Apocalocyntosis

The Ancient Roman philosopher Seneca was not quite as stoic as reputation made him out to be. He could not help but feel a degree of spite and vengefulness, as evidenced when he celebrated the death of his enemy, the Emperor Cladius, which he welcomed with spiteful glee.

The evidence of this is the short satire Apocalocyntosis. This word, which to my eyes is more Greek than Roman in origin, means Pumpkinfication. This is a pun on the term Apotheosis – which is the Latin for Deification – turning into a God. The Roman Senate, in its spineless era of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (as opposed to its later spineless eras), had a habit of declaring dead emperors to be Gods – deifying them in death rather than defying them in life.

Claudius was no exemption – he got deified, although Seneca, with the protection of his pupil Nero now on the imperial throne, felt safe enough to assert that the late Emperor had undergone pumpkinfication instead, much like the carriage in Cinderella does in the Disney cartoon when the clock strikes midnight.

In my intellectually self indulgent way, I did elude to Seneca in my retirement speech 18 months ago, where I claimed that day was my own apocalocyntosis.

Eighteen months on, I think that pumpkinfication in my own life has taken on a more literal and practical aspect.

For the first time in my life, I am attempting to grow pumpkins. They do take up a lot of space and attention, so I have not tried them before. Besides, I have only a passing fondness for pumpkins, and much pretty to attempt tomato growing most of the time.

This year, I got some pumpkin seeds (butternut variety) from my mother and planted them in some polystyrene boxes left over from our wine making efforts in March. Once they started growing large enough, I transplanted the most viable seedlings into large pots and deposited them in various corners of my garden.

Apparently the vine puts down new roots in the soil as it grows, so starting them off in large pots is not going to stunt them.

So now I have six healthy pumpkin vines making their way around my garden.

It’s still early days, but if I am successful, I might buy some giant pumpkin seeds online and try, next year, to grow some of those giant 50kg pumpkins which require much cow poo and water.

I’m also making a similar serious attempt to grow cucumbers – a salad vegetable I have never had any great luck with. This year, things seem to be going much better. I have three vines which are actually flowering and have baby cucumbers already showing.

I know that it is cheaper to simply buy veggies from the supermarket, but doing this is much more fun.

The Impermanence of a Stock Exchange Listing

Years ago when I first started learning about investing in the share market, I remember reading, in one or other of the various books I had bought to teach myself about share investing, that the author observed that many large companies did not remain listed on the stock exchange. He mentioned various big name companies which, through mergers and acquisitions or bad decisions, disappeared from the ASX over the years.

I was pondering this over the past few days, when looking through my watch lists of possible share purchases and former share holdings.

The first company I invested in was Mayne Nickless in 1996. It was a logistics company which was about to divest its 25% holding in Optus, and which had a small side business in private hospitals. It ended up divesting most of its operations and becoming a pharmaceutical company – disappearing from the ASX entirely after a while, and then returning relatively recently as Mayne Pharma.

I think I learned a lot from the $1000 I bought in Mayne Nickless as my first investment. I had the experience of having actual share certificates for both the initial shares and the few which got issued afterwards during dividend reinvestment (share certificates are now a relic of finance history). I participated in the spin off of Optus shares – my first ever IPO. And I got to enjoy the ups and downs (mostly downs) of being a share market investor for the first time.

After about three years, I got rather fed up with Mayne Nickless and sold my shares. The company was going nowhere despite (or because of) all their many changes in strategic direction. Even looking now at it’s successor, Mayne Pharma, which only bears a passing resemblance to the company I once invested in, the business does not look like something I could rely on for the materially affluent lower middle class life I wish to maintain.

Besides, an investment which had dropped below the initial $1000 I had put in was not exactly a life changing sum.

Since that time, I have bought and sold (or been stuck in one case with a dud) many companies, and when looking at my investment history, it turns out that a lot of them besides Mayne Nickless no longer exist in their original forms, if at all.

