Collect things only for pleasure, not for profit

Every time I glance at the Antiques Roadshow they seem to be fetching smelling salts for some delighted old biddy who has just discovered that the chipped bowl she uses to serve the dog’s dinner is worth several thousand pounds.

I always think “That could be me”, in the same deluded spirit that keeps me buying National Lottery tickets.

Because, over the years, I have accumulated vast quantities of old tat that I always believed I could sell at a profit one day. After all, they were usually limited editions, in the case of books, coins and prints. Or implausibly well preserved examples of rare, collectable toys.

It turns out that Bernie Madoff was offering far better and safer returns on investment than my loft full of this stuff

I discovered my mistake in the matter of books a few years ago, when I carefully conveyed a box of duplicate titles to a local dealer. When I had been buying, many of these had been very valuable first editions in exceptional condition. Now I was selling, there was no demand and most of them were only good for recycling: since it was me, they could stretch to £20 for the lot.

Last week it was model railways and coins. My extensive collection of the former is apparently now worth less than half what I paid for it 20 or more years ago, while the best thing I could do with most of my cherished coin collection is prise open the presentation cases, take the coins down to the shops and spend them.

This seemed odd, when the insurance company “expert” who insisted on coming to my house a year or more ago sucked through his teeth at all the immensely valuable stuff I owned, and how desperately underinsured it was. He even insisted that I install a burglar alarm as a condition of my continued and inflated cover.

Surely it cannot be the case that insurers are in league with the conmen who peddle this stuff in trying to persuade us that we are making an investment rather than simply squandering our money?

There is, I confess, one exception to the general rule. The few gold sovereigns I have acquired over the years have appreciated very nicely indeed. Though it turns out – surprise, surprise – that I was a mug to pay a premium for the Royal Mint’s beautifully presented proof sets, because they are worth not a penny more than the bog standard bullion versions of the self-same coins.

Quite possibly the only useful advice ever contained in this column: don't pay the extra for the polished coin in the nice box

Now I do, as it happens, know a man who wanted to get rid of the tiresome collection of Japanese miniatures that his late father had picked up in junk shops for a song over many years. And discovered, to his utter amazement, that it was worth more than a million pounds.

What’s more, that was the sum the collection realised at auction, not that ascribed to it by some wildly over-optimistic insurance assessor.

But that is as much the exception to the rule as the couple who buy a ticket for only the second time in their lives and scoop the Euromillions jackpot.

For the rest of us, the rule must be to laugh at those vendors of the “heirlooms of tomorrow” as heartily as we do at the spoof versions of their advertisements in Viz.

Only buy things because you like them, and feel that your enjoyment of life will be enhanced by having them around you. Never because you fancy for a moment that you may one day be able to make money from them.

The same rule should be applied, with added emphasis, when choosing a place to live.

Luckily it is not all doom and gloom. Two small boys will no longer be denied the pleasure of playing with vintage Hornby Dublo trains that I wrongly thought were much too valuable to be used for the purpose for which they were intended. In due course they may also look forward to inheriting a moderately interesting coin collection, too.

I also expect to make a huge saving on next year’s household insurance bill that I look forward to investing in something with truly lasting value. Like a lottery ticket, for example. 

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The only way to retire in comfort is going to be winning the lottery

The greatest obstacle to every well-intentioned Government health campaign, like Stoptober, has always been the Uncle Fred factor.

However convincingly they may present statistics on the terrible consequences of smoking and drinking, nearly everyone can cite in response the example of an Uncle Fred who defied the odds.

Toping and puffing to wild excess from the age of 14, Uncle Fred only died aged 98 when he was knocked off his bike while fleeing from his girlfriend’s house after her husband came home unexpectedly early.

How the nation’s medical profession must have groaned last week when Dorothy Peel from Hull, interviewed as she celebrated her 110th birthday, revealed that one of the secrets of her longevity was giving up smoking … at the age of 104. While the other was never drinking whisky before 7pm, sticking to sherry earlier in the day.

Cheers, Dorothy! [Picture courtesy of The Sun]

The problem with this sort of story, amusing and spirit-raising though it undoubtedly is, is that it falls into the same category as those regular tales of massive lottery wins. It could be you. But it won’t be.

