Par for the course
I had always thought that Sarah Montague was a sensible good-humoured woman. But yesterday’s Sunday Times included a 2,000-word rant on behalf of first herself and then the sisterhood for being paid less than her contemporaries at the Today programme. A line or two later, however, it transpires that she operates as her front a personal services company. Sarah just does not understand that a company is not a person.
I’m afraid this sort of ignorant drivel at the BBC is par for the course.
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Anyway, since watching The Masters seems to reduce grown men to whimpering idiots I tuned in last night. Why anyone would ever watch a golf tournament on foot I cannot imagine. But they do.
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My wife was not prepared to endure The Masters, so I had to engage with The Durrells. Here the subject of Bombay Duck came up. One never sees this salty delicacy anywhere nowadays.
In my parents’ ‘fifties pantry a round tin of the stuff sat there year after year. I suppose they were equally unenthusiastic. Bit by bit I snitched the lot. No one minded.
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However, things are looking up in that three weeks ago a chum slipped by with a bottle of Grands Echezeaux 2001 as bottled by Domaine Romanee Conti (only £1,700 a bottle at Chelsea Vintners). It was an hour’s work over lunch. I then hit on the brainwave of selling the empty bottle on EBay. Here, since I have not got the faintest idea how to do this, I recruited my elder daughter to do the business. Yesterday afternoon it was listed at 5.00 p.m. at £50 and sold two minutes later with the cash in my daughter’s PayPal account. Cor Blimey!
And that’s not all: the buyer wants more empty bottles. When teetotallers get going they indeed take unexpected turns.
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Finally, I’m afraid things are unravelling at Pantheon (LON:PANR). I really do not know what to think.
Spot on comment about Sarah Montague’s whinge about her BBC payout.
Congratulations on the bottle sale on eBay. Could it be that the buyer is in the refilling business??
The empty bottle gets filled with an ok 1er Cru burg and then resold as DRC Grand Echezeaux 01. A nice £1600 profit for the fraudster
40 years ago I came by a case of very nice Nuit St George which I drank my way through over a couple of months and so became more than a little familiar with the taste. A while later at a country club in Norfolk we found that the identical vintage was on the menu. We ordered at the bar and the bottle of wine was waiting for us, opened, when we went to our table. With due ceremony the waiter poured it for me to taste. In the bottle was the cheapest, roughest house wine. It was probably safe for the restaurant to assume that few in Norfolk would have known the difference back then and that I was only out to impress my rather attractive companion. Subsequently no unopened bottle was available.
This perhaps explains the market in empty wine bottles?
Evil, the bottles are bought by people who want to sell on fake wine to pompous idiots. So you are a guilty party. Still you were probably drinking a fake anyway, Bombay Salty.
Have you read Billionaire’s Vinegar – that might explain why someone needs some genuine empty bottles.
Sarah Montague was forced to work via a personal services company by the BBC as an employer’s NI dodge. She did not want this. This was in the article I believe.
Rubbish. Like all the other BBC tax avoiders she knew exactly what she was doing.
Simon any tips/thoughts on the Grand National?
40 odd years ago I heard the old Duke of Norfolk tipping his 4 most favoured horses for the Grand National. By the time I got to the bookies I could only remember 3, they came 1st, 2nd and 4th and earned me 42 quid, a tidy sum for a school teacher in those days,