looking forward to it.

You want humility? Here’s real humility (well, sort of) and the sad tale of how I came to realised I am not the world’s greatest stock picker

Every so often I take a look at ‘the stats’ to see which of my previous posts have been read. There are a few evergreen favourites - the travails of M. Hollande, of 4, Factory Close, Versaille, France, are a perpetual favourite, as is more or less a post on what a bloody little shit T. Blair, of Duncheatin Palace, 1 Moneybags Avenue, George Town, Cayman Islands, is. My musings on Somerset Maugham also prove more popular than other posts, although I can’t suggest why.

Yesterday I noticed that an entry published on December 3, 2009, entitled ‘A share tip from a certified sucker who is otherwise highly sceptical of ‘a sure thing’ ’ had had two visitors. Intrigued about what I could possibly have to say, I went along and subsequently almost blushed with shame.

The first thing that struck me was how the qualifying ‘from a certified sucker who is otherwise highly sceptical of a “sure thing” ’ of the post’s title, apparently an innocent and modest disclaimer, is nothing of the kind. And in view of what I am about to tell you, you will realise just how conceited I was to write that entry in the first place.

You can follow the link above and go and skim through the post, but if you can’t be arsed - and I wouldn’t be offended if you can’t - I’ll sum it up: when, in about 2006 when I heard of SIPPs (self-invested pension plans), I decided that the very modest sum I had stashed away with some mickey-mouse company based in Bournemouth and which was growing at the astounding rate of 0pc per annum wouldn’t do any worse in a SIPP. (I had taken out the pension about 18 years earlier with Hill Samuel, but it was then sold on several times - they are actually allowed to do these things, believe it or not - until it ended up with the losers in Bournemouth.)

Most of the sum I transferred was invested in three funds which went on to do rather well - one doubled the amount invested in nine years - but I had a little left over. In 2006, we were still living in an age of ever-greater credit and the stock market was booming. But I suspected, given that we were still living in an age of ever-greater credit, that at some point the music would stop and the party would be over.

That’s exactly what happened a few years later, although I can’t claim any credibility as a soothsayer, because I didn’t know exactly when it would happen. I mean you wouldn’t hand the keys to the Meteorological Office over to some herbert who assured you that as sure as eggs were eggs,

it was bound to rain at some point in the next two months. I just suspected that it would happen, and knowing that when the economy got into the doldrums and people were very much feeling the pinch, shares would undoubtedly be hit, I asked myself what kind of business might be expected to thrive in a recession. Of course: pawnbrokers.

I did ‘a bit of research’, i.e. I googled ‘UK pawnbrokers share price’, and discovered only one was a limited company quoted on the London Stock Exchange, a company called Albemarle & Bond.

If I remember, I bought the shares when they cost about 62p each - and watched in delight as the price rose and rose and rose. By the end of 2009, when I wrote my entry giving my ‘share tip’ and faux-modestly explained that otherwise I knew nothing about picking great shares (but, of course, hinting the exact opposite) the share price had more than doubled. And better than that, it went on to hit £3 - a startling rise.

Well, if I really was that smart an alec and if I really did have the faintest clue as to what I was doing, I should have sold the lot at the point. I don’t know how much I had invested in Albemarle & Bond, but whatever it was would have grown to almost five times the amount. But I didn’t. Patrick, me lad, (I told myself) you are onto a winner! Just hang on in there and Albemarle & Bond shares will grow and grow and grow (and I don’t doubt that privately I reflected on just what a financial genius I was).

Well, as I don’t doubt you have already guessed (and wondered when they hell I will not just get on with it!), the fall which inevitably follows unwarranted pride came along in good time. Albemarle & Bond’s share price ended its starospheric rise and began what would eventually be a calamitous fall.

There were several reasons for this, as you can read here. But briefly, it made much of its money buying up the gold of men and women who, in the bad times which followed the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy had sold it all to help make ends meet. For a while the price of gold increased. Then it stopped increasing and fell again by over a quarter of its price. Then there was a second factor putting the break on all the good times and denting my imagined expertise as a stock picker: the competition Albemarle & Bond faced increasingly.

