Tuesday morning was deliciously quiet. Why, as I get deafer, should I notice and bask in quietness? Perhaps I should move to the country?
It is quiet in Barons Court on Christmas Day (no tubes) and when it snows – that muffles the sound of the tubes.It was quiet on Tuesday because the road was closed for re-surfacing. It stopped being quiet and became very nosiy at 8.00 am when the work began. By 2.00 pm the old surface had been stripped and silence reigned.
Meanwhile down in Tunbridge Wells the management has been cooking and out of the oven popped a 10,000 hectare palm oil plantation in Indonesia that they are buying to replace a minority stake they held in another plantation and sold. This new acquisition is slightly larger and the palms are younger with yields that will increase significantly over the course of the next ten years.
It looks like a good deal but, inevitably, our jilted Malaysian suitor will be delighted with this icing on the cake. I expect KLK to pounce again when they can under Takeover Panel rules – that will be early next year. They only secured 13% support for their £7.50 bid last year. Now they must grit their teeth and bid £10 and they may succeed. Meanwhile the shares are trading at around £7.40 and yield about 2%. January is always a nightmare with a blizzard of Christmas credit card bills to pay, so maybe load up with a few.
On Wednesday morning I got a handyman round to do a lot of small jobs that had been building up. He fixed the shower door, tightened a loose tap, mended the hinge on a kitchen cupboard, changed a broken bulb in the top oven, fixed the freezer door and then hopped out on the kitchen skylight and mended the flashing that had developed a leak. Meanwhile the workmen re-surfacing the street have been productive too. Constant rain has not hampered their activities.
I read with great sadness of Sir David Tang’s death. One of the oddest tributes was from the chief executive of a London shop.
“When I went to visit him in hospital a couple of times in the last month, the chefs would prepare freshly made scotch eggs and a jar of piccalilli.
“He would be a fierce critic if the scotch eggs were in any way inferior. I always lived in fear that one day our scotch eggs wouldn’t be quite up to it.”
I hope I might be the first to mention his skill as a chess player, an accolade that I think he might prefer to being a scotch-egg-scoffer, although he was indubitably a good egg.