Monday, May 3
"James, dearest, thank you for the beautiful flowers. Put them over there with all the rest."
I sat by my Great Aunt Sheila's bedside with my usual bunch of irises. She was propped up in bed day-trading on a laptop. A bowl of grapes sat beside her, along with copies of The Warren Buffett Way and The Zulu Principle. Her face was haggard and slightly yellowish, her hair brushed up in a sort of purple bramble bush. Otherwise, she seemed entirely normal.
It's been a difficult few years for her. In 2002 she faked her own death to escape a huge tax liability, popping up in Uganda only to be hunted down by Interpol and extradited to Australia - where she now convalesces, having been relieved of all her money by the Tax Office and other front-line creditors.
She also bankrupted me, for which she is eternally sorry.
"James, my darling boy, I can't see why Warren thinks Google's on the nose."
The Oracle of Omaha has given the Google IPO the thumbs-down.
"Could it be the business model, Aunt? Perhaps Mr Buffett doesn't see a great cash flow here? Or maybe . . ."
"James!" she said harshly. "Google does for search engines what Amazon does for online sales and eBay does for online auctions. No portfolio is complete without all three!"
She showed me her portfolio. She doesn't actually own anything; it's a watchlist. Of this she is unaware, and presumes she's rebuilding her empire.
I noticed, grimly, that Aunt's phantom portfolio was now worth $654,987.12, up by about 50 per cent in three months.
Tuesday, May 4
My wife Grace wants to have a dinner party, with some new people. She complains that the only people I ever see are Yogi and FastCash.
This is unfair: I pay Doomsday the occasional visit, and have rescued him from three suicide attempts. And I do like Roxy and Martha-from-Macquarie.
"But sweetheart," I said, "I don't know any new people."
"What about all your old school mates?"
"They're old people."
I ruminated on my old boy network like a cow chewing on a piece of nuclear fallout. "And they're my mates. And a nicer set of mates you wouldn't find in the, er, Southern Hemisphere. But they're not the sort of blokes one asks to dinner."
"Why not? We had Doomsday to dinner - he's not a model diner. Last time he tried to garrotte our surviving goldfish with his dental floss.
"But he's normal compared with that absurd little Yogi or Bogi friend of yours. Do you know what he said last time he came to dinner?"
I tried not to think about it.
"He said, 'Hey Grace, have you noticed the Echidna Breakout in News Corp's Triple-toothed Gammy Wader? It's grouse!' He actually said that. He actually said 'grouse'."
"Grace, darling, I'll concede his methods are unorthodox."
"Methods? I don't see any methods! He once drew my attention to a shard of box jellyfish tentacles that had dragged down the price of Patrick. I invest in Patrick!"
I pondered this and tried to reason with her. But it's not easy, in the circumstances.
Wednesday, May 5
Grace decided to invite her old girlfriends and their husbands.
Her girlfriends all went to schools like Abbotsleigh and Wenona. They all live on the North Shore.
They arrived on time, with their various tamed husbands, in clean sedans. There was Pru and Greg, Chloe and Mark, Helen and Sebastian. They seemed not to have ventured out for several years, and bore pasty faces and child-rearing eyes.
"Hiiiyeee Graciekins!" shrieked Pru. Chloe and Helen were similarly enthused.
The husbands shuffled about in the vicinity like three old draughthorses waiting to go to the knacker's yard. Indeed, they seemed to relish the prospect of the knacker's yard.
"Erm, a beer? Or a glass of wine?" I suggested.
My inquiry was met with various degrees of silent incomprehension. Perhaps they don't speak English.
"Would you like a drink?"
They grunted in the affirmative. It seemed Greg was an investment banker, Mark an investment adviser and Sebastian an investment planner. Greg drank soda water; Mark and Sebastian preferred mildly aerated water, with a dash of bitters. Apparently this is fashionable in the salons of Killara.
Oil prices had soared to nearly $US40 a barrel, a 13-year high, Greg said. "It seems low American fuel stocks have played a part, but I do believe the terrorist threat to foreigners in the Gulf will usher in a new oil crisis."
We all nodded gravely.
"Yes, indeed, I would vouchsafe for that," said Mark, stroking his incipient chin.
"So would I, though I'm heartened by the nickel price," said Sebastian, somewhat jarringly.
Soon, after muttering a few more things about nickel and terrorism and oil and Nice Mr Latham, everyone went home.
Thursday, May 6
I slept in, went to a DayTraders Syndicate meeting, then returned to bed, none the wiser.
Friday, May 7
Grace woke me at 4am to say: "Last Friday, the NYSE total trading volume was 1.63 billion."
"That's nice, darling," I said.
And we shared another sleeping pill.