Keep buying. Dilute the sonofabitch. I want every orifice in his body flowing red.

This was originally going to be a grimly ironic post about the longest day (summer solstice, some three days ago), involving some sardonic humour about only getting three hours' sleep a night at present. Trouble is, I haven't had time to write it.

Next week requires me to do a month's work in the space of four days (albeit with a little assistance from a regional junior chimp) whilst the boss is on holiday, which I'm really looking forward to.

I find myself in the unusual position of being whatever the equivalent of 'triangulated' is for four items (squargulated? quadrangulated? Strangulated is perhaps the most apt) between no less than four powerful women at present - one who is covering for me on a project I can't spend any time on, one at the private equity house I'm working for, one who's standing in for the boss, and of course Mrs Chimp, who's less than delighted that I'm not home for 21 hours out of 24 at present.

The problem with powerful women is that they all need constant updates as to what I'm up to. I could easily fill the 35 hours (ha!) of my working week with progress meetings, to do lists and conference calls. Trouble is, I'd never get the work done.

And to top it all off, Gordon Brown will be running the country by the end of the week. Hating to tempt fate, can things get any worse?

It's better to be wrong than alone

Feeling as if my liver is going to explode today, mainly because of a four hour Menu Gourmand (roughly translates as 'bloated pig') dinner yesterday evening here, which involved six courses accompanied by six different glasses of wine, one of which was memorably called ‘Terre Arse’ (although sadly not pronounced in the correct English manner by our inevitably Polish waitron).

After a little awkwardness during a conversation with our German guest about whether wine from Alsace is German or French (it depends on who's asking, apparently), a fine evening was had by all. Wish I’d eaten less, though. Four courses would have been fine.

Here’s a story about City high flyers out-breeding each other. Makes my own two look rather meagre. If only they were joking about it being “cheaper to run a string of polo ponies than bring up twins.”

Be careful what you look for on Gumtree, however.

Good (ie. brief, and doesn’t contain any bloody ‘random musings’) blog about chatter on the tube. On reflection, this must be made up, as everyone knows that it’s simply not done to talk on the Tube.

Here’s a quick internet poll.

And finally, a Chartered Accountant dancing

See you next, um, Monday

Being born in a stable does not make one a horse

A quick one today – I have proper work to do. So, using the punchy bullet-point style so loved of due diligence practitioners:

• exchanged contracts on the new chimp enclosure in Tooting today, and if I could give you one piece of advice (or 'value add' as we call it), other than the obvious stuff about never trusting estate agents, it’s that you should never sell residential property to a junior investment bankers – it’s just not worth it.


• one of junior chimp boy’s new words this week is ‘castle.’ Problem is, he can’t quite pronounce the ‘c’, leading a number of my fellow Earlsfieldians to believe they’re being called an ‘arsehole’ by a toddler who they’ve never met. The kid will go far. Heh.


• Is it me, or is this an unpaid advert for a well known mobile operator, not an item of ‘media news’. ‘Golden spot’ my foot.

• Say what you like about Gordon Brown’s support in the country, all of 182 people on Facebook like him. Only another 44,775,003 more of us to win over, and the job’s done. Might be easier to use the more, um, ‘reliable’ system of postal voting. I don't know why we bother to elect our new Prime Ministers at all. Hang on a minute...


• For those Daily Telegraph readers out there feeling the urge to splutter in angry protest about something, why not ally yourself to the Campaign Against Political Correctness. The ‘about us’ page is particularly special - in the same way the devil has the best tunes, the lunatic fringe of the UK right has the ugliest nutters.


• If you’ve got 10 minutes to spare and need some adrenalin to brighten up your day, why not try a high-pressure geography quiz? It's simple - you name each of the 192 member states of the UN whilst a socking great stopwatch counts down your ten minute allowance.

Triangulating your resilience is like watching a swan.

Today's post (which is in a holiday mood) is proudly dedicated to the Baron, who after this afternoon is giving up exciting opportunities in a go-getting organisation in order to muck about with covenant re-sets for the rest of his career.

This week's lesson from Sralan on 'The Apprentice': "When I sell, I sell to people like Dixons". Maybe if they hadn't carried so much Amstrad stock, Dixons 106 closed stores might still be open.

Well, a very Happy Easter to you all, I'm out of town for a while. And remember - in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The gawky and lifeless sit around, innocent of any flicker of intelligence

Thanks to the late, great Anglo-Yank Alastair Cooke for today's blog title - an uncannily accurate description of beancounting towers, where I spend every waking hour. Well, I never thought I'd live to see this day, but the lovely, inclusive, collegiate, all-round good bloke Gordon Brown has actually increased my net wealth thanks to the latest budget, to the tune of 50.42pence per day. Gordon, I salute you. That will bring down my Stamp Duty bill on the new chimp enclosure (still in Tooting, alas) to just £27,366, a trifling tax bill which will only take an entire year of mortgage repayments to pay back.