Here, off the top of my head, are several of my past investments which have disappeared from the ASX board:

Southcorp (friendly take over by Fosters)

BRL Hardy (friendly take over by a US based business partner)

Fosters Group (take over by a foreign beer company – I voted against it at the EGM)

Australian Leisure and Hospitality (take over by Woolworths, and since demerged as Endeavour Group)

Broo (I have written about this one frequently in this blog)

Optus (taken over by Singtel)

Coles Myer (taken over by Wesfarmers and then remerged and refloated)

Harris Scarfe (whilst the business still exists, despite having been in and out of administration at least twice in the past 25 years, the ownership structure which was listed on the ASX collapsed around 2001 – thankfully after I had lost patience and sold out)

Robust Resources (a penny dreadful gold mining company which had been recommended by a stock broker in his column in the Herald Sun as a speculative buy – it did not pan out obviously)

Coca-Cola Amatil (formerly a tobacco company which reinvented itself as the local subsidiary of Coca-Cola – and then was taken over by the European subsidiary. Not a great investment of mine – it slumped from $13 to about $9 in less than a year before I bailed)

Ethane Pipeline Trust (taken over by its major shareholder during a share price slump – after I had bailed out at a loss)

Westfield (Westfield was a multi-decade success story which disappeared from the ASX after its founders, the Lowy family, decided to cash in and support a foreign takeover).

There are others. There was a period where I would take small punts on penny dreadful resource stocks – none of which took off and made me rich. [One of which, WHL Energy – a mistake from 2012 or so, has since reinvented itself through its using its listing twice as back door floats into totally new businesses.]

So even with really big names like Coles Myer or Fosters or Westfield, survival (or at least independence) is not guaranteed.

My takeaway is that share investing can be rather expensive when things go wrong, but it is fun.

My White Elephant Solar Panels

This morning, I feel like Peter Dutton is really onto something with his suggestion for rolling out nuclear power.

After all, nuclear power is safe and clean as a source of electricity right across Western Europe, where people enjoy the sort of sophisticated technology which the First World creates. Even that annoying Greta Thornburg is a supporter of going nuclear.

Things like Chernobyl happen in less advanced societies – Communist Russia always had inferior engineering solutions.

As a more stark example, let’s look at all the nuclear powered warships which the US Navy has used over the past 70 years. There has never been an incident with any of those. Well designed nuclear reactors are probably a very green solution to our energy needs.

But why am I suddenly on a tangential rant this morning about going nuclear?

The answer is simple – my White Elephant Solar Panels.

Soon after my official retirement in mid July, my former employer paid me out the unused remnant of my long service leave and accumulated annual leave. The cash sum came to a bit more than I expected – about $16,000, and I immediately earmarked this for some necessary matters.

I spent $2000 immediately on some RM Williams boots, Aquila shoes, and a new double breasted suit from Peter Jackson (joining a private club with a dress code does require a bit of an upgrade to my wardrobe).

Then I turned my mind to necessary home improvements. My split cycle air con unit is an important addition to my lounge room given that my old air con unit is beyond repair and my gas heater needed replacement. The charcoal grey colour bond fence between my block and my nice neighbours to the south is a pleasing replacement for the old fence which was falling to bit.

And on a whim, I decided to splash $4700 on solar panels. After all, with summer looming, I love the idea of running my new air con all day every day without worrying about the electricity consumption.

Right?

Wrong!

The problem is not in getting the solar panels onto my roof – that was pretty simple. The problem is that the installers, even 6 weeks later, have failed to send the relevant paperwork to my electricity retailer so that a new meter can be installed and whatever other niceties can be followed in order for me to start saving money on my bills from having these panels sitting on my roof.

This is infuriating, as this is a very big upfront investment – one which probably will take at least 10 years to break even for me.

So right now, those 14 solar panels are a White Elephant, a pointless addition to my roof.

I am thinking that perhaps I would have been far more sensible to have spent the money on a holiday in Queensland.

The Imminent Demise Of Lambrusco?

Being Australian means that my default red wine is Shiraz. My preference is for the big, sugary, high in alcohol version of Shiraz that you usually find in North Eastern Victoria, particularly around Rutherglen.

I am not too finicky though, and I am fine with most dry reds – for instance, my best friend and I made a passable Merlot in my garage earlier this year.

I frequently will try other wines. There were two positives out of catching a mild dose of Covid two years ago – the first being that I used up a couple of extra days of sick leave that I otherwise would have left behind when I retired, and the other being that for the first time in over 25 years, I could actually enjoy the taste of white wine.

I regularly go out to lunch with various wine lovers. Recently, I started attending ‘Bottle Club’ at one of my two private Clubs, and I intend to attend Bottle Club at the other Club in the new year. The people I have met at Bottle Club know a lot more about wine than I, but I think they have had a 20 year head start on me. However, for well over 20 years, I have been attending lunches with some former colleagues who are a fair bit older than me and long retired.

