We live on a country lane, in a row of houses that all face the same way. It’s a nice spot, and the people in it have arrived by quite different routes. Some have been here decades and bought when the prices were, by today’s standards, a rounding error. Others turned up more recently, earn […]
The House Across the Lane Read More »
When I started out in this job, twenty-five years ago, preparing for a client review looked like this. I’d dig out last year’s fact-find, which was a paper form, filled in by hand. Then I’d copy it out again, by hand, onto a fresh one, changing the bits that had changed. The values came off
Everything Changed Except One Thing Read More »
In 1902, the French administration running Hanoi had a problem with rats. The city’s smart new sewers had turned out to be a superb rat motorway, and the rats carried plague. So the authorities did the sensible thing and put a price on them. A small bounty for every rat killed, payable on production of
The Tailless Rats of Hanoi Read More »
On the 17th of March 2004, a Cornell defenceman named George Boiardi was struck in the chest by a lacrosse ball during a game. His heart stopped. He was twenty-two. Twenty-two years on, his old school still runs a forum in his name, and this spring the speaker was Connor Buczek, the head lacrosse coach
Sometime in the late-nineties, a magazine would arrive at my student house on a CD-ROM. Not a link. Not an app. A shiny disc, in the post, that you fed into a computer the size of a small fridge and then waited, while it whirred, to find out whether it would work at all. The
In 1785 a French mathematician named Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour set out to take the mickey out of Benjamin Franklin. He wrote a parody of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack built around a character called Fortunate Richard: a man so tediously, unbearably American in his optimism that he left a small sum in his will on the condition
Pip is just a boy when a convict rises out of the Kent marshes, turns him upside down to shake out his pockets, and demands food and a file to cut through his leg-iron. Pip, terrified, obliges. He creeps back before dawn with a pork pie and some brandy stolen from his sister’s pantry and
Great Expectations Read More »
Hetty Green was, by most reckonings, the richest woman in America when she died in 1916. She left behind perhaps $100m, a sum that inflation has since turned into several billion in today’s money. She also wore the same black dress until it turned green at the seams, ate her porridge cold to save the
The Most Expensive Year of Your Life Read More »
I saw a widow recently. She’d booked in to talk about inheritance tax, which is usually where these conversations start and almost never where they end. Before we got anywhere near gifting or trusts or any of the clever stuff, we did the dull, necessary thing and read her will. It had been drafted only
Give With a Warm Hand Read More »
Last week I was at an evening function catered by a brilliant local independent café and restaurant. Exactly the kind of place we all love to see on the high street, and quietly mourn when it’s gone. The food was wonderful. One of the speakers said so, to warm applause, and then gave a plug
Let Them Eat Jaffa Cakes Read More »
