A New Tax on Death
I’ve just found out that the cost of extra Death Certificates not ordered when you report a death, is going up from £3.50 or £7 from April 5th.
What was it they said about two things you can’t avoid; death and taxes? It is certainly and and not and/or.
Death of my Son
My youngest son died yesterday from pancreatic cancer, at just 37. He passed away peacefully at home with friends and family.
I shall always remember how he bore his illness very bravely and always thought of others, despite the fact he only had days to live. The support from the local surgery, district nurses and Macmillan was impeccable and meant he was at least as comfortable as possible.
Nothing I can say will really make any difference.
Pancreatic cancer is an awful disease for which there appears to little chance of any progress towards a cure. I do have hope though and it is my wife’s and my old University of Liverpool, that is one of the leaders in this fight.
Read more about their work here.
Farewell Harry Carpenter
The BBC has produced some legendary commentators. Harry Carpenter was one of the best and most professional. He was certainly the best boxing commentator.
Sadly, ‘Arry died last night. He will be sorely missed by everyone.
But don’t just take my word for it. George Foreman has just said a lot more on Radio 5.
Echoes of Orde Wingate
In The Times today, there is an obituary of Major-General David Tyacke. The first two paragraphs talk about how he worked for Orde Wingate.
David Tyacke was the last officer on the staff of the Chindit HQ at Sylhet in Assam to see General Orde Wingate on the morning he left to fly to “Broadway” and “White City”, the jungle bases of 77 and 111 Brigades attacking the Japanese lines of communication in Burma.
Writing in old age, Tyacke described how, when Wingate’s aircraft was first reported overdue, a strange euphoria spread among the HQ staff as they realised that the general would not be keeping them on tenterhooks that evening. But it was soon replaced by a grim foreboding that their eccentric but visionary leader was dead.
Somewhere my father must have met Wingate, or perhaps someone he knew had served with him. But he was one of my father’s heroes.
I have read quite a bit about Wingate and feel that although some of his views were questionable, on the whole his was the right sort of thinking in difficult times. Wingate definitely was not a conservative thinker. The trouble today is that we have far too many of those.
Andrée Peel: A Brave Lady
Andrée Peel was a heroine of the French Resistance and she died a few days ago. This is the first paragraph of her obituary in The Times.
The youthful Andrée Virot was running a beauty salon in the Breton port-city of Brest when Germany invaded and overran northern France in May-June 1940. Being adventurous and high spirited, she was an early recruit to the Resistance movement but her work was initially confined to the distribution of an underground newspaper. Later she worked for an escape line smuggling shot-down Allied airmen out of France to Britain and the reception and dispatch to safety of the occasional agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
She went on to survive the war and incarceration in concentration camps. After the war she married an Englishman and settled in Bristol.
Perhaps though she had the last laugh on all those who punished and imprisoned her. She lived to be 105.
Would we do the same now, if we were fighting a foe as ruthless as the Nazis?
Keep it Small on Zopa
Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to reduce the size of the individual loans I make on Zopa. I now have a limit of forty pounds and the average loan is just above that figure for the over a thousand contracts I have. When I started I had a limit of two hundred pounds and a couple of those loans went into default, which meant I had some bad debts. There was also the problem then of liquidity in that there wasn’t the same number of Zopa borrowers and it was sometimes difficult to lend the money out. Now, if I put say a thousand pounds into the market, it gets lent out within a couple of days. Note that my low limits on each individual loan, do not give Zopa any extra costs, as they only check the borrower once and the other is just data processing.
There also appears to be a big difference in how Zopa checks borrowers. They have said that their checks are more stringent, but they also appear to be much faster. Perhaps, this is because they are now bigger and have more staff, but they must have better systems too!
This leads to an interesting theory. As Zopa and others like them get bigger, then the markets will get much more fluid and responsive. Money will get lent out quickly in loans split into hundreds of small ones. This will mean that larger lenders like me, will have thousands of loans which will spread their risk and thus, they will get a good return.
Do I have any evidence to back this up?
Possibly!
My rate of return over the last year is 5.39% before tax and taking it since October 2008, it is 5.55%. These are not bad returns in these troubled times.
But if I look at my returns over the last six months, the figure is 5.85%. It would appear that my policy of restricting the amount I lend to individual borrowers is having an effect, as I started this policy in the summer of last year.
When looking at loans in arrears, I have less outstanding now than I did a year ago. Partly, this is due to the smaller amounts lend, but mainly this is due to Zopa‘s better systems.
But I am not a hundred percent optimistic. We have an election coming up and who knows what that will bring.
But I certainly feel that if you want a better return on your money, that Zopa and their ilk are a better proposition than something like an Icelandic bank.
Do I have any regrets about Zopa?
Not really! But one of my borrowers died. It just goes to show how that in this world there are much more important things than money. My heart goes out to their family and friends.
Rose Gray at the River Cafe
The death of Rose Gray, one of the co-founders of the River Cafe, has just been announced. That is obviously extremely sad for her friends and family, but it also marks the passing of someone, who has left her culinary skills to the world. Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall have all paid tributes.
My late wife and I went twice. It was marvellous and of course, I was able to eat a real high-class gluten-free meal.
I’m sure if my wife was here now, we’d be discussing those two meals and paying our tributes.
There is a post here, that I wrote after one of the meals.
Ray Gosling
I’ve liked Ray Gosling and his quirky documentaries for many years.
It was probably a surprise that he admitted last night to mercy killing a gay lover who was dying from AIDS. Perhaps, it was more of a surprise, that I hadn’t realised that Ray was gay. But then that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that one is a decent human being. Ray appears very much to be that sort of person.
So was Ray right, to kill a man who had no hope of life and for whom the doctors could do no more, I think, yes. I only think as I don’t think I could have done it myself. In fact, when my wife was desperately ill in great pain at the end of her life, I couldn’t have done it. So perhaps for Ray, he saw no hope and did the deed that many will condemn.
I will not.
Carmichael, Dankworth and Merrick
It sounds like a typical country firm of solicitors, but actually, these three well-loved people have sadly come together in the obituary pages of The Times.
Ian Carmichael made us all laugh, John Dankworth created some of the best music and Gil Merrick was Birmingham City’s loyal goalkeeper who tried his best to turn the tide of the Mighty Magyars for England.
But perhaps John Dankworth’s wife, Cleo Laine, showed how you celebrate death rather than mourn it. Many would have cancelled the show they were going to give that night at the Stables Theatre. But not Cleo!
The show did go on!
She did the right thing!
Anne Mustoe
I don’t think I ever met Anne Mustoe, but I may have done as I knew one of her three stepsons, Edward, quite well. My late wife and I used to eat in his restaurant in the 1970s and later he had a house near us in Debach. He used to affectionately tell tales of Anne.
Thinking about this a day later, I have a feeling that Anne did come to lunch with Edward. This would have probably been before she started on her adventures and was still the headmistress at St. Felix School in Southwold.
It was sad to hear today that she had died from one of Telegraph obituary writers, Nicholas Comfort.
Long live the British eccentrics.
The Anonymous Widower 