We had one of those lunches today to mark the 75th birthday of my favourite former boss. My contribution was a bottle of the 2021 Baileys of Glenrowan 1920s Block Shiraz which arrived yesterday. Another wine, which the birthday boy contributed, was a Bleasdale Estate Frank Potts Cabernet blend (in the Bordeaux style – Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Malbec, although alas no Cabernet Franc to round out the blend).

One of our lunch companions decided to play up to his reputation of dubious wine choices. You see, about 40 years ago, he brought a bottle of Lambrusco to a lunch. He has never lived this down.

Today, he gleefully showed up with two bottles of Lambrusco red as gifts for the birthday boy. His glee was slightly tempered by his inability to find any Lambrusco white to bring along.

Which got me intrigued. So after getting home from Richmond (we lunched at 14 Bridge, if you are curious, and it was very good value), and having my afternoon nap, I decided to go for a walk around the two bottle shops in Avondale Heights to see if this is indeed a matter of scarcity.

There is indeed a box of Lambrusco red in the Bottlemart (Avondale Cellars), but no white.

I then popped into the Liquorland, which is the doyen of bogan drinking choices, with abundant cardboard casks in a corner, and did some idle browsing. There were no bottles of any Lambrusco, red or white, present. Nor were there any cardboard casks containing Lambrusco.

Like, WTF???? Is this another of our budget drinking choices disappearing?

For instance, the last time I saw a bottle of Brandivino was in January 2009 when I was on Christmas Island (I used it to cook a huge amount of Bolognaise sauce when I hosted a lot of colleagues for dinner). How will Gen Z kids understand Cold Chisel’s anthem ‘Breakfast at Sweethearts’ if Brandivino does not exist?

Then there’s Stock Gala Spumante with the plastic cork and the leopard foil jacket. I have not seen that on offer in many years.

Nor does Kaiser Stuhl exist as a brand anymore – I remember it mostly as a cardboard cask, but I remember in my youth that it offered a Rose in a frosted glass bottle.

And I recently mentioned in this blog my propensity, some 3 decades ago, to enjoy the truly awful Demestica red in Lonsdale Street over Greek food on Friday nights.

Which reminds me of Kokineli – a cheap and cheerful light Greek red wine, a bit closer to Rose or Lambrusco in style. I have not seen that in any bottle shop recently. (Not, mind you, that I would actively seek it out except on the drinks list in a Greek restaurant.)

And now Lambrusco seems to be going the same way, into oblivion?

For shame….

Should I Adopt A New Investment Strategy?

Telstra shares hit an all time high of $9.20 in February 1999. I know this for certain because at the time I had 600 shares in the company from the original T1 float, and had temporarily moved to Canberra for a few months in late January 1999 – it was a moment I could well remember because of my new adventure.

I bought another 400 shares for $7.20 in the T2 Telstra float later in 1999.

I think I more or less broke even when I sold my Telstra shares in late 2002, but only because I counted dividend income towards what I had gotten out of my investment.

It left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth really, and I have avoided Telstra shares since then, even though I am a pretty loyal Telstra customer.

Around that time, I bought 500 Coles Myer shares, because at that time, anyone who had 500 Coles Myer shares got a shareholder discount card. Oh those were the days!

Sadly, I was unable to get much value out of the Coles Myer shares for too long because the Coles supermarket at Highpoint West closed down in 2000.

I guess like a lot of newish shareholders, the Telstra float and the Coles Myer shareholder discount card looked pretty appealing, but did not ultimately benefit me or any other likeminded investors in the long run.

I hardly think of that epoch in my share portfolio anymore.

Nor do I really own many shares which are actual businesses listed on the ASX anymore. Most of my portfolio is listed investment companies, real estate trusts, exchange traded funds and conglomerates (ie Washington Soul H Pattison). The one current exception is Treasury Wine Estate, and readers of this blog would know very well why I own those shares.

I am thinking of changing my ongoing investment strategy going forward however.

I am retired now, and have plenty of spare time to spend attending corporate AGMs, alongside all the other grey retail investors. This past month or so, being AGM season, I joyously attended the Treasury AGM (I urge all my friends to become shareholders of this company) and was pleasantly surprised as my mother’s proxy with the post meeting catering at Insignia Financial.

I’m curious as to what other company AGMs might be well catered, demanding my attention and attendance in future.

