"Is this some kind of bust ?"

"Well, it's very impressive, yes, but we need to ask you a few questions".

In memory of the actress Gina Mastrogiacomo, who died in 2001 aged 39 ...  I first saw this film in a cinema in San Diego when visiting a friend who worked in the shipyards.

Anyway, at the end of a business trip to the Netherlands in early February of this year, my wife and I stayed in a hotel on the seafront at Scheveningen for our last night. 

Scheveningen - photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

On the morning of the Sunday, before we drove to catch the overnight ferry departing from Ijmuiden to Newcastle, we visited a large and popular fleamarket in the centre of The Hague and one of the things we bought was a large plaster bust, for 20 euros.

It's a good size, around 550 mm (22") tall.  I thought it might be a copy of some famous sculpture, but if so then I couldn't find any reference to the original during an internet search after we'd brought it home.   I also researched the subject matter to see if I could identify a particular Greek or Roman goddess, but that also failed due to a lack of iconography - the girl in the bust is simply holding a shawl around her shoulders, and is not carrying anything.

We thought the bust would look good on a plinth as the centrepiece within our new circle in the front garden.

The only problem being, of course, that it's cast in plaster and not resin or concrete, so if it was left outside unprotected it would likely dissolve into a puddle of gypsum slurry after the first heavy rains.

Back in February we'd bought some specialist stone-effect spray paint and clear lacquer to protect it - the paints actually cost more than we'd paid for the bust - but it was too cold and wet for painting at that time.

The paint was to turn it back into its original colour, because it had been hand-painted by a previous owner and they hadn't made a very good job of it.  The lacquer is required so that the bust will shed water without it soaking in to the surface of the plaster and causing damage.

So, during a recent spell of fine weather, it was time to tackle this mini-project.

Financial Planning - 2020 Review

We're now seven years into the 10-year plan, and so here are the usual two graphs :-

SAVINGS POT to Mar-20

SIPP POT to Mar-20

After a very good year in 2019, we had been creeping ever closer to the targets, which will be met when the combined portfolio reaches a 225% increase over its March 2013 baseline value.  

And then 2020 arrived ...

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 2 - Six on Saturday

Following on from our Part 1 post last week, this is where we left the project.

The first post described the process up to completion of the basic timber framework. 

Investment Review - March 2020

Well, that first quarter of 2020 was certainly interesting ...

For a change, this time we'll lead with the progress graph rather than the spreadsheet summary.

(click on any of the images for a larger view)

In this first period of 2020, I've had three consecutive months of negative investment returns (-0.9%, -4.1% and a whopping -7.9% in March), resulting in large falls in the combined portfolio value.    

Mind you, in the middle of March the monthly return looked like it could possibly end up at -15% or even worse, but a bounce from the start of the fourth week means the portfolio value today is back to the same level it was in February 2019.  

But I'd been waiting for some sort of a dip, even though its size was totally unexpected, and so I've used some of the cash in the accounts to buy more equity funds.

There may well be more more falls to come in this slump, and many businesses will likely never recover from the effects of the forced closures, but from within the depths of today's doom and gloom there still seems to be upside potential for equities.

The glass is still half full.

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 1 - Six-on-Saturday

In the early spring of 2013, we built our large greenhouse using 14 shower panels we'd picked up on the cheap.   

This 12' x 6' 6" (3.6 x 2.0 m) building has served us extremely well for the last seven years, but during the winter we made a decision to demolish it and re-use the glass panels to make a similar smaller greenhouse in a slightly different location.  There were a few reasons for this :-

• some of the greenhouse roof beams are suffering from rot which may soon become a structural problem, so they'd have needed replacing anyway.

• we want to reclaim the corner of the garden where the larger greenhouse is currently sited.  With the greenhouse removed, it's a large paved area surrounded by a concrete plinth, so it's an ideal place to plant some shrubs either in large pots and / or by selectively removing a few of the paving slabs and planting directly into the ground.

• by building a smaller greenhouse than the original, we can re-use all of the glass panels and make it glass-sided all around - at present, the back (north) wall is made from timber, and although we'd faced the panelling with reflective aluminium foil insulation, the back side of the greenhouse is still a little dark. 

I could have removed all the glass panels, and then just modified the existing carcass to make a smaller greenhouse, repairing the roof in the process, but I think that's actually much more work than building a new framework from scratch.  It would also have been very heavy to move, even though it's not far to drag it over to its new position.

So, before our recent holiday, I'd drawn up plans for a new 8' x 6' (2.4 x 1.8 m) greenhouse and prepared a base using paving stones I'd recovered from elsewhere in the garden.  

new greenhouse base area cleared and levelled ...

Not waving, but drowning ...

The huge scale of the stock market falls over the last three weeks has actually resulted in two of my individual brokerage accounts being underwater when compared to the initial sums invested.

Below is the performance of each of the accounts, simply showing their current value against all of the cash ever added to them - the dates in brackets are the periods in which contributions were made.   They're not adjusted for inflation or anything else ...

• ISA 1 (2007-2010), +79.8%

• ISA 2 (2010-2013), +0.8%

• ISA 3 (2013-2017), +15.2%

• ISA 4 (2017-2020),  -9.4%

• SIPP (2010-2020),  -3.9%

Lockdown in Tenerife ... updated

Today is Day 19 of our planned 28-day break in Tenerife.

We went out earlier this afternoon on our hired motorbike.  It seemed quiet on the streets, but it's Sunday and today's the first day since we arrived when overcast conditions have persisted into the afternoon, so I didn't read anything unusual into it.  The sky's clearing up now, and it looks like it'll be a nice evening as usual.

We rode up to the east side of Los Cristianos, near to where all the motorhomes park up for the night, and went onto the rocks for a spot of fishing.   We've been there a few times in the last couple of weeks, and many times during previous trips here - this time, we've seen motorhomes registered in many other countries, and from as far away as Scandinavia and Bulgaria.  

A few other people were around, walking on the beaches or clambering over the rocks, but we were the only ones fishing today.

We'd been there for a couple of hours when my wife noticed a pair of police officers gesticulating from the car parking area, but we were a couple of hundred metres away and couldn't hear them above the sound of the waves, so we just ignored them.  Anyway, I had an idea what they might have wanted from reading the news last night ...