In practice, buying that ticket every week (and I write as a fellow mug who does it himself) just admits you to that not very select club of idiots who have cheerfully signed up to pay an extra voluntary tax. 

Continuing to smoke and drink heroically, in defiance of all official advice, involves a similar willingness to pay additional taxes. And, unlike having a flutter on the lottery, it will also shorten your life.

One of the main reasons cited for making cigarettes beyond the pale is the huge amounts that the NHS will “save” on the treatment of smoking-related illnesses. This will no doubt be true in the short run, but I wonder whether anyone has ever attempted a proper cost-benefit analysis in the longer term.

Because sadly few of us are destined to pass away peacefully aged 110 or more. The process of dying is more likely to be unpleasant, prolonged and, for the NHS or its privatised successors, expensive.

If we cut out the fags, the effect may be just to defer that cost for, say, 20 years, adding in the meantime to the drain on the nation’s pension funds. The parlous state of which needs no underlining.

The Government’s latest wheeze to deal with that particular crisis kicked off yesterday with the beginning of auto-enrolment in pension schemes. This involves having your pay docked now to build up a fund for your old age which, according to all the examples I have heard, will pay you a pathetically small additional pension and reduce your entitlement to benefits by a similar amount.

A worthwhile win for Government and society as a whole, no doubt, but hardly a great boon to the individual compulsory saver.

This will not make welcome reading for those towards the bottom of the economic heap, but I believe that the underlying reality is that we have simply had it too good for too long.

After Macmillan, no one dared to point out that "You've never had it so good." But he was right ...

The generation that won the equivalent of a double rollover jackpot in the lottery of life was the one just before mine. They were too young to be conscripted for World War II. Those who made it to university not only enjoyed their education entirely free of charge, but received a maintenance grant from the taxpayer. They worked through a period of generally increasing prosperity and benefited from a wholly disproportionate inflation in the value of their property assets.

Then, to cap it all, they retired on the sort of final salary pensions that are now completely unaffordable.

The reality for those of us bobbing along in their wake is that we are likely to go on getting worse off for some considerable time, whoever we vote for at the next election. For us, any sort of retirement, let alone a prosperous one, is probably just a dream.

Rather like emulating the spectacular luck of Uncle Fred or Mrs Peel in smoking and drinking without ill-effects, or picking the right six numbers in the lottery.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Facing up to that overwhelming sense of time running out

I once found it ridiculous that nearly every mention of anyone in a newspaper should be followed by a bracketed reference to their age. Why on earth did that matter?

Today, Keith Hann (58) is completely nonplussed in the rare instances when this detail is omitted, because age provides the essential context for my reaction. An accidental death at 19 is almost always going to seem sadder than at 91.

Though if the 91-year-old met their end surfing on top of a train after downing a case of alcopops, it does make for a more unusual and arresting story.

I remember being mildly amused by the fact that my parents’ first port of call in their Journal and Evening Chronicle was always the “deaths” column; but it has now been mine, too, for many years.

I cannot recall exactly when death changed from being a vague, theoretical possibility to the central consideration of my life, but I suspect that it was somewhere around the age of 40. Perhaps it comes later for women, because Mrs Hann just laughs when I try to explain that some element of her forward planning is of limited relevance to me because I won’t be around to see it come to fruition.

It does not seem so long since I found myself similarly frustrated when suggesting improvements to a family property and being met with indifference on the grounds that “it will see me out”. Though in that instance the pessimists proved correct, as pessimists so often do.

Right now, Mrs Hann and I are juggling my desire to live and die in rural Northumberland with our work commitments elsewhere, and the knowledge that where we are living this December will determine where our older son starts his first school next September.

Buying a new home is not the simple option it once appeared, when a 25-year mortgage would run until I am 83 or, on the evidence of 300 years of Hann family mortality statistics, long dead. A fact that is evidently not lost on potential sources of such finance, judging by their marked reluctance to provide it.

The revolutionary iCoffin: surely the perfect last word for a PR man? (With acknowledgements to onceuponageek.com)

I have no life insurance, because what was the point of spending money on that when I had no wife or dependents to benefit from it? (Added to which, I hoped that more distant relatives and godchildren might greet the news of my demise with unadulterated sorrow, rather than as the harbinger of a lucky windfall.)