And so I am thinking about a new strategy in my future investing. I am seriously considering investing my dividend income (approximately $20k per annum) in ASX Top 100 companies based in Melbourne.

There are, aside from Treasury Wine, about 30 of these companies. These include BHP, Rio Tinto, NAB, ANZ, Coles (sans Myer these days), Telstra, CSL, The Lottery Corporation (NB I do buy the odd ticket to the megadraws, but not all that often), Transurban, and Australian Financial Investment Corporation.

So… if I were to buy a marketable parcel in each of the 30 (ie about $500), I could own a shareholding in each of those in time for the next AGM season, at which time I could attend all the AGMs and discover what the catering is like.

I think this is as valid an investment strategy as any, and could be quite amusing.

The Stultification Of Literature: The Real Threat From Artificial Intelligence

Not that anyone can tell too closely from my library (which is sorted in what I call ‘autobiographical order’), but I have a marked preference for the works of Anthony Trollope over those of Charles Dickens. I am pretty sure that I have read all of his novels and most of his short stories, although I have probably read just about all of Dickens’ stuff as well.

There were many similarities between the two men. Both were sons of failed barristers who were unable to maintain the genteel lifestyles to which they were accustomed. Both reversed the family misfortunes through their talents as writers. And both were able to write witty and prescient characterisations of deadbeat spongers – in the case of Trollope, the character of Sowerby in Framley Parsonage, and Dickens the character of Skimpole in Bleak House.

Trollope’s reputation faded towards the end of his life due to his honesty. He wrote an autobiography where he gleefully admitted to the joy he got from all the money he earned from his novels, and what he could buy with it, and how he would write a certain number of pages every morning whether or not he felt inspired.

Dickens loved the money even more than Trollope, but never fessed up to it quite so publicly. As he was paid by the word, a lot of his novels (eg David Copperfield and Bleak House) are far longer than they need to be, and the language is unnecessarily verbose as to spoil one’s enjoyment of them.

Dickens also was a sanctimonious prig, as you can tell from reading Hard Times. Skimpole aside (I do love Skimpole, as I have met various deadbeats and spongers in the course of my life), he was also incapable of developing convincing characterisations of the people in his novels.

But for all I can can fault Dickens (and there is a lot as the only few of his books that I have enjoyed are The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, and A Tale Of Two Cities), I can never fault his work ethic, which was every bit as strong as that of Anthony Trollope.

Both wrote every one of their words themselves.

Compare that to Alexandre Dumas, who used a factory of ghost writers to produce most of the works which bear his name. I believe that Dumas created the business model followed in more recent times by those publishers who (a bit like the producers for late rapper Tupac Shakur) keep coming up with new works vaguely attributed to such authors as Tom Clancy or Virginia Andrews.

But now we get to the present day, and the advent of Artificial Intelligence.

Many people believe that Artificial Intelligence is going to end in some sort of apocalyptic nightmare like in the Terminator or Matrix films, where the machines murder or enslave us. I must admit that the idea of a killer robot does leave me rather apprehensive about such advances.

However, most of what AI has achieved so far is to stultify the content of a large part of the internet.

For example, Facebook runs mostly on AI, which polices its rules very arbitrarily, and without room for appeal (try talking to a machine).

It also contains much AI generated content, which mostly consists of stories stolen from actual Reddit forums where the AI creates a monotonous voice which recites a distorted version of those real stories, usually with several key phrases thrown in (common ones I have noticed are ‘my mother says I am tearing the family apart’, ‘I not only survived but thrived’, ‘strap in, this is going to be a roller coaster’, and ‘this led to a whirlwind of emotions’). Such short videos are monetised with lots of ads of course, which is what motivates those people.

Then we get to Amazon, which publishes all sorts of novels electronically on its Kindle platform.

I was a fan of CS Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, although I never got around to following it up with Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubrey series. I did recently finish Julian Stockwin’s more recent but very similar Kydd series. All of these follow seamen in the Golden Age Of Sail (ie the Napoleonic Wars) as they build their careers in the Royal Navy and becoming dashing frigate captains (frigates can have individual adventures, unlike the larger ‘ships of the line’ which float in large boring fleets).

To my surprise, there are an abundance of such series in Amazon Kindle, and I do not believe that most of these have actually been published in hard copy format.

The publication date between each novel in some of these series is remarkably short, making me wonder about how they can write such novels so quickly without an abundance of coffee, sugar, and other stimulants.

