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Aaaah Boxing Day

It's just after 2 pm, and I just enjoyed a roast beef sandwich with Roger Jillian's father.  The house is quiet as everyone has gone shopping for tomorrow's wedding.  This morning, I went to make sure that the farm manager's new house was ready, she is moving in tomorrow.  I checked the heating and the water.  

I think that Roger and I will probably go for a walk...to our nearest local, the truth is that a good ale has to come from a cask.  Their food leaves a little to be desired, and I suspect that around 3 pm the place will be quiet as everyone goes shopping (Boxing Day is a big thing in the UK). 

Roger is an industrialist, who owns several UK businesses, his biggest one is involved in steel fabrication.  But he told me that he owns about 20 different companies.  Among them, it turns out, is a specialist high-end travel agency.  Roger told me that he called them from his car, and said "Find me a beautiful place for a honeymoon not too far and with tons of things to do".  When he arrived at our house two hours later it had been not only arranged but booked too.  The only thing they asked to confirm was if Morocco was ok.  Amazing what can be arranged these days!

He is amazed by our farm's capitalization.  He was surprised to hear that we carry no debt, but I explained that until about 12 months ago, we carried about three million pounds in debt on the farm and that the new farm would normally have been another five million pounds in debt, but because of our bitcoin windfall, we were able to make an all-cash offer.  

He still cannot believe that I had 1,000 bitcoins that I bought for less than a pound each.  I told him that we take our current reality as something that has been there forever.  Smartphones only emerged fifteen years ago.  Telexes, faxes or even home phones before that. In 2011, bitcoins were esoteric and not easily tradable they were nothing, not real, it was the dark web (which was not even called the dark web then).  I told Roger that I had no idea where my broker found the 1,000 bitcoins, which is not surprising considering that it was really the instrument for the underworld.  I told Roger that even now the value of these things changes at such speed as to make them lousy stores of value.

The beer will be good, and the temperature is just right for a walk



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