While my pension provision, thanks to the feeble performance of the stock market as well as my own improvidence, makes my retirement seem a more implausible fantasy than my three-year-old’s current concerns about the ogre that apparently inhabits a tree in our garden, or the tiger that regularly takes up residence beneath his bed.

The bottom line is that I find myself with responsibility for the future of two small boys and a strategy for their housing and education almost entirely based on winning the National Lottery.

Or, after 40 years of mainly scribbling for a living, suddenly coming up with the latest answer to Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey. Realistically, I think we have far more chance of winning the Lottery.

But, as you read this, I will be sitting at my desk with my phone off the hook and my email inbox disabled, staring at a blank screen as I try to start the short book that someone recklessly commissioned two months ago, and which now needs to be delivered in just five short weeks.

I will be breaking off only for my long deferred annual check-up at the doctor’s tomorrow, which can surely only add fuel to my slow-burning fire of fatalistic gloom.

My book? Oh, it is a supposedly humorous short guide to opera, about which I know a little. Though my main hope, if I get it done, is naturally for a follow-up commission on my specialist subject: trying to work out how much time I have got left.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Can we keep up that Olympic spirit? Yes, we can

I am writing this week’s column with a post-Olympics hangover – so for once, perhaps, find myself in tune with the spirit of the nation.

Just as all those bills roll in after Christmas, we are surely about to wake up to the fact that the economy is still contracting and the Government that is meant to be sorting it out is riven by deep ideological divisions, exacerbated by disagreement on such burning issues as who should sit in the House of Lords.

Meanwhile we are about to demonstrate our gratitude to those charming soldiers who stepped in at short notice to handle security so capably by handing many of them not medals, but P45s.

And all this before we begin to ponder what exactly we are supposed to do with world class facilities like a Velodrome when there isn’t an Olympics to be hosted.

Nevertheless, I shall miss the Games, despite my total lack of interest in sport. They clearly made so many people very happy.

I enjoyed the “buzz” of collective satisfaction and the sense of community that led a bright-eyed, black-tied stranger to approach me after the country house opera I saw on Saturday night to inform me that “we” had won another two gold medals.

Even though my own contribution to “our” Olympic success, in reality, has been restricted to buying the Lottery tickets that have helped to fund so much of Britain’s sporting renaissance, and which should be remembered as one positive legacy of the much derided government of John Major.

Attaining political consciousness in the late 1960s, it always seemed to me that key to Britain’s undoubted sense of failure at the time was a simple lack of self-confidence. We were still turning out world-beating inventions, but the combination of inept management, bloody-minded unions and feeble government meant that we seemed completely unable to translate these into economic success.

Meanwhile those pesky Continentals we had helped to flatten in the war were clearly doing much better than we were. It is not hard to understand why we were ready to turn our backs on our natural friends and allies in the Commonwealth and throw in our lot with what was then billed as the Common Market.

If EU fanatics had their way, we would never know how well Great Britain’s athletes have just performed in London because they would have marched out as part of a single European team under the EU flag.

On the Continent, newspapers have been pointing out that the EU collectively trounced the US and China, with Germany’s Die Welt noting that Europe is “doing pretty well for a continent in decline”.

But so too have the Commonwealth realms of Queen Elizabeth II, with Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Canada, the Bahamas and Grenada together bagging a total of 145 medals, including 48 golds.

Call me old fashioned, but I always find that I have more in common with those people with whom we share a head of state, language and laws than with those who have been our enemies for centuries, but just happen to live next door.

I know that Bob the Builder’s “yes we can” slogan has been somewhat devalued through its adoption by Barack Obama, who has demonstrated that he can’t to such an extent that Mitt Romney is apparently in with a serious chance of winning the US presidency.

But, even so, the best Olympic legacy for Britain would surely be retain that sense of “yes we can” take on the whole world and win. Let us broaden our horizons, hold on to our recovered self-confidence and keep remembering that we are right up there with the very best on the planet.

Now all we need is some genuine leaders capable of harnessing that feeling, rather than focusing on the detail of ensuring more hours of PE in primary schools while timidly kow-towing on the big issues to the whims of our neighbours, who so rarely have our best interests at heart.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Enjoy the Jubilee - and try not to think about what comes next

As one of Britain’s more fanatical monarchists, I am greatly looking forward to celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee – one of the very few genuine “once in a lifetime” events.