Where I really raise my eyebrows is in Military Sci Fi. My favourite military Sci Fi author is Jack Campbell Jnr, whose Lost Fleet series is inspired largely by the Anabasis of Xenophon. Campbell writes, at best, one novel per year.

When browsing Kindle, I find many military Sci Fi series, some of which are many books in succession (we are talking over 20) and where the publication dates are very close together. There is one author who (with one attributed co-author), in the 18 months since I started reading his recently concluded series, has added about 10 books (of 400 pages each) to the series, which ends after 16 books. He also has several other series on the go at the same time.

And I was delighted to learn of the imminent release of the latest instalment in yet another Napoleonic War series recently, which follows a roguish infantryman much in the form of Bernard Cornwell’s highly popular Richard Sharpe series. This is Book 17 in a series where Book 1 was released 4 years ago. Obviously I wonder as to how does someone write so many novels in the one series at a rate of one every 3 months?!?

I do notice that in a lot of these novels, the proof reading leaves quite a lot to be desired – one naval novel series has the hero relying on a solicitor whose name alternates between ‘Snodgrass’ and ‘Snodgravel’, whilst the wife’s maiden name is confused between ‘Morehouse’ and ‘Morehead’. In the peninsula war series, the characters all use the word ‘okay’ constantly – a word which originated in the USA about 35 years later.

So what conclusions do I draw from my observations after 18 months of reading ebooks on Kindle? I strongly suspect that a lot of these series rely on Artificial Intelligence to do a large part of the writing, in order to produce so many novels so quickly.

Unlike Trollope, Dickens, CS Forester, Bernard Cornwell, Julian Stockwin, and even Tom Clancy, who wrote every word of their novels, I believe that this is not the case for these ebooks I see on Kindle. The difference in the quality of the writing, the poor proof reading, the repetitious nature of some of the prose and themes is all indicative that AI has been writing these poorer quality novels.

So this is really the big threat from AI – not that it is going to destroy Mankind as a species, but that it is going to undermine what makes us Human, our creativity and imagination. It threatens our Humanity, not our biological existence.

Rise Of The Street Libraries

I’ve always been a bit of a Tom Wolfe fan, back since I read The Right Stuff at age 16. The movie, which was made around that time, remains one of my all time favourite films (indeed, you might have read something I wrote here a few years ago comparing the movie to the new TV series – the latter misses the point of the book and the movie entirely).

I’ve read all of his actual novels since then, but they don’t really do it for me the way his journalism does.

Still, The Bonfire of the Vanities is, alongside American Psycho, one of the most telling novels about the materialism and moral vacuousness of late 1980s New York. [Coincidentally, both are published by Picador.]

So, en route to a dinner party at a friend’s house in North Carlton last month, I was pleasantly surprised to see a copy of Bonfire in a street library a couple of streets away from my destination (not that I can understand why anyone would abandon any book by Tom Wolfe in a street library). I picked it up and took it along with me to dinner and promptly presented it to my friends, who were happy to add it to their book case.

Which goes to show what treasures you can find in street libraries.

The street library phenomenon seems to be quite new.

There have been passive book exchanges for a while – such as the one which was at the Highpoint bus station for a while when the Covid started, and the fridge used as a book exchange at Newmarket station where I left a large box of books a couple of years ago (the fridge is still there, but it is currently almost completely empty of books).

But now, it seems that street libraries are popping up everywhere like mushrooms. They usually consist of a wooden bird box shaped structure with a perspex door mounted on top of the fence line in front of someone’s house.

Right now, there are three within easy walking distance of my home, and another three in Waterford Green just over the river.

You might want to have a look yourself at the map:

https://streetlibrary.org.au

I get the general idea that the rise of the street library might be a side reaction to the years of Covid isolation – a way for people to cope with the lockdowns and rebuild some sort of connection with other people in a manner which was Covid-safe.

Just like the odd copy of a Tom Wolfe novel, there are often treasures to be found there. I picked up a biography of Charles Lindbergh in one last year (an old one from before the revelation that he had two secret families in Germany came out), a battered paperback of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, and a spare copy of The Fellowship of the Ring (you can never have too many copies of Tolkien).

For me, the value of street libraries is not just the occasional treasure that I can find, but the opportunity to offload a lot of my books. Whilst my personal library is about 2000 books in size, I have had the feeling for years that I am at ‘peak library’ and that there are a lot of books that I read (SciFi, Fantasy, detective novels etc) onto which I do not really want to hold. I do give many books to family and friends, but that does not take care of all of the overflow from my library. Hence, merrily taking a lot of books down to the nearest street library is a liberating feeling.

