Crab House Cafe, Dorset

LivingCheapinLondon gave us a great tip from recent post about a fine source of modest decadence, and Mrs Ermine was on it immediately. We were going to dine at the Crab House cafe, where Chesil beach starts to leave the mainland at the southern end. This took place is the sort of intermediate phase of the coronavirus pandemic loosening up, where you could eat out, as long as outside meant outside, which is a little bit on the brass monkeys side in late April, even on the south coast.

The Hellstone via Dorchester

To work up an appetite we took a look at the Hellstone dolmen, I have been coming to Dorset regulars with some old college pals ever since one of them had a camper van in the late 1980s. I last saw this some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when one of our party who shall remain nameless managed to get an impressive thump followed by outpouring of blood as he made the mistake of standing up in the Hellstone. You don’t want to do that because the headspace is about 5ft 4in, enough to get a good heft because the irresistible force loses out to the immovable object. There’s a reason the AONB booklet calls this land of bone and stone…

We hustled him back town the track to the Hardy monument, and figured we really ought to take him to A&E at Dorchester General after deploying the first aid kit in the camper van. Fortunately it wasn’t concussion and he only needed a tetanus jab, but that site had been crossed off the list for ever afterwards and this is the first time I’d been in the area without him in the party.

I regaled Mrs Ermine with this story, and fortunately the imp of the perverse did not prevail. Peace has been made with this fine site.

which is a short hike from the Hardy monument. For some reason Mrs Ermine took objection to this object, because I had said it was to commemorate Thomas Hardy, for the last two decades I assumed this was Thomas Hardy the author, he of Tess of the d’Urbervilles etc. The trail to the dolmen starts from the Hardy monument, and the National Trust educated me that this was Thomas Hardy, the naval fellow to whom the dying Lord Nelson was reputed to have said “Kiss me, Hardy”

Die With Zero–FI/RE, the YOLO edition

I picked up a copy of Die With Zero, H/T Monevator, and it was a pleasant read over about half a day. The TL/DR summary is that we are doing this FI/RE stuff all wrong, and should start spending more earlier.

I certainly found the book worth the Amazon Kindle price-tag (£7), and I have occasionally wondered if I should be spending more. DWZ’s takeaway is a resounding Hell Yeah, and it’s certainly a different way of looking at things from your normal FI/RE trajectory – eat rice and beans while working in the City/IT Big Cheese/well paid job and quit at 45.

Some things I have already got right – retiring in my early fifties and not working at any significant level is very DWZ. I’d really like to be able to say that was a carefully planned strategy marshalling all my resources from the previous 20 years, but it wasn’t. Learn well from the error of my ways, young fellow

There’s an app for that

I was unable to get his app to work properly, in the sense of giving me useful insights, though it seemed to function serviceably¹.

It didn’t like a lot of things about me. For starters it can’t process someone who retired nine years ago. Computer sez WTF?

HAL9000 –> Ermine, I can’t do that

so it’s one for all you pre-FIRE-ees out there. So I decided to start hacking. I pretended that I want to retire in a year from now, I have an income of my pension, and I get 100% of that in future. After all, a DB pension is an annuity, innit.