I have vivid memories of driving to London on an old A-road during the Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1977, passing through village after village hung with bunting that must have been carefully put away after the Coronation, judging by the number of South African and pre-maple leaf Canadian flags on display.

Now that's what I call a street party. Salford, 1977, according to The Guardian.

These may have finally succumbed to moths by the time of the Golden Jubilee in 2002, but the left’s eager predictions that the public would refuse to celebrate half a century of Elizabeth II turned out to be spectacularly wrong.

The Mall in 2002. The Guardian predicted a total lack of public interest.

My hopes are accordingly high for the week ahead, even if the weather forecast sounds dubious and we can no longer afford to turn out the Gold State Coach for a grand procession to St Paul’s.

But will the positive impact on my personal morale be reflected across the nation as a whole? On the one hand, we have Sir Mervyn King warning that the loss of GDP caused by an extra bank holiday may be enough to tip the UK into recession for a further quarter.

On the other, retailers tell us that they are looking forward to an £800 million spending spree that may partially make up for the thoroughly depressing 2012 they have endured so far. True, their other hopes are pinned on the generation of a “feelgood factor” by sustained good weather, a strong showing by England in the Euro 2012 football championships and a series of British triumphs in the Olympics. None of which looks massively more plausible than my decision to base my retirement strategy entirely on a big win in the National Lottery. Though I do at least usually remember to buy a ticket, thus raising my chances by a mathematically insignificant degree.

Above all, I greatly need some happy memories of the Jubilee to banish from my mind the defining image of 2012 in Britain so far: the team of 50 paramedics, firemen and police officers half demolishing a house in South Wales in a £100,000 operation to release a 63 stone teenager from her bedroom.

Image from The Sun

It is hard to imagine the sheer dedication to gluttony that must have been required to achieve a weight gain on this scale. Indeed, the only positive spin I have been able to put on it is seeing some encouraging parallels with the Eurozone, where Greece similarly finds itself trapped in an impossible position as the result of years of overindulgence.

It clearly won’t be easy to extricate it from its dilemma, but given the will and the resources perhaps it may yet be done. If not, who can tell what may await the Greeks and all the rest of us just around the corner?

When Britain last celebrated a Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the country was at the apogee of its imperial power and could look back on 80 years of global pre-eminence, rising if unevenly distributed prosperity, and relative peace.

Note how closely the soldiers stood together in those days ...

You don’t have to be a big Downton Abbey fan to know what happened 17 years later.

Today we may be sadly diminished as a power, but can similarly look back on more than 60 years of increasing wealth and the avoidance of large scale conflict. For the sake of our collective sanity, I suggest that we do not dwell too much on what may happen next, but simply reflect on our good fortune in having a head of state who has undoubtedly given us a much higher international standing than any politician would have managed.

And while enjoying the cakes and ale, remember also the personal moderation for which Her Majesty has always been renowned, lest more of us ironically end up requiring a bulldozer to release us from our homes when this “great summer of sport” finally comes to an end.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Faltering first steps towards economy

It has been a week of faltering first steps in my household, as one-year-old Charlie discovered that he could let go of the furniture and boldly go across the middle of the room towards the smiling adult with the outstretched arms.

Naturally there have been mishaps along the way, and I have belatedly come to appreciate the origin of that useful phrase “trying to run before you can walk”. Words that spring to mind every time Education Secretary Michael Gove pops up in the media, stuck in the bottom of his hole yet still ferociously digging.

Not that I am without sympathy for those in the Government charged with finding savings in their departmental budgets. It finally dawned on me a couple of weeks ago that I have been living vastly beyond my means for years, and that the only solutions were to increase my income by about 60pc or cut expenditure by a third.

That will be the spending cuts, then, won’t it?

I duly drew up a list of things I could do without, but none has yet got past the family vetting committee. Cancelling my eye-wateringly expensive private health insurance looked like a no-brainer to me, particularly as the small print carefully excludes pretty much any problem I seem likely to develop, but Mrs Hann remains to be convinced. I might go down with blackwater fever right after cancelling my direct debit, and it would be like forgetting to buy a lottery ticket on the day when your usual numbers finally hit the jackpot.