Canary Black: Kate Beckinsale Continues To Play To Her Typecast….

I did not really notice Kate Beckinsale in her first major role – which was the oddly named Hero in the Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing circa 1993. To be fair, how could you? The leads were Branagh as Benedick and Emma Thompson as Beatrice, and the chemistry between them was amazing. And then you had Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves and that guy from Dead Poet’s Society, along with Michael Keaton as Dogsberry, the comic relief.

And the role of Hero, let’s face it, is mostly as a passive victim of a malicious plot.

Apparently Keanu Reeves was besotted with Kate (although she did not requite), which does show that as well as being an all round nice guy and generous fellow, he also has excellent taste in women.

The role where I first fell in love with Kate Beckinsale was in 1996 when I enjoyed the limited cinema release of Cold Comfort Farm, where she had the lead role of Flora Poste. This time, despite an ensemble cast including Stephen Fry, Sir Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell, and Joanna Lumley, she was not overshadowed and her performance shone through.

I’ve seen a lot of her films in the intervening three decades. Shooting Fish was fun, although I did not like her cropped hair style, and her Hollywood debut was in the Whit Stilman arthouse The Last Days of Disco, where she costarred with Chloe Sevigny and was noted for her feud with the director (which did not stop them working together 20 years later on the Austen inspired regency comedy Love and Friendship).

Most of her early Hollywood roles were in big but disappointing films like Pearl Harbor (I only reluctantly adopt the American spelling for the latter word for verisimilitude), Serendipity (I’m a big John Cusack fan and happened to enjoy it even though it was a weak storyline), and Van Helsing, where she is a bodice wearing assistant vampire slayer.

Underworld was where she reinvented herself as an action heroine, playing Selene, a vampire enforcer with two hand guns blasting whilst wearing a tight black bodysuit. Rrrrrr. She returned for three sequels, and the internet buzz is that there is going to be another one soon, although I doubt that as it all seems to be an AI generated hoax.

Since then, she has been rather disappointing really. In Jolt, a straight to streaming action comedy which came out about 2 years ago, she played a rather manic and romantically challenged woman where an inability to manage her anger properly leaves her with quasi super powers of strength and endurance (as well as being rather stalky).

Canary Black, her latest offering, is even more disappointing. She plays a CIA agent who is forced by the kidnapping of her husband to go rogue. There are very many holes in the plot, and the script seems to have been written solely around the idea of Kate rushing around dressed in tight black outfits shooting everyone up.

Don’t get me wrong, I like watching Kate Beckinsale in black body suits as an action heroine.

But she seems to have fallen into a stereotype, and the early promise that was there in her incandescent performance in Cold Comfort Farm seems to have disappeared or been buried by type casting. She has become a rather boring (to be honest) action heroine in increasingly badly scripted and preposterous roles, rather than working to her original strengths in intelligent mildly comedic films.

Also, it appears from recent photos on the net that she seems to be trying to preserve her youthful looks with cosmetic treatments, which leave her looking rather plastic.

This saddens me.

At the Insignia Financial Group AGM

In the almost 17 months since I retired from work, I have started making an effort to attend corporate AGMs where I have a direct or indirect interest.

[Direct interest is where I am a shareholder. Indirect interest is where I get my mother to appoint me as a proxy to vote her shares in the entity currently known as Insignia Financial Group, and which previously was known as IOOF.]

I had a bit of a dilemma this week as Insignia Financial Group held their AGM on Thursday in Melbourne, at the same time as one of the companies I hold (WAM Capital) was holding their meeting in Sydney. Washington Soul H Pattison were also holding their AGM in Sydney on either this Wednesday or Friday.

I was originally planning to make a holiday of it and go to Sydney for the AGMs, even though claiming a tax deduction for the trip would be too a long bow to draw.

But ultimately, the desire to attend the Insignia AGM and not splash cash on a trip to Sydney won out.

It does help that a close friend has recently bought IFL shares on spec and was willing to accompany me to the AGM.

I did attend last year, and was seriously underwhelmed at the time. The share price was in the dolldrums and the only questions anyone would raise are the banal ones by the ‘volunteer monitor’ from the Australian Shareholder Association about directors’ tenures and other directorships (frankly, if this is all the ASA can do, I am glad I don’t belong). More importantly, the refreshments afterwards were merely some pastries with coffee.

