Chapter 6

My girls were having the time of their lives, driving around in my car to visit as many properties as possible in the county. The lowest prices appeared to be in town centres and the highest in the countryside where someone looking for a ‘place in the country’ and had the money to support it, was happy to consider such properties. I was of the opinion that being too central was being too obvious and open to public view, so I had a preference for a halfway location: near town but not in it. We did not want to flaunt ourselves. Fortunately such offerings were also in the low-priced bracket.

We could also afford to wait for the price to drop further, and that suited my financial situation. I told Phyllis that in order to dabble more in the stock market I had less free cash for a house purchase. As a result I would be happy to go along with an even lower price for a building needing some repairs, as the cash for that could become available in the near future. We could move in and do the splashing out later, once we worked out our priorities for the upgrading tasks.

Fortunately for me, the stock market activities were moving more speedily than most expected, and within a couple of weeks my broker had sold 25,000 shares of Graphity at the price level I had stipulated, giving me a net return of about six times the original cost of that tranche, and almost immediately there was a reaction in the market as some investors were panicked by my selling spree and sold their own shares at a lower price than I obtained, yet still making a good profit for them. Their actions caused a snowball effect, and the shares subsequently dipped lower again, down to about four times the original price.

This was when I asked my broker to buy up all the shares he could find available. I got another 60,000 shares this way, and soon after my major purchase the share price crawled steadily upwards. Two days after that, the board anounced that they had sold their major patents to the defence group that had earlier taken over the company. That sale price was notable for its size. The shares took another bounce upwards and when they hit the level of ten times my original buying price, I instructed the broker to sell in tranches of a thousand shares each day, so as not to trigger any more speculators offloading shares. I was of the opinion that the shares would settle around that level for a long time to come, with expectation for more industrial graphene applications to come from the company. My broker got back to me shortly afterwards to tell me that one of the technical universities was proposing to start a new company to market a device they had been working on for a couple of years. They reckoned it was not at a stage where they could make money through a company set up by themselves.

I quizzed him about the new device, and what I heard encouraged me enough to ask him to phone the university and ask what level of investment was required to buy half the equity. I knew in my gut that it was going to be a success, and so profitable for the startup and therefore me.

He got back to me within a few hours and told me that he had come to an agreement with the university for me to fund their market launch of the company and allow them to state that they had already found a backer for half the equity in the new company and were looking for more investors to complete the share issue, with a deadline of one week to commit to the company.

“Lovely!” I told him. “I’ll bet they get all the investors they need by tomorrow, then they can appoint the board and set up the manufacturing using another company that has the right tooling for the job. What is the nominal value of the shares being issued?”

“One pound shares, but you get yours at a discount as the prime investor. I would guess that as soon as they list on the London stock exchange, the share value will be at least four pounds if not more.”

“Gosh!” I gushed as if shocked. “My little attempts at getting in on the ground floor look to be working.”

“And how!” he exhaled. “You appear to be on a winning streak, mister Jenkins.” I laughed, “I hope it is not all luck, my friend. We’ll see as we go on. Consistency is not a sign of luck, but of good judgment!”

My girls were now badgering me to go out and have a look at their preferred choices of larger houses. All of us going in the one car was a bit of a squeeze, so they decided that Phyllis would be my guide, and Elizabeth would be the technical adviser on defects and drawbacks that they had observed. They had a shortlist of only two that they believed would meet my stipulations, and we could visit both within a couple of hours, so I accepted their plan. We set out next morning after a leisurely breakfast. My ladies vied with each other to give me a decent feed every morning, and today was one of fried breakfast mornings: bacon, two eggs, two Cumberland sausages, baked beans, a large tomato sliced and grilled, and a couple of potato waffles also grilled to a crispy texture. The whole thing was delicious, and I said so. That produced huge grins from Jenny and Linda, as they had worked together on the repast. I was becoming used to my girls taking every opportunity to show me what good wives they were, over and above the sex.

As I sat with my coffee afterwards, Phyllis laid out the two folders of information about their preferred buildings. I skipped over the estate agent’s puff about each property and moved to the real information: A front photo of the building from the street; the building’s date of erection, construction (local stone blocks), roof (thin Caithness slabs on top of a sturdy wood frame that was still in good condition), interior walls all lathe and plaster, with a few more recent interior walls made of wood frame and plasterboard. The ground floor was raised about two feet, necessitating several slabbed steps up to the front door. This surprisingly allowed for an excavated basement where the heating system boiler was sited. It was fairly recent and oil-fired (kerosene), while the old coal-fired boiler was still sitting nearby, abandoned in this spacious cellar. There was a back door leading to a garden fenced by upright Caithness slabs topped with a wooden support to keep them all in line. The house frontage had a simple area of stone chippings behind the tarmac pavement for pedestrians. A driveway came down the side of the building to a wooden garage in rather shaky condition. It would need to be replaced with a new and larger edifice.