The only foreign holiday I have taken in the last decade was my honeymoon, and I would gladly never take another, but my wife feels the urge to go somewhere reliably sunny in September and even I cannot claim that she is necessarily going to get through a bottle of Soltan in Scarborough towards the end of the summer season.

But tough choices, as they say, are going to have to be made. Memberships of clubs I rarely visit; donations to good causes (and political ones); expensive indulgences like nights at the opera are all in line for the axe. But just looking at my list of potential economies reminds me what a hugely privileged, middle class life I lead.

I may no longer be able to progress, like a mediaeval monarch, between two comfortable homes, but we are some way off worrying about not having a roof over our heads. More of the food shopping may have to come from Iceland and less from Marks & Spencer, but we will not starve (and frankly it would do me no harm if I did, at least for a while).

Dieting is a dreadful prospect, but becomes curiously enjoyable once you have started, as you become obsessively focused on shedding the pounds and feel the benefit of not carrying all that surplus weight around with you. With luck, economising will prove equally addictive. I am just hopelessly out of practice, having been lucky enough to remain reasonably prosperous since the early 1980s.

Never rich, though; never saving for the future; in fact, never really giving a thought about tomorrow. Could there have been a worse preparation for late-life parenthood?

I did notice, in my years as a trustee trying to raise funds for musical charities, that the genuinely wealthy were often pathologically mean. This, I have finally realised, is their secret.

So this week I finally embark on my first unsteady steps to slash spending, just like a proper toff. I hope that anyone trying to touch me for a few quid in the coming months will note that my sudden close-fistedness is not the result of suddenly acquiring a fortune: quite the opposite. With lottery tickets also on my list of cuts, contracting blackwater fever seems a much more likely prospect.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The lazy and coincidental way to sell

On Friday I made a momentous and entirely unexpected decision: I agreed to sell the house I anticipated leaving only in one of those zip-up plastic bags that have now displaced the traditional wooden box.

Now, you might think that “entirely unexpected” is a pretty strange description, given that my house has been on the market since January. But the fact is that I never actually imagined it would sell. Placing it with an estate agent fell into much the same category as buying a National Lottery ticket, which I do faithfully twice a week, without ever really believing that I am about to scoop the jackpot.

There is, I should emphasise, nothing wrong with the place. It is a solidly built, listed, stone house offering stupendous views of Simonside, the Cheviots and Whittingham Vale. But its appeal seemed likely to be limited both by its remoteness and the fact that I had configured it to meet the specific needs of an eccentric and crusty bachelor who worked at home half the time and spent the other half elsewhere.

The head-shaking reactions of the few viewers of the property seemed to confirm my suspicions. So earlier this month I signed the lease on a rented house in Cheshire, so that my wife and I could fulfil our work commitments there for the next couple of years. I intended to take my place off the market and retain it for weekends and holidays, with a view to moving back to it as our main home in due course. Characteristically, I then made the schoolboy error of being too lazy to tell the estate agent of our decision, so that his “For Sale” sign was still in place to catch the eye of a chance passer-by.

This had very much the random character of a lottery win. Sadly for me the sum involved is rather smaller, and indeed somewhat less than I had hoped it would be. The potential buyer makes his living from property, albeit hotels rather than houses, and so pitched his offer with appropriate professional rigour. In fact, I would have rejected it immediately but for the fact that I liked the man from the moment I met him, and was much struck by the fact that, passing by on a day when I was not at home, he took the trouble to make friends with my next door neighbours of 21 years.

It was an added bonus when I mentioned to an Essex-based friend that I was thinking of selling my house to a baronet from his neck of the woods, and he remarked on the coincidence that his best friend held just such a title. Luckily I am familiar with Anthony Powell’s novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, so was appropriately unamazed when my bloke and his turned out to be one and the same. It instantly moved negotiations onto a new plane of matiness that did little to improve the offer, but made me more inclined to accept it.

I am naturally conscious of the many slips that can occur once lawyers start poring over a contract. But, fortunately, I am now in the happy position of not greatly caring how it all pans out. If the sale proceeds, my house will pass into the hands of a friend of a friend who clearly loves the place for precisely the same reasons that I do: the location and the views. While if it falls through, I shall be able to bring up the next Hann generation in a beautiful spot where his ancestors worked the land a couple of centuries ago.

If we do move away from the North East for a while, I can say one thing with total confidence. We will be back.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.