Enough from me. I'm off to read up on just how the bloody hell I'm going to "handle the 'paradox of success.'" Nice one

Forecasts are forecasts really, you don't really know until you know

An Excel Chimp budget day scoop - insider knowledge of GB's final budget!

Benign debt paydown profile

So I was on the train home last night accompanied by the usual collection of South African accountants heading to Wimbledon and corporate brokers heading to Farnham when the woman standing next door got involved in one of those tedious high-volume one-sided mobile calls that make other commuters' lives hell. Said woman, however, was a very loud, very confident and very OK City yuppy, brimming with uber-confidence and desperate to tell the equally bumptious person on the other end of the phone how simply ghastly the weather was in New York at the weekend, and how it was absolutely dreadful that poor Jessica had just got pregnant after moving in with her boyfriend of nine months.

Then, the two blonde, tanned South African girls next to me on the other side started sniggering loudly, saying in a thick Gauteng accent "Does she know how ridiculous she sounds?" "Yah." Long live multiculturalism - your opportunity to hate people of all races equally...

Still, at least the South Africans are moving up the London social food chain

Casting about for a semantic escape hatch

Overheard on the bus this morning:

Tooting undergraduate 1: When I graduate I'm gonna become a social worker, innit

Tooting undergraduate 2: Why iz dat?

TU1: Coz you get da key worker housing off da government innit

TU2: Woz dat?

TU1: Iz loads of free cash. You buy a house well cheap, sell it an make a fortune man

TU2: Then you moov to Chelsea, innit

TU1: Yeah, man.

That'll be where my 25 grand stamp duty will be going then. Key workers my arse.

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth

Taxing accounting

So I've just submitted my 2005/06 tax return, and am delighted to have contributed more than £20,000 to Uncle Gordon's coffers during the period. At the current rate of £1.5bn a year, that's bought me 7 minutes of 'peacekeeping' in Iraq.
The above snap is meant to be the first of a series of 'famous accountants in films'. Trouble is, there aren't many more of them. Oh well.
Monday starts in less than 90 minutes. I've already received an SMS from El Presidente telling me to get into work early tomorrow. Have a good week, bean counters.

Lovely weather we're having

Making lemons into lemonade

Today's jolly Friday column is brought to you in association with David Hasselhof, living proof that you can make a fortune from people laughing at you rather than with you, and still be a boozing wife beater. Hoff, I salute you.

So, it's September - I would like to take the opportunity to be the first to use the phrase "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", which will appear in every third story in the UK press over the next six weeks or so. More prosaically, six months of commuting in the dark beckons.

Nevertheless, most serious journalists are still dozing in Cornwall, Tuscany or Barbados, releasing column inches for such earth-shattering stories as the bunch of firefighters (didn't they used to be called 'firemen'?) getting into trouble for refusing to dole out fire safety leaflets at Pride Scotia 2006. They now have Archbishop Mario Conti weighing in to support them. I'm not sure whether refusing to hand out leaflets anywhere should result in disciplinary action, but given that the alternative is mandatory diversity training, maybe it's better to stand there for a couple of hours and take the verbal beating.

I wonder what the Gay & Lesbian committee of the Fire Brigades Union makes of it all?

On the subject of diversity, I'm struggling to see how a government clipboard nazi can determine whether I'm 'welcoming' rather than merely 'accepting' diversity. Is there some sort of test? A great time to be a lawyer, I should think.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have decided that aeroplanes are bad, and are busy advocating 'painful tax rises'. Good to see that they are still determined not to win an election. Even the Great Gordo wouldn't go so far as to use the word 'painful', except perhaps in the context of his awful public grinning these days.

Apparently the way to spend our way out of environmental disaster is to build a MagLev train line to Glasgow, at a cost of £30billion and a couple of million gardens, fields, meadows, copses, lakes and woodlands churned up and cemented over. Good work boys.

The ongoing dressing down I'm receiving at the hands of my over-achieving 16 year old cousin continues. She looked decidedly underwhelmed when I explained to her what my job entails this morning (Q: "So do you just count things all day?" A:"er, not really, I'm kind of like a surveyor, but of companies not houses"), then suggested in rather strong terms that A-Level Business Studies (yes, I've got one of those) is a complete waste of time, "like psychology". Also, aeroplanes are evil, as are the Conservatives. Sounds like Cameron's boys still have some work to do on the youth vote.