Life is, shall we say, a little on tilt at the moment. I’m three months into the builders experience, and most of us have been through that at some point or another. The job – forecast to be finished next week – is about halfway done. The five main factors militating against progress here have been poor administration, bad planning, bureaucratic meddling by the planning office, architectural drawings that had to be abandoned, and three suppliers failing to live up to delivery promises.

Meanwhile, the buy-out deal with my wife on the property here was scheduled for the end of January. Nothing has moved since mid February, when it became the notaire’s job to send my wife one letter. The notaire has been pushed, kicked and yelled at. Now I’ve had to think about approaching the professional body concerned to complain. Failing that, I’ll have to change notaire and start all over again.

Last week, the last of the implants I had fitted in Greece fell out. Four in, four out, months of pain, and then the need to get a French dentist to redo nine new implants.

This morning, a letter arrived from Saga car insurance, with whom three weeks ago I renewed my policy at a cost of £550. It thanks me for my communication with them, and confirms that my policy has now been cancelled.

This afternoon, I had to move some Pounds into euros in order to pay for building materials and labour here. The gigantic swamp of multiple cockup, speed-lies and failure that is the internet and banking working in concert meant that the operation took nearly two hours.

Believe it or not, there is a common thread running through all these unnecessary events: administration, and the professions.

Accountants have ruined product marketing and made fiscal reporting lies the norm, scientists discover but can’t design, architects always seem to get their scales wrong, solicitors have made life a non-stop fear of litigation, delay and cost, bureaucrats go over budget on anything they’re given to handle, Judges seem to think their job is to protect the Establishment, bankers have bankrupted all of us, and pretty much everyone involved in designing software or logistics systems sets out to ensure complication and slippage.

Thanks to administration and the professions, almost nothing works any more, clarity has disappeared, simplicity is covered in the mire of deliberate obfuscation, and globalist bollocks is handed a degree of credibility by laws and accountancy that only very rarely bear examination as a true picture of what’s right. Being a multinational plc these days is a licence to say down is up, stagnation is growth, and loss elsewhere is profit here. Trust me: for a mercifully brief period, I was part of it. It was like pacifying the inmates of an insane asylum where every patient is further disadvantaged by ignorance.

The neoliberal f**kwit will tell you this is all to do with lack of competition. But the empirical data of the last 35 years tell a different story: the more competition there is, the more gargoyles like Murdoch and Dimon try to kill off any and all competitors. And on the whole, they tend to do it by corrupting lawyers, police, accountants and politicians: yet more “professionals”.

What messes up the contemporary world is Big, Bureaucrat, Bandit and Bollocks. Such honesty and added value as is left resides within Small, Simple, Service, Citizen, and Skill.

The future will consist, eventually, of the latter: for it is this mélange of family and communal entrepreneuralism that has always worked to our best advantage and greatest satisfaction….that once created The Happy Breed.

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