What a difference a year makes!

Let’s start with the questions raised from the floor. Yeah, the ASA ‘volunteer monitor’ was pretty boring, but there were a wide range of other people willing to stand up.

You see, IFL recently ‘paused’ its dividend, which is corporate doublespeak for not having a dividend. This is due mostly to needing cash on hand to remediate various of the corporate misdemeanours the company needs to atone for.

Cutting out a dividend payment is a sure fire way to anger otherwise placid shareholders.

Several people raised this – including people who are accountants and investment advisers. One chap who is a long term shareholder went back through all annual reports from 2019 onward and pointed out that all reports contain the same optimistic language and buzzwords about improving the performance of the business, but that the reality did not match the language.

My friend and I were checking the Commsec app on our phones throughout the meeting, and wondered whether the criticisms by angry shareholders had a direct link to the share price dropping 3% in the first hour of trade.

The refreshments after the meeting were a marked improvement on last year. Gourmet sausage rolls and quiche, along with fruit platters, macaroons, and other desserts. [I am a fiend for sausage rolls and did not need lunch.]

Afterwards, my friend and I popped around the corner to the Kelvin Club for a refreshing ale before hopping on a train back to the western suburbs.

I stopped in on the way home at my mother’s house to update her on the outcome of the AGM – she has been annoyed by the cessation of dividend payments this year – and on the refreshments. She observed that her money as a shareholder is paying for those sausage rolls I enjoyed.

The End Of The Lonsdale Street Greek Quarter?

Have you ever heard of Demestica Red? No? You are probably lucky.

Circa 1996, when I used to be a regular Friday night fixture in a corner of Stalactites, the Greek restaurant on the corner of Lonsdale and Russell Streets, I think I drank a lot of it.

In May 1997, as groomsman for a close friend (the best man was in Perth and therefore unable to organise the festivities), I organised a rather tame Bucks’ Night upstairs at Stalactites. I call it rather tame because whilst I had the passes in my pocket to enable us to kick on down the round at Santa Fe (an establishment filled with poles and tables), everyone was happy to just sit around, eating and drinking til I put them all into taxis to go home and sleep off the inevitable hangovers.

In those days, Demestica Red was the table wine of choice in Lonsdale Street, a very rough imported Greek red wine which was quite cheap and not too cheerful. I don’t think you can find it anywhere in Melbourne anymore.

That is probably just as well – Demestica’s main positive quality was that it made drinkers grateful for the more budget priced Australian wines, such as Rawson’s Retreat or Jacob’s Creek.

I did outgrow Stalactites within three or four years. For the past 25 years, my favourite Greek restaurant in Lonsdale Street has been Tsindos, which is a few doors west of the Russell Street corner.

In 2004 when Greece won the European Cup (in Association Football, a sport I find tedious), the Greek precinct went amok in jubilation – but my status as a regular meant that I could still get a table at Tsindos.

Incidentally, the egg plant dip at Tsindos is amazing – and one of the things that I most love about Greek food generally.

The father of the current owner at Tsindos (a family run business which has been going for 50 years) told me once that compared to now, the Greek precinct used to not only cover the entire block in Lonsdale Street from Russell Street to Swanston, but would stretch around the corners along the latter two streets until Little Bourke.

Even as recently as about ten years ago, there would be at least five or six Greek restaurants operating around there.

Now, the situation is rather sad. There is Tsindos not quite halfway up the block from Stalactites, with a Greek travel agency down the laneway from Tsindos, Stalactites on the corner, and a Greek knick-knack shop a couple of doors down from Stalactites.

Until a month or two ago, there were also a long standing cafe and cake shop next door to Stalactites – International Cakes. But that has now closed down.

Which does leave the Greek Quarter looking very bereft of Greek businesses. Much as I consider both Stalactites and Tsindos to be strong and popular businesses, I felt the same about Medallion and some of the other places which are now long gone. And two restaurants do not really make for a Greek Quarter, even though the Melbourne City Council has much signage on the footpath in front of non-Greek businesses reminiscent of Greek imagery.

The only silver lining is the Eaton Mall in Oakleigh. That has emerged in recent years as a much more impressive Little Athens than Lonsdale Street in my time. But Oakleigh is a long way southeast of Melbourne, and I live in the opposite direction.