Going, going, gone!
A LEATHER trunk, believed to have belonged to whodunnit writer Agatha Christie, was sold on auction in England for £100. Now the new owner has found that a locked box inside had in it jewellery and coins worth a thousand times more.
Jennifer Grant, an Agatha Christie fan, bought the trunk – which bore the initials CMM, those of the writer's mother - following the death of Christie's only daughter, Clara Margaret Miller.
It contained a locked strongbox but there was no key. When she had it prised open, inside lay 35 gold coins in a small bag, a diamond engagement ring and a buckle-shaped jewelled brooch, worth a total of £100 000.
"I was thrilled that I had something that touched Agatha Christie's life," Mrs Grant says.
However, the auction house is not as thrilled. It plans to fight to have the treasure returned. A spokesman for the company says: "The question of good title has been raised and we are currently taking legal advice."
Surely they can't have a case. It's the auctioneer whodunnit.
Bonsela
MANY years ago I bought a large desk at the auction sales. When I got it home, the top drawer was full of lifesaving medals. The second drawer was full of, er, birth control devices, all in mint condition.
Perhaps I shouldn't mention this because those auctioneers are still in business and they might raise the question of good title and demand a return of those items.
A BIT OF highly erudite financial analysis comes my way from a fundi called Kiron Sakar, whose opinion of the common European currency – the Euro – is exactly the same as mine.
To quote Sakar's newsletter: "A number of you who have known me for some time will recall that I have argued about the impossibility of having a single European currency with just monetary union. In particular, I have argued that European economies, which are so structurally different, cannot survive within a 'one size fits all' monetary policy, which accompanies a single currency. Indeed, I believed that certain countries would have to exit the Euro, as they could not survive within it. The recent events in Greece highlight these issues pretty emphatically.
"All those economists and political thinkers who argued that 'Europe is different', well … quite frankly, you do not have to be an economist to see that a crazy monetary union experiment, (without fiscal and political union), was never going to work, particularly as countries (even Germany) had ignored the Stability and Growth Pact rules in the past - that is, the budget deficit to be no more than 3 percent of GDP and total Government debt to be limited to 60 percent of GDP."
I'm delighted that a skilled investment advisor agrees with me so completely on the Euro, though admittedly we come from different directions.
My complaint is linguistic. How can we talk about a "Euro"? It's not a noun. It's a truncated non-word, a descriptive prefix followed by nothing. You could talk sensibly about a Euro-dollar, a Euro-thaler, a Euro-dalder or a Euro-franc. Perhaps even a Euro-pfund. But you can't leave the prefix "Euro" just flapping about in the breeze.
And, as Sakar says, you can't have a "one size fits all" currency for the multiplicity of European economic systems. So, obviously, what is required is a return to the francs, Deutschmarks, guilders, schillings, kroner and lira that served Europe so well for so long.
I'm glad to gain so distinguished an ally in my campaign for the restoration of pounds, shillings and pence as our currency, the system all of us understood and which served us so well. Some have tried to project we £sd campaigners as fuddy-duddies trapped in the past. But Kiron Sakar is at the cutting edge of modern finance and he knows what he's talking about.
Anyone who still doubts the superiority of £sd as a coinage need reflect only on this. At the time we went over to decimals a pint of beer cost one and sixpence (15 cents). Where are we today?
I rest my case.
Tailpiece
WHY DOES a chicken coop have two doors? Because if it had four it'd be a chicken sedan.
Last word
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
GRAHAM LINSCOTT
No comments:
Post a Comment