Of Strimmers And Strife
Everything appears to be going to pot. But not everything is as it is presented.
Writing this is pure avoidance. When we moved here in late 2018, The Lovely Penelope (TLP) took command of all gardening duties bar the lawn: I was to maintain it, mow it and keep it looking pristine.
Seven years on or so and, thanks solely to her, most of the garden looks great.
Except for the lawn, now an expanse of moss with the occasional outbreak of grass. Nevertheless I am diligent in mowing the moss, and keeping it back to an acceptable length.
I have some grass seed and moss killer to throw about next week, which I’ve done for the last seven springs. This does nothing other than keep me occupied for an hour or two, zoned in on weather forecasts ensuring I’m seeding on warm, damp soil but not too damp or warm and doing so either side of rainfall that must on pain of death arrive but not within two days of seed chucking.
I often feel I’m distributing moss seed and grass killer.
Undeterred, TLP has now commissioned me to “strim the edges” or something, and so I’ve bought a strimmer. I went for the one with seemingly the least moving parts. On unpacking it, there are still way too many of these for my liking; the instruction manual comes with a smaller instruction manual to help you understand the former.
So at the minute it sits in the kitchen, balefully lurking, mocking, as I studiously avoid having anything to do with it for as long as possible.
Hence me at the keyboard. For, Dear Reader, I have discovered something this morning that rather piqued the old grey stuff. It turns out that 2026 has, as far as the values of The Great Companies of The USA (and hence the world, in practice) are concerned, been a big bag of nothing.
Yes, lots of stuff has been going on. From a potpourri of misery we can choose any one or all of the following menu items:
impending war, possibly with nuclear weapons, definitely with armies of drones
global food shortages thanks to nitrogen being on the scarce side
oil and gas prices rocketing up with potential fuel shortages in the UK, quite the trick given that we are an island surrounded by oil and gas
more widespread pernicious inflation coming back into Western economies.
In the same way that most of us couldn’t find Ukraine on a map until a few years ago, now the world opines about some distant piece of the planet called the Straits of Hormuz. [Quick aside - watch this and weep: that lady will one day be running an HR department. Chew on that.]
Then we hear about the Magnificent Seven, those fabled tech stocks that have so driven returns over recent years, losing their lustre. About how overvalued the US market in general is. How Trump’s Tweeting and “think-it-say-it” approach to global diplomacy is not quite cricket.
Disastrous, right?
Not so quick. Turns out the US stock market is down since the start of the year. The doomsters were right! Well, yes and no. The S&P500 is - wait for it - 0.4% lower than it was at the beginning of January. For context, most markets move up or down by more than 0.4% almost every trading day.
To say the US market is down is, technically, correct. To actually believe it is down in any way that we emotionally understand the word is a stretch. If we were to add back in dividends paid out by the Great Companies over the first quarter of 2026 then we’d be in positive territory.
This is another lesson in the eternal course labelled “The Media Is Not Your Friend”. Try as I might to block it out, snippets of the filth do sometimes get past the filter. From these breaches of the wall I might have been permitted to infer that US and global markets had taken the mother of all batterings over recent months.
No. Not so. An untruth, at best. Without doubt, markets have been volatile this year. Here’s an insider revelation: markets are ALWAYS volatile. If you want the superior long-term returns that are sitting waiting there patiently for everyone with patience then volatility is part of the ride, a feature, not a bug.
There was never a Goldilocks moment, when the porridge was just right, when things just went up and up and bad news was hard to find. We are pining for a time that never existed - and never will. A mix of tumult and anxiety is the human condition. At least, it’s my condition. My resting face is basically anxious tumult.
What happens when we have a proper, unpleasant, gut-wrenching temporary decline in the values of The Great Companies of The World? I’m talking 20% or 30% or more. Not your 0.4% pipsqueak. How will the media react then? Way more importantly, how will you? Such movements typically occur every five to six years or so. In a typical three-decade retirement you can (and should) expect to see the value of your precious investment pots fall by a third or more five or six times along the journey.
Think about that. Internalise it. Are you up to it?
Are the times we live in unsettling? Yes, more than normal, without doubt. Has your financial plan changed as a result? No (unless you’re the captain of an oil tanker and get paid on delivery). If your financial plan hasn’t changed then the investments fuelling your financial plan don’t change. And if they don’t need to change, why do you or I care about what’s happening (or not) in the scary stock market?
For those still with me, I gave up on the strimmer. I had a go at it, I really did. I couldn’t get beyond this, which was the first part of the whole process, racingly entitled “Mounting The Deflector”.
When TLP returned from a light-to-medium session of retail therapy, on learning of my progress or lack thereof, a certain chill of the glacial variety permeated throughout Lincoln Lodge. With a look that could wither a man at 30 paces she boldly took charge of the operation, barking instructions at me, muttering something about “a village somewhere missing its idiot.”
And, lo, I present the strimmer. Cordless, thankfully. The last corded thing I wielded in the garden was a hedge trimmer thing, rendered impotent the moment I accidentally trimmed the cord in two