The other folder, with photograph, offered a very similar structure but without the extensive basement, so the boiler was housed within a jutting-out concrete extension at the back of the building. The Caithness slabs were also prevalent, reflecting the age of the property. The front wall was partly a sturdy iron fence, making it look better than the building actually is. The second property had a one car garage attached to one side of the building, restricting access to the rear garden along the other side of the house. The front garden was grass and several planters artistically laid out.

Condition-wise, both buildings were in need of some repairs and redecoration, and the heating system might have to be renovated as well, as the radiators were very old in both properties. The estate agent had for both properties stated, ‘Excellent opportunity for renovation’ which is code talk for ‘dilapidated’. That means that extensive and expensive repairs are needed. That of course drives the value down below the asking price, so we will not offer anything near what is being asked as the guide price. Another factor is how long has the property been on the market? The longer it has not attracted offers, the less value the property has. We need to take that into account, I told Elizabeth. She agreed, for this girl is not daft.

I accepted the need for our agreed personal visit, at which we can point out that the asking price is unacceptable and we could only offer a reduced figure once we had worked out the cost of renovation. Phyllis, Elizabeth and myself set out with Phyllis at the wheel. She was becoming familiar with driving my car, almost regarding it as her right as senior spouse. That was fine by me. We got to the first property, introduced ourselves as ‘the Jenkins family’ and got a grand tour of the place. The owners tried to praise everything, but Elizabeth kept belittling their comments by pointing our defects of one kind or another until they gave up and simply showed us the place. We ended by thanking them for their helpfulness, but I remarked that the asking price was unrealistic.

“If we do decide to put in an offer after viewing other properties, you can expect our offer to be a realistic one, well below your asking price.” That rather soured our departure, but I was okay with their despair. This was a business deal, not an attempt to help out a failure.

The second visit, in another village, went much the same, just with different complaints from Elizabeth. I was pleased at her effective ripostes to all the attempts to sell the property to us. They, like the other owners, were keen to sell, and that implied desperation to sell.

By the way, Caithness has two towns: Wick and Thurso, otherwise is rural with a few villages, spread over a little more than 600 square miles. (1600 kilometres). It has tarmac roads, but all of them are either A or B roads, no motorway at all, as the traffic loads do not fit the criteria for better roads. This is the old ‘Catch 22’ scenario: your population hasn’t risen high enough to merit major road improvements that would encourage development and then merit these improvements. Result: minimal investment in roads. The same flawed planning applies to the rail line: not enough customers at present to merit major investment, so there is no stimulus to bring in additional customers. Keep things ticking over until it breaks down, is the result. One horrendous storm washed away part of the rail line beside the sea recently, and as a result there was no rail facility to and from Inverness for a couple of weeks until the line was rebuilt; no alternative route was available.

The advantage as I saw it was that it kept out the hordes of tourists that otherwise might infest the quietness of the northern counties. The North Coast 500 route brings a fair measure of tourists, but they are mostly touring and don’t stay long anywhere. A stream of motor homes come and go, mostly in the summer months and don’t get in the way of me living here. In Thurso, many residents are retired employees from the Dounreay nuclear research reactor and so don’t get in the way either. They just love the countryside around them and enjoy life without the noise and pollution of city living in the south.

We drove back to Thurso and home, keeping our chatting on the way to family chit-chat and avoiding discussion about properties. That would wait until we were all together. Arriving home we were grabbed by Jenny and Linda and kissed as if we had been away for days and not just a couple of hours. Then they all wanted to dissect the two contenders to see which was the better option, and what each was worth in monetary terms. I knew I would have to liquidate a good chunk of my savings to buy this new house, and not get much cash back until I sold this house in town. I reckoned it would sell quicker than the properties we were considering, but I had best get started on seeing how much I could lay my hands on in a month or so, or I would have to go for a mortgage to cover the rest. I could get a good rate, as I had enough assets to guarantee the mortgage repayment. The trick is, if you can prove you don’t really need the mortgage, you get preferential treatment.

