Doubters, Doomsters, Gloomsters

In 2019, in his first speech as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson said:

“The doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters, they are going to get it wrong again. The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts.”

What a masterful statement! The first six words are rather good, but I am especially impressed by the subtle insertion of the word “again”. 

In the late nineteen-eighties, I moved from the public to the private sector. The salary seemed generous but the pension provision not so good. As I could no longer add to my so-called “gold plated” public sector scheme, I needed to make my own provision. I joined a private pension scheme and started to take an interest in stock markets.

In those days the global share indices were not dissimilar. In Britain the FTSE100 was at 2144, in America the Dow Jones Industrial was at 2679, and in Germany the DAX30 was 1366.

As I write this, the FTSE is 7138, the Dow 35,369 and the DAX 15,781.

In other words, since 1990, the value of the FTSE is now 3.3 times what it was in 1990, while the Dow has multiplied 13.2 times and the DAX 11.5 times.

So £5,000 invested in 1990 would now be worth about £16,500 in the FTSE, £65,000 in the Dow and £55,000 in the DAX.

In fact, the Dow Jones and DAX have done as well over the last ten years as the FTSE100 over the last thirty.

Here it is as a graph showing how they multiplied over the years: 

This doesn’t tell the whole story. In 1990 the pound was worth 1.7 dollars. Today it is around 1.4, so the £65,000 would be worth more like £79,000 taking into account the exchange rate. Similar factors apply to the German stock market. When the Euro was introduced in 1999 it was worth £1.40 compared with £1.17 today.

You can argue about this until the cows come home – for example that it doesn’t take into account rip-off fund management fees, that the constituent companies in the indices have changed, that FTSE companies pay higher dividends and that the Dow Jones contains more technology stocks and fewer traditional industries – but the numbers must surely be indicative of the economic wealth, health and confidence of the three countries.

So much for “get it wrong again.” Does it look as if those who waged bets against Britain lost their shirts?

Should we now be switching funds to Britain in readiness for the great catch up? I don’t think so.  

Fortunately, I put a good chunk of pension into international funds. And as I later re-joined the public sector, I’ve had the best, and worst, of both worlds.

Strange Brew

Back In Time For The Weekend Episode 3
(first posted 18th February 2016)

Watching Giles Coren savour a pint of home brew in Episode Three of Back In Time For The Weekend brought it all back. I think it was down to the slightly cloudy, pale, urine-like appearance (the home brew, that is, not Giles), which looked so authentic I could actually taste the stuff. Boots Home Brew Bitter: it had a kind of thin, floral, and, well, bitter flavour.

We used to brew plastic dusbins full in our shared house in Leeds. One housemate, Nick, would urge us to make it as strong as possible in his own inimitable way:

“Get some f---ing sugar in. It doesn’t matter what it tastes like as long as it gets you pissed.”

Here are two views of our front room in 1974 with the red plastic dustbin fermenting away in the left hand corner, filling the house with a farm-yardy, malty, yeasty smell. There are empty bottles underneath the television and fag packets on the mantelpiece. That dimple pub-glass on the chair arm is mine, just like Giles Coren’s. I’ve still got it. It’s indestructible.

Most of the time we bought the Brown Ale kit. The darker the brew the more drinkable it was. Bitter was fairly nasty. Lager was beyond disgusting. Brown Ale was passable. Stout had a roasted dandelion and burdock flavour. 

Going by the numbers of empty bottles, it looks like we were fast running out and desperate for the dustbin to get a move on. Just a small number, the ones with red plastic push-on tops to the left of the hearth, remain to be consumed.

We used to sterilise and rinse the bin, dissolve the malt extract and add sugar and yeast to make the ‘wort’, check the specific gravity with a hydrometer and then leave it to brew. It was ready when the specific gravity fell to below 1008. It then went into sterilised bottles (we had a large collection waiting to be sterilised) which were sealed with the red push-on plastic tops, taken down to the cellar to finish off, and stood in three groups: mine, Nick’s and Brendan’s.

There were usually around thirteen bottles each. As fermentation came to an end, the pressure in the bottles slowly increased so that sometimes the tops would blow off to discharge the contents all over the cellar wall and floor. If this happened to one of your own bottles you could try to swap it for someone else’s, but the sticky mess left behind tended to give you away. In any case, Brendan put a stop to this practice by marking his bottles with secret symbols.

You were supposed to leave them in the cellar for at least a couple of weeks to clear and mature, preferable longer, but Nick and Brendan had invariably drunk all theirs well before the couple of weeks had passed. They would then, of course, start on mine. Rarely, if ever, did I get my full share. They thought it hilarious that I believed holding out for two or three weeks would make it taste better.

There was always a layer of sediment at the bottom of the bottles. It was almost impossible to pour undisturbed: hence the cloudiness.

Brendan didn’t care. He just used to drink the sediment as well. He didn’t want to waste it. His party piece was to open a bottle, put his thumb over the top to seal it, and shake it up. He would then put both the neck of the bottle and his thumb in his mouth and release the pressure. I swear you could see the back of his head balloon out like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Although the brown ale kit was best, it never came close to the real thing. If you like cocktails, I can thoroughly recommend a bite of Cadburys chocolate flake mixed in the mouth with a swig of Newcastle Brown.