It is a good life, if you're doing what you like doing.

Stand in despair anywhere old-growth forest has been clear-felled. All life has been replaced by blackened, poisoned desolation. Animals and birds have either fled or been killed, and baits are laid waiting for those that should return. And in these tortured places, the devastation is brutal and total. And this is what greed looks like.

My best advice to individual investors can readily be summed up into two closely linked precepts. Be patient and don't be greedy.

Old gardeners never die they just very slowly turn into the most magnificent compost. But what a marvellous, active brew it is!