I left Phyllis and Elizabeth to go over all the pros and cons of each property, and what they saw as being the better fit for us as a family home. The condition of each kitchen was quickly identified as a factor of merit or demerit. The low standard of decoration was not seen as a worry, but more as an opportunity for them to express themselves in a décor scheme that they wanted in their lives. I chipped in with my own views on the repair work that was needed and what it would cost, pointing out that it might not be done for a while without ready cash to plough into the work. Elizabeth argued that such costs should be allowed for in the offer price we would make. I noticed the ‘we’ comment, indicating how she felt about us as a group. We were now family in her mind, so the alien’s magic was still working well.

I asked the girls to do their own assessment of what value we placed on each property from our own perspective, and which of the two buildings was their best choice for us. They argued in a friendly way about the number of rooms and room sizes, the suitability of either kitchen’s units, plus the garage options, One of the garages was a ‘tear down and replace’ essentially and the other was an ‘extend to the size we hoped for’, and the relative cost of each of these choices, as far as they could guess the costs.

My mind was apparently assessing it all in terms of finance, and I found my alien app looked at everything in monetary terms, as numbers to be judged. Aesthetics did not seem to be part of the app’s capabilities, but aesthetics was a human attribute, so redecoration was much lower-ranked by it than utility such as costs of rebuilding. I found that my mind was in conflict with that approach. I would have to advise the alien mind that human desires, likes and dislikes had an important input in certain calculations such as deciding on the suitability of a building as a family home. I short-circuited my own input by telling my girls that I would leave the final decision to them as I could not rely on my own judgment as to the best choice. This pleased them and got me off the hook at the same time.

I did a thorough assessment of what assets I had that I could access without complications. My business sale had netted me in excess of £700,000, with some of it in the form of shares in the group buying me out. I reckoned I could sell these shares to net me a bit over £150,000 at their current price, which should be enough to buy the property the girls were considering. I would need to dispose of some other government stocks to realise some more cash for work on the new property. My broker was going to be busy for a week or two.

The girls continued to be very attentive to my needs, and I learned what each one wanted in sexual attention. I was amazed at the differences between them. None was exactly like another in their desires to be fondled and loved: kisses everywhere, caressing their nipples, breasts, and all the lower parts from bum to clitoris. All played their parts in our lovemaking, making me wonder if the alien had anything to do with these idiosyncrasies, but told myself that an alien mind would have no understanding of such human foibles. It may have learnt about human anatomy from the encyclopaedia, but not the erotic responses of the body that encouraged preparation for conception.

I had a local lawyer submit our offer for the property the girls finally chose, with all the provisos about acceptance, payment arrangements and documentation for legal change of ownership. The whole thing usually takes several weeks, possibly more in England where property transactions are more complicated. Scotland’s legal structure makes house purchasing simpler. However, once the verbal acceptance of your offer happens, there is a legal agreement that cannot be broken with impunity. It is like a handshake on an agreement: you are honour bound to follow it up with the documentation. This makes it possible for you to start things like calling in a builder to prepare an estimate for work on the property. You cannot engage a contractor without being certain you now own the building.

I didn’t know how and when the alien relay was operating. All I knew was that at some point I would be contacted if there was any change to their ‘requirements’. There was the promise of the relay moving to our new home once we moved in, but that was the aliens’ problem. They could derive the location from my mind and flit the relay over to the new place when it suited them.

The owners of the building we were buying needed some extra time to find new accommodation, so my lawyer (solicitor is the word in Scotland) set a timescale for that and informed me that such a delay was normal and expected. The owners would find a lodging house until they bought a smaller house to move into. They had no current residents in their guest rooms, so no problem there.

So it took about a month before we moved in, but the builders were already at work on several jobs that I wanted done sharpish: the garage and the urgent house repairs. By then my broker had settled up and told me that I had a surplus of a good many thousands of pounds with him, which I could redeem or invest in more targets.

As his words sank into my head, my mind rapidly informed me of several companies that looked likely to get a boost in earnings and an increase in share price in the next month or two, plus a couple more that my alien app seemed sure would be bought out before long. I decided to go with the takeover prospects. One was a supplier to several grocery groups and one of the grocery firms wanted to buy them out and benefit from a shorter supply chain. The grocery group also thought they could make it more profitable. I won’t bother mentioning the other, as it was a similar proposition. I told my broker that I wanted to buy shares in these two companies as I saw them as ripe for a takeover bid that would give me a good return in a short time.