The Evil Diaries: “Credit where it is due”

Credit where it is due: as readers know I have this last two years been enraged by the idiocy provided by Charles Stanley. But yesterday the chap who attends to the affairs of Family Cawkwell (a generally thankless task) telephoned to remark that my late mother-in-law’s account had been credited with c. £24,000 through a surprise intervention of Lady Luck. More interesting still is that I had told CS to take over the holding (long since suspended and completely written off by me) in question since I did not wish to see expenses incurred in keeping a useless holding. I incline to think that not all stockbrokers are that honest.

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I bought 100,000 Victoria Oil and Gas (LON:VOG) at 37p having tried for rather more. There is no stock around. The barmy Jack Grynberg, who has garnered a few bob along the way but, as a sport, revels in litigation and has had a go at VOG before – to, I hasten to add, no effect but the loss of a lot of his money – has popped up again. The latest pose will, I am told, cost VOG £100,000 but achieve nothing for Grynberg.

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By way of housekeeping I bought 100,000 Orosur (LON:OMI) at 16.5p.

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Finally, about forty years ago, I read George Steiner’s The Tower of Babel in which the author, a Cambridge philologist, remarked that since the beginning of language on this earth there have been no less than fifteen thousand entirely separate languages of which five thousand remain today. The conclusion is that people demand the privacy of their own language.

Thus the metric martyr of Sunderland simply reflected language in practice in Sunderland when deploying imperial measures. It took the idiocy of the Europhiles to make him a martyr. However, we should be thankful for their idiocy since I was not alone at the time in being troubled by how this could happen. Eventually of course the resentment grew and, as it happens, it was first most materially expressed in Sunderland when that City’s Brexit referendum vote came in. Europhiles are so thick that they probably still cannot recognise their own folly.