Tortoise – Daily Object Writing – Mar 31 - Paul J Penton

Tortoise – Daily Object Writing – Mar 31

Mar 30th, 2010 | By admin | Category: Daily Writing

Where would we be without Aesop I say? Surely everyone knows the tale of the Hare and the Tortoise. Yep, there’s the super successful entrepenurial, high flying Hare, dressed up in his wall street pin striped suit, barreling along toward what he assumes might be his first billion, and there’s the Tortoise plugging away at his menial white collar round the neck chain attached to his feet job, plodding through each day thinking of feeding the kids. Will he meet the next mortgage payment? Small visions , small expectations.

It all seemed to be going well for the hare until a couple of years ago, that runaway stock market rising like a Chinese firework rocket, scheme upon scheme being layered on fellow competitor and bank, the mortgages of the lowly plodders being sold on and on and on and on as collateralised Debt obligations. The hare happily building his house of cards until the foul wind of reality caught up with him. Probably while he was lounging about in his cruiser moored off the Bahamas or something. Maybe the tortoise was downstairs mucking out the stalls, just plodding along, plod plod, heavy feet sucked into the ground as if it were magnetic, his hard lumpy unattractive shell keeping him safe from a falling sky, but the hare, on that day when the noose began to tighten started loosing his fur, turned into a quaking mass of jelly, but Mr Tortoise kept plugging away. He’s done the hard slow yards so this ‘financial crisis’ wasn’t gonna touch him, with lower interest rates it was gonna make it better- but he’s not sure what his house is worth anymore, he’ll plod until the next housing boom, while the hare has to sell everything to meet his over extended credit lines. At the finish line who’s gonna have the most toys?

He’ll get there, the tortoise, maybe with a couple of grandchildren and a home, but Mr hare- he might wind up in a retirement village alone, because he loved money more than he loved someone.

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