Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Churchill
Profit from folly rather than participating in it. *** Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful. *** I prefer buying things. Otherwise, it’s a little like saving sex for your old age. Warren Buffett
You make most of your money in a bear market, you just don’t realize it at the time. Shelby Cullom Davis
One morning I received a call from my Zurich lawyer, Dr. Andreas Froriep, who informed me that someone was trying to find out who was behind Arran Isle Improvement Association AG. I burst out laughing.
The history of tenant abuse by aristocratic landlords goes back in the UK for a thousand years. But the twentieth century turned out to be The Revenge of the Downtrodden.
If you want to be called Lord Joe, Earl of Arran, you have to own Lochranza Castle and about one thousand acres surrounding it.
We’re talking about the “subtle maneuvers” we were using to try to drag the charming-but-antediluvian Isle of Arran into the modern era and to try to prevent Lady Jean from hobbling off to the poorhouse.
Before I describe the “subtle maneuvers” we orchestrated on Lady Jean’s behalf, I want to emphasize that these weren’t all my ideas. They were an amalgam of many conversations with the accountants, estate managers, attorneys, Charles Fforde, and Lady Jean herself. I was merely a kind of midwife presiding over their birth.
Whenever I traveled to Europe in those days it always seemed to me that I was moving not just through space, but also through time. The Europeans always seemed to be two or three decades behind America, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.
That evening, after our tour of Arran and another whisky-soaked evening, Charles walked me outside Strabane. He was carrying, for some reason, a large bowl of eggs he’d taken from the refrigerator.
Selected blog posts from the first five years of my blog. learn more »