Roskov book 19, p.13
Roskov, Book 19, page 13
‘Why say foolishly?’ I puzzled.
‘They turned out to be a bunch of flash bastards that cared little for the laws and regulations of this country. They took investors’ money, and we hunted around for good properties to buy, renovate and then rent out, as you do, but they all bought flash cars and paid themselves a dividend before any profit was made – which is not legal.
‘So I quit before they all got themselves arrested, and I’ve been looking for something local these past few weeks.’
‘Who’d you vote for?’ I asked.
‘Well it sure as hell was never Thatcher, my father was a miner and his father before him. I’d piss on her grave, when she finally croaks.’
I smiled then forced it away. Facing Bill, I asked, ‘Why did you bring him up?’
‘He’s the best candidate by far, the rest were kinda shit, a few flash bastards, and he’s local and wants to stay local, family ties. The others were mostly London people with very posh CVs, big words that I didn’t understand.’
Smiling, I asked our candidate. ‘And your family circumstances?’
‘Just … going through a divorce, one daughter who’s now nine years old.’
‘So you won’t have anyone complaining when you get home late,’ I noted. ‘You could work out of Leicester?’
‘Been planning a move here, to get away from Nottingham, for a while at least. And to get away from her relatives. My parents are still alive and struggling on, they live this side of Nottingham, not far from your soft prison.’
I eased back. ‘What we want to do … is find people all around the country, train them, people who can then go find for us suitable properties, working to a formula.
‘Some of the properties will be for High Street regeneration, some for simple profit made, many will be shit terraced houses in shit areas that we hope to improve.
‘Barclays will create a fund, and there’ll be consortium money for us to use, so it will be a big budget, the next Labour Government to put in some money as well.
‘You’d have an office in the High Street here, a staff of ten to start that soon becomes fifty, an external staff of a hundred to keep checks on, and an asset register to run, rental agencies to oversee.’
‘That I can do, all of that.’
‘When can you start?’ I asked.
‘Anytime.’
‘So you start tomorrow, report to Bill, find out how we work, then help Bill find some offices, he has a place in mind. You recruit a deputy, a Human Resources manager and then a sales manager for the externals, you specify a computer system that my people will write, and you build a large concern from an empty patch of carpet, not so much as a desk in place.’
‘I’ve done that before, I created a new office for the factory I worked at, as well as the rich pricks I just left.’
‘If the rich pricks hassle you, tell them you now work for me.’
‘That would worry them, they might think you’ll investigate them.’
‘I may well do. Go make a start, a stapler to buy, a chair and a desk.’
Bill put in, ‘Those offices I found are just about the best. Big to start with, but it sounds like we’ll need the space.’
‘We will, trust me, we’ll be managing a lot of money. Do any of your staff, now working on this, want to go to the new building?’
‘Nine of them, maybe more, they don’t want to abandon what they’ve done.’
‘Get them some desks, computers, filing cabinets, but don’t move till they can function in the new place. And think about a pay rise for them, because technically they stop working for the charity and then work for the new company – when the bank account is set up. Oh, and most important of all, a kettle and some tea bags.’
Bill smiled as he stood. ‘That they’ll do first, trust me. And David is talking to a conveyancing solicitor about joining us.’
The new guy had stood, but now studied me. ‘Are you sure that you were shot twice?’
I touched my shoulder. ‘It throbs, and I take painkillers, and I fall asleep now and then.’
I shook hands with the new guy before he left, his worries about his divorce surfacing, but otherwise I got no warning images; he did not want to kill me.
Sat with the Swedish main men, we drew tree diagrams on large A3 sheets of paper, the structure of the new property business laid out. On a second sheet we detailed the money flow, in and out, and what was taxable.
We would have standard rates for estate agents to work to, based on our local Leicester estate agent, they could not just bill us whatever they liked.
And renovations would be controlled by a regional man, someone who hopefully knew a thing or two about renovating apartments and old buildings.
Kicking around ideas, we modified the charts in a few places, but we were finally happy that we had covered everything. The charts would now be drawn properly and handed to Bill, a copy kept here.
A package then arrived from Ross Daniels, and when open it contained a map, and several aerial photographs of the valley in question in Spain.
The map showed that the nearest town was Almeria, a 100km drive to Malaga along the main coastal highway, so the team would have an hour’s drive at least to get there during site visits – it was a fast straight road.
The aerial photos showed a valley that was quite narrow where the main highway cut across it, perhaps 400yards wide, and that the dry riverbed ran under the main highway, a two-arch span of bridge across the dry riverbed, those arches perhaps twenty feet high.
There was a dirt road seen leading down to the beach and what appeared to be a dirt parking area, and although the beach looked terrible there seemed to have been locals visiting it.
North beyond the main highway the valley opened out, and the two slopes facing the highway were ideal for nursing homes, to be positioned at least 600yards from the traffic.
The sides of the valley seemed to be gentle enough for housing many nursing homes, and at its widest the valley seemed to be half a mile wide or more, there was space in the middle for a small village.
I could see that there were already dirt roads criss-crossing the middle section, several of them, and that a few broken down old buildings stood in one small section, perhaps an old farm.
