Free Misadventures by Sylvia Smith

was, ‘He’s not much of a man, is he? He leaves us secretaries to cope with an aggressive drunk while he hides himself away trembling with fear.’
    * * *
    Another afternoon all the probation officers attended an AIDS-awareness demonstration. Each officer was supplied with a banana and a condom and they were taught how to use a condom with the banana representing a penis. Once they had mastered this art the idea was that they would show their clients how to do so correctly, thereby reducing the risk of them catching AIDS through casual sex.
    Â 
    I was offered a job at that probation office but I considered the salary too low and I didn’t like their set-up of a supervising secretary being in charge of the daily workload and of all the other secretaries, which would have included me.

1985
M Y I NVESTMENTS
    I reached the age of forty. It was such a milestone I took a hard look at my past life. I felt I hadn’t done very much with it. I had never married or lived abroad. I had led the life of a single woman, having nice clothes, nice holidays, nice cars, nice evenings out, and, despite the fact that several men had fallen in love with me, I’d had few romances. I thought to myself, ‘What can I do about this? I don’t want to get to sixty and find I still haven’t done anything worthwhile.’ I decided I would like to achieve something and I thought, ‘What can I achieve?’ My next thought was, ‘How about I make myself rich.’
    I decided to make long-term investments which I hoped would eventually make high profits. I bought one hundred shares each in five leading British companies and I slowly bought large blocks of Premium Bonds because I thought ‘How else can I make a hundred thousand pounds?’ Also, I saw an advertisement in a newspaper which stated that if I invested in a leading bank’sinvestment scheme and put down at least a one hundred pound deposit and invested a minimum of twenty pounds per month over a period of nine years, my money would treble. I considered this investment to be a first-class idea so I filled in the bank’s form, enclosed my deposit and sorted out a Standing Order with my bankers.
    Six years passed by. During this time I made approximately sixty pounds a year in premiums from my shares. I won fifty pounds four times on my Premium Bonds and I had continued investing my twenty pounds monthly. Then the recession caught up with me. I was made redundant by a building company and I returned to temping halfway through the summer, which is usually the busiest time for temps, only to find there was no work available. Despite trying my best to find work, I was to be unemployed for the following two years.
    Faced with unemployment pay of thirty-nine pounds a week to live on I decided to look at my investments to see if they were worthwhile.
    I went to my bankers and spoke to one of their executives. I said, ‘I have a lot of shares in various UK companies and I’d like to sell them subject to the shares being worth at least as much as I paid for them. So could you tell me the selling prices before we start filling in forms?’ The executive consulted a newspaper and informed me that all my shares were currently selling at half their original value. As I couldn’t afford sucha loss I chose to keep them in the hope that at some time in the future they would return to the price I had paid for them.
    I kept my Premium Bonds as I still considered them a good idea despite only winning a total of two hundred pounds during the six years I had owned them.
    I telephoned the famous bank whose investment scheme I had joined and discovered I had not trebled my money but had actually made a loss of some twenty-six pounds. I decided not to lose any further monies and cancelled the agreement. I received a cheque for the amount I had invested minus twenty-six pounds.
    It was quite obvious to me that I would have fared better if I had put