As it had not occurred to me that the price of its shares would not carry on rising for ever and a day, it didn’t seem to have occurrd to Mr Albermarle and Mr Bond that as their pawnbroking business thrived, others would take not of the moolah to be made and also move into pawnbroking to get a piece of the action. Which, of course, other firms did. Albemarle & Bond also made much of their money by giving short-term loans. And again other sharks weren’t slow to spot a winner, and the number of shyster firms also lending money in short-term loans at exorbitant prices exploded.

Finally, thinking they were onto a good thing Albemarle & Bond decided to expand. They announced that they were opening loads more branches throughout Britain and, crucially, borrowed a great deal of money to fund that expansion. Sadly, that was what is universally known as a Bad Move.

As business got a lot tougher, the new branches didn’t thrive, profits suffered and the share price went into reverse. I was - thank the bloody Lord - in the habit of keeping an eye on how the shares and funds in my SIPP were doing, and I noticed the decline in share price. Within months it was dropping from £3 to £2.50 to £2 and further. At first I wasn’t alarmed. ‘These things happen,’ this wise old owl of a financial wizard told himself. ‘Just hang on and it will go up again.’ But it didn’t, and finally realising just how unwise it would be to hang on in there, I sold up when the price hit £1.32.

Now that, admittedly, is not half as good as getting £3 per share, but at least I hadn’t lost the lot - as I would have done if I had hung on much longer in the hope the price would rise again: the share price dropped and dropped and dropped until Albemarle & Bond asked for trading to be suspended when it hit just 6p (£0.06).

Given the smug tone I managed to hit in the title of the original post - ‘A share tip from a certified sucker who is otherwise highly sceptical of ‘a sure thing’ - which implied that I was, of course, anything but a sucker, I shall admit quite clearly: I was lucky, very, very lucky. I would like to conclude by ‘well, that’s taught me a lesson’, but it hasn’t, of course. I - you, too, if you are honest, shall carry on believing my own bullshit, sadly. But at least I can recognise the odd occasion when Lady Luck as the good grace to suck my dick once in a while.

Things went from bad to worse for Albemarle & Bond without my help and the company is now once again a humble pawnbroker, all its dreams of grandeur and cutting a dash in the pawnbroking world in pieces. Here are two more pieces you can read about how fate caught up with Albemarle & Bond, one from the Guardian and one from its administrators PriceWaterhouseCooper.

Panama papers leaked: the Guardian fingers Putin (though why just him?). Then there’s another few nights at the St Endellion festival and I wonder why I can’t simply settle for being middle-class. But sadly I can’t

I must immediately be honest about this entry and state that it has less to do with what I am writing and posting a blog entry and a little more to do with the fact that I acquired a Bluetooth keyboard a while ago when I bought my iPad Air and have never used it. So now I am using it to write this. I am sitting outside La Pappardella restaurant in London’s Earls Court (or, as some would have it, Earl’s Court - no one know which is correct, so that’s both or neither) where I have been coming for my Sunday supper - I only work a single shift on Sunday’s after getting up at the crack of dawn to drive to London and am thus the other side of fresh - and where I then go outside to enjoy a cigar and another glass of wine or a sambuca.

I was sitting here just now when my son messaged me and asked me whether I had heard of the ‘Panama paper leaks’. I hadn’t, so I looked them up, first on the BBC News website and then on the Guardian website. The saintly Guardian’s story is centred on Vladimir Putin, although the BBC states that many other former and current heads of state and prime minister are involved. Briefly, a law firm in Panama called Mossack Fonseca has been helping various folk fleece their countries and build up fortunes. Putin is, for example, said to be in it for $2 billion dollars.

Well, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more of that over the coming days and weeks, so I shan’t blather on too much. But one thing I did tell my son was to look at the leak of the Mossack Fonseca documents in the round. By that I mean he should ask himself, as I’m sure are many other people: who was doing the leaking and, more pertinently, why these documents were leaked? The explanation could be anything from downright banal - a disaffected employee taking his chances - to something far more complicated. My bet is on the latter, although what is really going on we - Joe Ordinary like you and me - won’t find out for a long time or, to be honest, ever.

For me the first question was, I suppotes quite oddley: what is it that makes people want ever more money? I really, honestly, don’t understand. Certainly, most of us could do with a little more dosh as and when, and I shall in a few months’ time when I finally call it a day at the Daily Mail and retire. When I do that, my income will more than halve, but the bills will stay the same. But I can honestly say I really don’t want more.