Looking at the map, a dirt road came in from the east, then became a solid road as it neared a village, that village perhaps two miles away, after which I could see a roundabout and a good road connection to the coastal highway.
‘OK, get a paper and pen,’ I told my main Swedish men. They got ready. ‘First, I want a hut for security men delivered straight away, portable toilet, provisions, and a rotation of guards. Have the security hut on the road coming in.
‘I then want huts for workers, delivered as soon as they say that the land is ours. I want a small concrete dam in the middle of the valley, water to be collected for building work.
‘I want the builder’s huts to be here, the middle section, plus a fenced-in stores area, plus an area for concrete production. I want a small café for the workers, and it has to be ready when the first men arrive.
‘We then need to secure local electricity - to start we’ll use generators, so we need to pressure the local council via the government to run cables, that village is two miles away.’
The main man cut in, ‘I read that this highway has electric cables inside it, under it.’
‘Please check that, and maybe we can grab some juice from the cables. This river, which seems to be just a trickle in the photos, we need to find the aquifer up above the village of Carmen and start a water flow that we can use.
‘Make a note: we need to know what the maximum rainfall was whenever this valley last flooded, and down the centre we’ll build a canal of concrete and get rid of the river, as at Scorfo.
‘It floods once every fifty years, at least it used to, so we need to be ready for that, a nice water feature the rest of the time. Here, these two positions on the slopes, nursing homes One and Two, foundations started straight away, water and electric laid out at the same time.
‘Plan for twenty nursing homes and work to a plan similar to Scorfo Valley; staff accommodation, sewage, water, electric, a small hospital in the centre.
‘And the beach I want cleaned up at the start, so that if anyone looks at the site before it’s ready they’ll see a nice beach. Pick up all the rocks and move them, as we did in Corsica.’
My main man lifted a sheet. ‘Here it says that they start test drilling near to where water was found forty years ago. It could be pumped to the head of the valley.’
I nodded. ‘If it’s pumped via a stream we’ll lose most of it, so we need a pipe a few miles long, a small dam at the top, a dam at the bottom, and then we can use the water.’
‘Perhaps no need,’ he said. ‘There is a desalination plant at the coast near there it says, and they produce industrial quality water, which I guess is no good for drinking.’
‘If it’s good for cement then we’ll buy some,’ I agreed. ‘Make a plan, type it up, and then send it to Malaga as being my suggestion. Have them talk to the town council in Almeria very soon. Priority is strong access roads for heavy trucks.’
‘This place is far from Malaga…’ my main man noted.
‘This is a side project, connected to the aquifer water and irrigation projects in the high deserts.
‘We’ll also build nursing homes closer to Malaga and further south, behind the tourist areas. The team down there can make a start on looking for suitable sites, and any such site must be big enough for four nursing homes in a cluster.
‘Eventually there’ll be nursing homes all along the coast, this is just the start. Oh, get the surveyors that looked at the dam in Corsica and the German men responsible for the turbines, and send them to that valley, we need a dam site and a site for the turbines, which could be way up the valley.’
‘Should we drill for water at the site itself?’
‘Yes, test drilling, we might find a small aquifer and be able to use it. But if you drill deep at the lower end you’ll get saline water.’
They nodded.
At 5pm I joined the twins in the suite, and we again did the “couple time” stuff, chatting about mundane things, and we looked through catalogues for new dresses that might suit them.
They had also bonded with the nurse, who became like a sister to them, and since she was a nurse I did not mind walking around naked, or the twins being naked.
Have I Got News For you
In the morning I made a decision, then made a call, and I was booked onto “Have I Got News For You”. The nurse protested mildly, and wanted to come with me, so I agreed – she could hold my hand.
The twins wanted to visit a certain shop in London, so Bill and Ted would go with them. We set off in convoy at 10am, a pleasant day for a change, and we avoided an accident on the motorway - it was on the northbound lane.
In London we split up, my minibus heading to the studios, the same studios where I was shot. Walking in, the staff were surprised to see me, surprised that I was up and walking around and looking well. But at least they had cleaned up the blood.
Ian Hislop and Paul Merton queried if I was well enough, and I assured them that I was, the nurse on hand in her BUPA uniform. Teeth cleaned, make-up done, and I walked out to a loud applause from the studio audience, soon sat across from a white-haired Labour MP, Tammy Short.
The music started and then faded. Angus began, ‘Thank you audience, and welcome our regular TV viewers, and those at home with nothing better to do.
‘With us tonight is Labour MP Tammy Short, and someone that should be in a hospital bed, a tube up his backside.’
I shot him a look as the audience laughed.
Angus faced me and sighed. ‘So what have you been up to since we last saw you?’
‘Bungling along, minding my own business.’
The audience laughed.
Paul touched my arm. ‘How’s that working out for you?
‘Well I got to open my new AIDS hospice, had Elton John and Lady Di there, and now it’s settling down and people are getting into a routine of – you know – being very sick and unwell.’
Angus began, ‘And you made a visit to the staff at St. Bart’s Hospital…’
‘Did I? Oh yes.’
The audience laughed.
