Today’s diary entry is short, mostly because I have run out of day again. Already it is almost midnight, and we have got to get up extra early in the morning. This is because Number One Son-In-Law is full of the enthusiasm of youth, and likes to start work whilst even the birds are still yawning and stretching and scratching their wings.
One of the fortunate things about Ted is that he doesn’t. Ted thinks that work should start after the children have gone to school.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, nothing is worse than a frantic scramble for coffee and breakfast, all before you have woken up properly. However tomorrow Mark is not rurally broadbanding, but heading off to build the house in Barrow, and so really we should have gone to bed at about the time that you would dispatch an eight-year-old, along with instructions to clean their teeth and then maybe a story if you hadn’t already hit the bottle by then.
Obviously we didn’t. Instead we thought how lovely it would be to drink wine and chat for the evening. In consequence we stayed up far too late, and now I am writing to you in a midnight forgotten-diary emergency.
It has been a fairly uneventful day in any case.
I have put Lucy and Oliver in charge of investing their own money.
They both have a little bit of cash in stocks and shares which I have been ignoring for ages, because of being too busy, too idle, and too ill-informed to do anything sensible with it. Over the last couple of years, although it has grown a little, it has not returned very much
When Lucy came home and decided that she wanted to buy a house she thought that she might like to try and maximise all her assets.
Pleased not to have to bother, I have turned the investment details over to the two of them. They had a conference between themselves about their next move, and I lost interest.
Today I discovered that what they had decided to do was to sell everything I had bought, and then spend the cash on all sorts of other things.
I am impressed.
Lucy is playing the game in the Daily Telegraph where you become a fantasy investor and see how much imaginary money you can make.
I am really impressed.
They have invested their real money in funds and multi-manager funds and had a couple of punts on the side. Wetherspoons is one. I forget the others.
I am hoping that they make a jolly good go of it and then keep me in a pampered old age filled with luxury and idleness.
I quite fancy some idleness.
Mark and Number One Son-In-Law both buzzed off to work today, and when they came home the Peppers had taken their house apart.
There is an enormous hole instead of a bedroom.
We all stood in the chilly void and looked up at the clear frosty sky and the stars.
The thing was that they had got lots huge long wooden joists which had once been an important part of holding the roof up, and which now had a role to play in keeping our house warm.
We needed to transport all of these from their house to ours.
We hauled them out with bruised-finger difficulty, and weaved our way through their back yard, which is packed so full of blocks that it looks like a scene from Minecraft.
It is not easy to manoeuvre ten foot lengths of timber around sharp corners and down narrow alleys, most especially not in the dark.
Having several excited dogs milling about under your feet does not help either.
In the end we had dragged it all home. Mark thinks that he does not want to burn it but to build himself a shed. Exactly where he is planning to build this I do not know, it can only be either at the farm or on top of the conservatory.
How excited I am.
Have a picture of the park in the morning, taken by one of the Peppers.
