Your New House Comes With Everything, Except Everything You Need!

I've been thinking, and I've come to the conclusion that no doubt everyone else has: No matter how rich I was, I wouldn't buy a private jet. I mean, despite how cool it would be to say "darling, shall we take the Learjet to San Tropez tonight", it would be such an enormous hassle to look after the stupid thing. First, you need to hire a pilot, because you want to make full use of the expensive luxury seating option in the middle bit that you had to pick. You need to hire glamorous assistants, because no self respecting squillionaire gets his own drinks. You'd need to organise fuelling, and it might surprise you to find that you can't land in the nearest Shell, you have to get a whopping great tanker down before you go anywhere remotely hot or bikini-clad. You then need to maintain it, which requires about eleventeen weeks of fixing it for every seven feet it flies, you then have to insure it and make sure it's safe. And where does it live when it's not flying?

Or, I could just hire one when I need it. Then, I could spend more time being rich.

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What do you do when even the experts have no clue?

Why is it so hard to get good advice these days? For example, I had a cough in October last year that seemed to go on forever. I tried to ignore it, then down copious quantities of honey and lemon, but when I became bored of coughing up my spleen, I headed to the pharmacy who suggested that I should try some cough medicine. When I asked which one, she merely said "this one is good; it tastes of strawberry". Really! That's your basis on what sort of medicine to pick from? I then proceeded to head to the Supermarket to see what they had. I did ask an assistant, but to be honest I might as well have channeled Barney the Purple Dinosaur. He seemed to have an affection for the words "um" and "uh", and kept saying "I dar' now, mate". He did attempt to work out which was cheaper overall, but seemed to shut down every other part of his body, including blinking, as he concentrated 100% on basic addition. I ran away before he overloaded and exploded, naturally.

The doctor was my next port of call, as you'd imagine. However this only served to confuse me even further: apparently, cough medicine doesn't even work at all! Huh?



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Lost my wallet? I nearly lost my sanity!

Have you ever lost your wallet? Well, this morning, I can happily tell you from experience it falls into the category of a "ridiculously inconvenient". No, really, it is a complete pain in the backside. Not only have I got to organise the obligatory cancelling of all my cards and re-ordering my driving licence, but it's the little things that you normally do without a thought that are now off limits, such as buying food. I have an "Internet-only account", so I can't just pop into the branch to get my money.

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So you don’t have a referral scheme.....why?

So there I was talking to an old friend over a nice sandwich. He owns one of the largest importers of pet-shop supplies in the region and is turning over something like £1,000 a day. Not bad if you can get it, eh? I wasn’t aware that there were that many pet shops in the region, but I digress.

He has a warehouse, as you do, and was struggling with paying for the place but as business has really picked up, all is looking well. His bank, however, (funny how many bad turns in a story start with someone’s bank) had decided to withdraw all funding from his business leaving him high and dry, and now a profitable company is staring at that big scary word, “Liquidation”.

As you might have guessed by now, he is somewhat miffed at his bank. They will not tell him why they have withdrawn his funding, and will not even assist in any way. Nice! He wants to take action against them, which is understandable, but didn’t know who to turn to. Guess who he asked for a recommendation? Moi.

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