you know, sometimes i feel like starting these posts off with something like well, hello daaaahlings or hey you or howzit, look you see. but i don't. it's always an hello or a hi. sorry for the lack of variety.
yes, indeed, quite a serious subject i have as the title here, and not one to mess about with. many assumed that pension fund raids were a thing of the past; that they died at the same time that Robert Maxwell died, which was 5 November 1991. i know this because i saw Bowie's Tin Machine on that night, and the news was on the radio in the taxi on the way home.
i invested £2 in this pension plan in good faith, expecting to wake up this morning to see that it had matured to, at best, some £4,000,000 in value, or at least £20,000. even £25 would have been a handsome return on capital outlay. but, alas, no.
i cannot believe that i am the only one to have experienced this terrible raid. many, i suspect, were lured into the same pension scheme investment as i was, what with them fancy adverts on the tele and that, and all those "pension fund ticket" sales machines located next to cigarette counters across the land.
an interesting statistic that sticks in my head about these pension fund schemes, or if you like lotteries, is that the odds of hitting the jackpot are 16,000,000-1. that doesn't sound all that bad, maybe an outside chance rather than a long shot. however, it's worth noting that if you were to walk into a turf accountant of your choosing and tell the bookmaker that you wished to place a bet on The King, Elvis Presley taking command of a flying saucer, then Him crashing it in Scotland and twatting the mythical Loch Ness Monster with it in doing so, you would be quoted a return on investment of 8,000,000-1. so if you bet on that happening twice you basically get lottery pension fund odds, i suppose.
a post from me without some whining about the apparently lack of Winston Red available for sale? oh, i don't think so. today i decided to pay a visit to that elitist, upper class shop that is Sainsbury's, in the hope that it was the case that Winston Red had simply been removed from the hands of the proletariat and was now only available to purchase where the bourgeois and ruling class send their servants.
no. Sainsbury's did not have Winston Red, hence me buying more Chesterfield. more Chesterfield, look you here, at a price higher than what all the other stores have them at, but Morrisons were out of stock yesterday so i had little choice. well, yes i did have choice if you consider "simply don't smoke, then" a choice, but i did not think of that at the time.
Sainsbury's, as you would expect with a store associated with the opulence of luxury, has a special folder on display by their locked away cigarette counter, where one may see what tobacco they have in stock, and what prices they currently command for them.
moving away from that - briefly - and an unexpected and very welcome blast from the past. as previous wallowing in nostalgia has told regular readers, there do not seem to be all that many pictures of me around in that decade that was called, briefly, the 90s. so it was wonderful to see one which featured me from some stage of the first half of that decade, possibly towards the middle bit.
many, many thanks indeed to the lady in the picture who stumbled upon it and forwarded it on to me. Olivia didn't mention if i was allowed to say it was from her or not, so i will not mention her name here, just to be safe.
they were indeed, as it were, spectacular glasses frames i had, were they not? yeah, i know, in many respects one could say that them are Elton John specials, them are.
my tele viewing, moving even further away from pension fund raids, is as you are aware, and somewhat in awe of, mostly limited to repeats of Bullseye. every now and then, when i cannot be bothered to change the channel, i get to watch Wheel Of Fortune too. here's a picture, from my (considerably) better half, of the puzzle that had to be solved last night to win the big, or if you like major, prize.
can you work out which Australian singer, actor and generally multi-talented person that is enthusiastic about putting lemon in shampoo that it is? the lady on the show could not, so she did not get to claim the big prize, whatever it was. probably cash, a car or some sort of holiday. they didn't do class prizes like speedboats and caravans on this show, they were the preserve of Bullseye. which is as it should be.
another look at the Chesterfield that Sainsbury's agreed to sell me at something of a premium? sure, why not, at least the plastic bag was free, although the man in a suit at the cigarette counter basically made me beg for it. well, i had to ask and he said "of course sir", but that's a bit like begging/
is it just me, or does there in the top left corner it seem like the bag and the wonders of Commodore 64 mode have combined to produce a likeness of Nick Rhodes out of Duran Duran? i have a lot of time for Rhodes; he is after all part of the 40% of the classic line up of Duran Duran not to be called Taylor.
anyway, let me go and lament the loss of my pension fund some more, and consider ways in which i may get it back to the level which it was at.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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