With the following week full again of pension surgeries, client and professional introducer meetings, the May Bank Holiday weekend is perfectly timed. Come Saturday evening and it is high time I visited Shakespeare’s Globe but it is Hobson’s Choice of King Lear in the afternoon, same in the evening, no other productions till Tuesday at Shakespeare’s Globe when yes, it is King Lear again. Having not done this play at school or seen it, I join the queue for returns 15 minutes before the evening production starts at 7.30. The 700 £5 groundling (standing) tickets having been long sold out, only two Lower Tier tickets (£33) are finally available which I gladly accept. The programme describes King Lear as Shakespeare’s most awesome tragedy and we take our places just in time.

In the only tragedy of Shakespeare set in Great Britain, Old King Lear is tired and wants to give away his kingdom to his three daughters. The largest share will go to the daughter who shows the most love to their father and when the youngest one Cordelia declines to go along with this, she is banished and disinherited. Her perceived ingratitude, plus the behaviour of her two sisters unhinges the old king. Later he is turned out into a terrible storm by the two daughters who had previously flattered him and received their inheritances. With plenty of drama with the occasional bit of humour, this works very well as a play but any parent who decided to settle their inheritance matters this way would be asking for trouble.

In the dialogue, come phrases one has heard before: take it or leave it, more sinned against than sinning. In one of Shakespeare’s small touches of genius, the most profound words to the king come from the jester or fool “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise“.

Nostlagia and a promise take us to Cambridge the next day reminding me of what a wonderful place it was to grow up in. Most memorable this time are two pubs. Firstly, the Eagle Tavern in Benet Street with its RAF bar and famous ceiling. This is covered with writing made by cigarette lighters, candles (and occasionally lipstick) of servicemen & sweethearts from the RAF and US 8th Airforce from 1943 to 1969. Notes on the wall identify the units and some of the people who might have smoked their name or unit on the ceiling one day and never came back. If this wasn’t enough, Crick and Watson also got their idea for the structure of DNA here, for which there is a blue plaque – must look for that next time.

Down by the river, Scudamore’s are doing a brisk trade is hiring punts but we do not stay long enough to see anyone fall in. Out in the country, another nostalgic visit takes me to The Tickell Arms in Whittlesford http://www.thetickellarms.co.uk/ formerly roost of landlord Kim Tickell. What was a pub at my last visit in my student days is now an up-market restaurant and if you like a place with atmosphere, this has it in spades. Blue candles, mahogany tables, soft lighting, a large pond with two black swans, a huge wine list with helpful comments finally lead me to choose an Australian rosé from Magpie Wines called The Thief. It is Sunday evening and sadly, no food is available – only wine. My enquiry if they perhaps have any olives or snacks to help soak up the lovely wine meet with the response that they do not keep that sort of thing behind the bar.

The dictionary defines Schadenfreude as enjoyment in the discomfort of others and is something within all of us, witness the popularity of shows like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity get me out of here! In its previous life, The Tickell Arms attracted much custom in anticipation of this, courtesy of the landlord – you just hoped it wasn’t you at the wrong end of it. On my previous visit, a young guy who was giving his partner a gentle peck on the check while they were sitting at the bar was bawled out by the landlord in his trademark knee-breeches, white stockings and silver-buckled shoes “We don’t want that sort of thing in here! If you are hungry, there is food at the end of the bar!” The pub made the national press when a sign went up No CNDers and this list of undesirables got longer and longer. Reading his obituary in The Daily Telegraph a few years ago, it made me feel that the world was a duller place without him…..or so I thought.

Back to Sunday evening and our glasses are being refilled. The bottle is kept in a cooling bucket on the bar rather than at our table and we are one of only three couples. My enquiry to the manager asking if he was around when Kim was there is met by the surprising response that he still haunts the place! It seems that the afterlife has mellowed him a bit as his two or three appearances at the end of the bar near where we were sitting, have been quite benign. We finish our bottle of The Thief, but no visitations this evening.

In the real world or perhaps I should say cyberspace, my blog stats throw up an interesting array of enquiries that have ended up at George’s Blog:

What to wear at the Reform Club? Tie and Jacket for gentlemen and probably no trousers for ladies. Some kinder London clubs may keep a bag of neckties for gentlemen who have forgotten theirs.

My Agreement in Principle (AIP) mortgage application has been referred – what happens next? It is re-examined manually as the credit score obtained from the computerised application is not enough to get a clear positive decision. Just to twist the knife in the wound of harassed home buyers, lenders are now doing a second credit search between Exchange of Contracts (when you pay a 10 per cent deposit) and Completion. In the UK (not Scotland) an offer to buy or sell a property is only legally binding after Exchange of Contracts and the balance is paid on Completion. Where the lender refuses to lend the rest of the money perhaps because some new bad data has appeared on their credit history, people can (and have) lost their deposit.

Triviality in UK pensions is another regular enquiry. If your pension funds are less than 1 per cent of the Lifetime Allowance currently £1.65 million i.e. £16,500, you can take the whole fund in cash without having to buy an annuity. 25 per cent of the fund is tax-free with the balance taxed at Emergency Income Tax Rate. A lady client asked me to calculate this for her earlier this week and the overall tax rate was 35.6 per cent for a pension fund totalling just over £8,000.

Client review meetings are always enjoyable and allow me to sign off on a positive note. Previously I have mentioned one client whose bespoke suits are now one of the goodies that you get when you buy a new Bentley http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=129 Another review meeting informs me that his own music archive Future Sound of London http://www.fsoldigital.com/ is now up and running with a nice steady month on month increase. Whoever said, good news is no news?