Yes, I want enough to pay my bills and a little more to save for a rainy day as we say in Britain, but an extra $2 billion? What the fuck use is that? Does a nice gin and tonic really taste so much better because you are drinking it on some rich cunt’s yacht off the coast of Sicily? That is a rhetorical question, of course, but if you hadn’t grasped that, the answer - or at least my answer - is ‘of course it doesn’t’.  I have many faults, of course I do, as do you reading this, but in my case greed is really not one of them. But then I am not 20, 30, 40, 50 or even 60. And I am now closer to 70 than 60. Getting back to the Panama papers leak, well, let’s see what comes of it.

NB. This morning I came across these comments which might be of interest to you if you want to know more about the Panama Papers' leak.

. . .

I spent the past two evenings in the company of Michael ’Peter Simple’ Wharton’s widow Susan listening to some very fine music at the 2016 St Endellion Festival. I have written about it before and shall decline my usual imperative to make the same rather snide jokes about how the whole set-up is quite remorselessly English middle-class.

Yes, there were one or two younger folk there, but I bet the average age of attendees is around 50. Susan, who I like a lot and who is very good company, will be 90 next year (and, sadly, feeling it). I know, because she has told me, that their first few years after her husband died were hard and she felt very lonely.

She and Michael Wharton had no children, although he had four (of which two were really his, and two were born to his wife by another man). She was a working artist and art teacher when she was working and has a workshop but she feels (this she hasn’t told me, but I know this to be true because I am gradually feeling something similar myself) on the periphery. It is a young person’s world - think back to when you were young if you are my or even her age - and young people, as a rule, take rather less notice of their older compatriots than is comfortable for their older compatriots. So she knocks about the cottage she lives in in Buckinghamshire, I should think trying to come up with ways of filling and passing the time.

Susan is by no means wealthy but I’m sure she isn’t on her uppers, but loneliness is loneliness even for an emperor. The music we heard was, on the Friday night, Bach’s Mass in B minor, which if you like Bach, you will like very much indeed. I have the piece on my iPhone and was not completely unfamiliar with it, but - well, I like Bach and am continually fascinated at how he just kept writing such sublime music week in, week out.

On the Saturday were a piece by Beethoven for violin, cello, piano and orchestra (I can’t be more specific because I haven’t the programme to hand), a piece by Brahms in which he set a poem by Goethe to music, a piece by a Judith Weir and a James MacMillan and it ended with Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.

That last - well, I haven’t heard it for about 40 years, but when I heard it last night, I realised it was one of the six or eight pieces I had on my three or four classical music LPs at college in the late

1960s and which I listened to again and again and again. So there was the odd and very welcome added pleasure of listening to a piece with which you are - in my case last night surprisingly - very familiar.  We were unable to attend any of the other concerts - on Sunday to Wednesday - because I was still up here in London, but I have promised her that by next year’s Easter festival I shall most certainly be retired and she must come for the whole week.

. . .

The odd thing about the St Endellion festival - and you might be able to tell this from my past and present snide remarks - is that, for better or worse - I simply do not and cannot identify with the rest of the gang who attend. For example, walking in we got chatting to one or two folk we - or rather I - was vaguely acquainted with, and without exception they all declared the previous night’s performance of the B minor mass ‘stupendous’ and ‘magnificent’ etc. Really?

Me, I have not heard the piece before performed live and, quite apart from the fact that my appreciation of classical music is merely that of an untutored listener, I have no way of knowing whether last Friday’s performance was good, OK, mediocre, bad, stupendous or awful. Yet it seems to be de rigueur for folk such as go along to such festivals as St Endellion to enthuse in superlatives. But I can’t do it. Sorry, but I can’t even if it is expected of me.

I suspect that is where I am more German than English. Ask a German his or her opinion and, as a rule, they will give you and honest answer, one which might even come across as blunt. Ask a middle-middle-middle type of English man or woman (though I’m sure the same applies to their Welsh, Irish and Scottish peers) and they seem obliged to enthuse beyond all reason.

Me, I enjoyed the performance because of the music. Certainly that music could and can be performed well or badly but, as I’ve pointed out, I am really in no position to judge. I suspect I would have enjoyed it had the performance been bad. Who knows?