‘Arrived in a police car … not an ambulance,’ Angus noted.
‘Faster that way I guess.’
‘And apparently you arrived with sellotape over your gunshot wounds…’
‘My Special Branch bodyguard was in the SAS, and they use sellotape, Army can’t afford a bandage. So he taped me up, but the blood was not pumping anyhow.’
‘You’ve recovered remarkably quickly,’ Ian noted. ‘And when shot twice in the chest at close range you recovered in seconds and asked Blair if he was OK…’
‘No great mystery, the bullets missed all the good stuff and hit the inside of my shoulders, just muscle and fatty tissue, no main arteries. And the surgeons, they dug out the bullets and discovered, Ian, that I am quite human in every way.
‘But there was a problem with the wigwam -’
‘The what?’ Paul loudly asked.
‘The wigwag, you know … the tent.’
Paul puzzled, ‘Did the NHS not have a bed for you?’ The audience laughed. ‘I’m all in favour of camping, but the NHS should have used a bed and not a wigwam!’
I faced him. ‘The morning tent. You know … the wigwam…’
He puzzled my meaning. I turned my head. ‘No good asking Ian.’ I faced the audience. ‘Sometimes … a man wakes up with a tent in the bedsheets.’ They laughed. ‘A morning stiffness that lifts the bedsheets and creates a tent, the wigwam.’
They laughed louder.
‘Well I woke up after surgery with a wigwam, and the nurses found it funny and apparently tried to push it down, and when the twins arrived they found it funny as well and tried to push it down.’
The audience laughed loudly.
‘And finally it went down of its own accord, and I blame the drugs they gave me during surgery.’ I faced the MP as he dried his eyes. ‘I’m sure that you once had a wigwam.’
‘As a teenager, yes, my mother walked in and saw it, and never again after that did she walk in on me in the mornings.’
I faced Paul. ‘And you?’
‘Not since I got married, no.’
The audience laughed.
Ian asked, ‘Are nurses allowed to push down a wigwam?’
‘It’s a hospital, your life in their hands, you know, doctor-patient relationship and all that,’ I told him. ‘And I didn’t mind nor would I complain, I just hope that no one photographed it.’
‘And your keen desire for a posh BUPA hospital and not a rundown NHS hospital?’ Ian asked.
‘That was organised by my legal team, who are there to rescue me and provide medical cover the world over, so I got a lovely BUPA room. But just to be clear, I feel no loyalty to the crumbling NHS, I’m out to shake them up and improve the NHS, not stand by what it is today.
‘So if you think it’s wrong for a working-class Leicester boy to use BUPA … bollocks to you.’ The audience laughed. ‘I want the NHS to be as nice as BUPA, not to just accept what it is today.
‘And the NHS food was terrible. There was not much of it and I couldn’t identify what they served me. I will campaign to change that.
‘What people there said to me … was that sick patients don’t eat much. Well how the hell are sick patients going to get better unless they have decent food, food that actually tastes like food.
‘I don’t know where the NHS buy their food, but it’s not from the same shops that the rest of us use.’
The MP cut in, ‘It’s supplied specially to the NHS, after the flavour has been removed, so that you can’t identify what you’re eating. I spent four weeks in hospital, and the staff were great, but the food was bloody awful.’
I told him, ‘It’s something that I will campaign on in the future, that and better wages for our nurses. I aim to save the NHS a shit load of money, which will probably be stolen anyhow.’
‘Stolen?’ Ian queried.
‘NHS managers spending millions on external consultants when they could do the damn job themselves.’
The audience applauded me.
I added, ‘NHS managers never have the money for extra staff, but they always have ten million quid for external consultants. I want all external consultants banned from the NHS unless it’s about building a new wing.’
Tammy put in, ‘It is an issue, how they can always claim to be understaffed and yet always find millions to pay external consultants. That money could go on nurses.’
‘And on food from a packet from a British shop, not from North Korea,’ I added.
Ian asked, ‘So are you in pain?’
‘Yes, but I take painkillers, and I drink the spring water, which does help me a great deal. As to why I was not a bit dead, ask the doctors who operated on me, they know what they found, I was asleep at the time.’
‘With a wigwam,’ Paul noted.
I faced him. ‘Not during surgery I hope.’
‘And when The Queen visited?’ Paul asked.
‘No wigwam, no, I was awake then. Her Majesty thanked me for my selfless act, then asked if we could help catch the Corgi dogs running around the wards.’
The audience laughed as Ian said, ‘They don’t allow dogs into hospitals as a rule.’
‘She’s The Queen, she can do whatever she wants,’ I told him.
‘And did Blair thank you?’ Angus asked.
‘Yes, but he didn’t bring me anything, no grapes or Lucozade, nothing, and when I complained he lamely said that he had been informed that I would be groggy and not eating.’
‘Which should have been the case,’ Ian pointed out. ‘People don’t eat after gunshot surgery, they lay there in a stupor.’
‘Put it down as a miracle if you want, Mister Miracle Believer.’
‘I most certainly do not believe in miracles, not after Thatcher. I think the Devil runs this world.’
I nodded at that as the audience laughed. ‘That would make sense, yes.’
