KBO

At the fag-end of a woeful decade, Ian Dury found reasons to be cheerful. If he could then, we can now.

Friend,

It’s too soon to call this the end of times. But can someone out there give me some good news? I am generally a revolver half-loaded kind of chap but it does feel as if we are awash under wave after wave of bad news, of state blunder to state blunder.

When will it all end? Will it all end?

The answer, of course, is “yes”.

But when, and how? Those are the bigger questions. I know not the answers to these, and neither do you, if you’re honest (which you are; my readers are the very cream of humanity, obvs).

And so onward we lumber, under rosette red and blue, from crisis to crisis, with no end in view (Betjeman is safe). A joke on the international stage, our sceptered isle finds itself ridiculed from within and outwith. Our institutions crumbling, our trusted society long gone.

Flight from urban areas, for the middle classes at least, is a real thing. And why not? Check out Birmingham as an exemplar of how not to run a country’s second city.

As a nation, we have adopted a saturnine stance. Gallows humour abounds: “Went into London and didn’t have my mobile nicked!”, “Caught a train the other day and it nearly arrived on time!”, “Phoned HMRC and it only took me three hours to speak to someone who could speak English!” and so on.

Gratitude Is The Attitude

And yet, despite the relentless bad news, we have so much to be grateful for. The inflationary spike of the last few years seems to have been tamed (although inflation at any level over a typical three-decade retirement is a serious threat to your wealth, as I may have mentioned once or twice).

Asset prices continue their northward ascent. The stock market, that composite of the values of The Great Companies of The World (GCOTW), continues to bat away things like Trump’s tariffs and various other “end of times” news items. Of course, by stock market we really mean the S&P500, and by S&P500 we really mean those pernicious tech stocks that seem only one way to travel know. All the while, our beloved FTSE is becoming a non-entity. Hey ho.

Property prices (look away if you are not a property owner, which seems to be pretty much everyone under the age of 30) remain solid enough, although not much seems to be actually changing hands. The market appears “sticky”. It is amazing what one asinine tax can do and Stamp Duty gets the gold medal in that category.

Non-income producing investments speculations such as crypto (“Wizards on clouds”) and gold continue to lure people in with strong returns based entirely upon the precept of finding a buyer willing to pay more than they did. To my pea-sized brain that is not the strongest sales pitch but, boy, it seems to be working.

And savers (those folk with grey hair) are getting some kind of return on cash, after over a decade of being hurled against the blades of quantitative easing (QE), which is latin for “bailing out the banks during the Credit Crunch and encouraging them to do exactly the same bad things down the line, safe in the knowledge that the taxpayer will foot the bill.”

At least now you can get 3-4% interest on your cash before tax (everything is taxed these days; I’m waiting for a future Chancellor to announce a tax on tax). So the folding stuff is still getting eaten alive by inflation but not nibbled at such a rate as in those crazy (stupid) years when the base rate vacillated between 0.25% and 0.50% and having cash at the bank was akin to taking a stash of tenners out of the safe every day and shredding them.

And the weather, no doubt entirely due to Global Warming Climate Change and nothing to do with us being in “Summer”, has been superb. Everything is a bit better when the sun shines. Not my deepest insight but true, regardless.

All of these good things give us the required energy to KBO.

KBO

So much is ascribed to Winston Churchill that it feels as if he contributed more to the English canon than Shakespeare. But “keep buggering on” is definitely one of his greatest hits, so much so that one can even purchase t-shirts with the phrase emblazoned.

It was his way of saying persevere through difficulties, to not give up, to keep the end in mind and always work towards it.

We need to KBO. We need to cleave to those things in life that matter - friends, family, health, laughter, copious amounts of alcohol - and not get caught up in the tsunami of seemingly endless bad news, most of which is outside of our control anyway.

KBO.

Still working? Keep striving for that next opportunity. Keep salting away that nauseatingly large amount of money each month into your pension/ISA/whatever, money that you could spend now on trinkets and baubles that would give you a nanosecond of fleeting joy, but instead you have chosen the incredibly noble path of delayed gratification.

For when you come to draw on those pots in the next stage of your life, you will thank your earlier self more than you can imagine. Having - and maintaining - real financial independence will confer on you a dignity denied to the vast majority.

Real financial independence is more than having “enough”. It’s also about being able to stand on your own two feet without needing or wanting any State support, without needing to interact with those bodies that seem, presently, to have nothing but bad intentions towards those who strive, who get up and go to work each day, who raise their children to be the best they can be, and who abide by our laws and customs.

KBO. The future is in your control. This is a great life and, for all our worries and flaws, we live in the best of times. Ian Dury’s 1979 looked like the end of times. It was just the beginning. It’s hard not to feel another new beginning is around the corner.

Keep
Buggering
On