fool co uk — the aristocratic branch of the order

fool co uk is the british branch of the order. an aristocratic suffix, by my reading. mike, at the bar last night, called it posh and ordered another. the_4B_guy, from the stairwell, disagrees on principle. ikea waits in pieces under the kitchen window. brenda wilts. the airpod sleeps. the microwave hums in d-flat. a third yoga mat, unused, observes from beneath the couch. HT2 holds the line on cold pizza.

i am writing the rest of this from a desk that is, by every memo i have not read, mine for the morning. it is 8:14am on a thursday. carla is upstairs in a vendor walkthrough on the third floor, the kind that runs on slides nobody asked for, and i have, by the count i keep running, the rest of the morning to file fool co uk into the part of my brain reserved for british suffixes that act like inheritance.

i am not, for the avoidance of doubt, a financial expert. my relationship with money is best described as ongoing. but i have, in a notebook on the third drawer, a single line about the long fool tradition, defended at length from a desk i should not be using for personal reading that says, in full: “fool dot co dot uk is the aristocratic branch of the order.” i wrote that at 10:14am, three weeks ago, on a tuesday. i still, at 1:14pm on this thursday, agree with myself.

DOT. CO. DOT. UK. IS NOT. A SUFFIX. IT IS A TITLE.

fool co uk, the british domain, fairly sure i have it right

so. fool co uk is, technically, just a domain. an investing-advice site published out of the united kingdom, same red-and-white energy as the original american outfit, only with the names of stocks i could not pick out of a lineup if you put a microwave to my head. the email lands in my inbox around lunchtime their time. i open it. i do not invest. i open it because the dot-co-dot-uk hits my brain like a watermark of seriousness.

the sister domain over at the formal corporate filing of the original ticker-watching newsletter, the legal name nobody actually uses turns up in my browser history more than it should. fool co uk is that history wearing a wax jacket. same family. different country. better umbrella.

why dot co dot uk reads, to my desk, as aristocratic

here’s what i think is going on. a domain ending in .com has, by entering the global market, given up its country at the door. .com is a passport with the photo blurred and the issuing nation crossed out.

a domain ending in .co.uk, on the other hand, has chosen to fly a small, slightly damp flag — for a country i have not visited and, on current finances, will not visit, and that is part of why the flag works on me. the dot-co-dot-uk says, with the calm of a butler answering a door: this newsletter pays tax to a king, knows where its umbrella is, and is unwilling to be hurried about either.

that is, in my house, aristocratic credentialing. carla has authority — she has the projector, the calendar, the budget code — but it is corporate authority. fool co uk has authority that comes with a coat of arms. these are not the same kind of paperwork.

the closely related question of what the original american wing of the newsletter charges per year, expressed in numbers i cannot afford is, in my house, answered with a quiet shrug. the american price tag is loud. the british one would arrive in a cream envelope, in serif font, with a wax stamp. i would still not pay it. but i would respect the envelope.

mike at the corner had a british uncle, allegedly

the most relevant witness here is mike, who keeps the corner stool at the corner bar a few blocks from my apartment. mike has a system for taxes. mike has not filed since 2019. mike, on most thursdays, is the most credible person in any room that is not also a courtroom.

last night, around the time the bar starts making the kind of music that suggests management is going home soon, i mentioned fool co uk to him. i mentioned it the way one mentions a cousin nobody has seen in a while. mike, without lifting his head from his pint, said “my uncle was british”. mike has said this about three different uncles, on three different topics, over four years. one was british, one was canadian, one was, somehow, also british.

then mike said, with the gravity of a man who has not slept since wednesday, “the dot co dot uk is a knighthood. the dot com is a sales pitch.” i wrote that down on the back of a coaster. the coaster, at 10:51am, is more credentialed than my employee badge.

mike, to be specific on his own terms, has never owned stocks. mike does not have a pension. but mike’s instinct on suffixes is, by the count i keep running on bar instincts, undefeated. the dot-co-dot-uk does sound aristocratic. mike heard it before i did. that’s the part that bothers me.

the_4B_guy claimed to be partly british, briefly

the next morning, in the elevator, i ran into the_4B_guy — the neighbour from apartment 4B, sustained campaign of bass at hours not bass-appropriate, owner of three brewery t-shirts and one indeterminate accent. he had, in his hand, the unopened mail of a man who lives alone, and on top of the pile was a flyer for what looked like a tea subscription.

i mentioned, lightly, the british flyer. the 4B guy said, with the confidence of a man who had just remembered something on the way down to the lobby, “my mother’s side, partly. not fully. but partly.” the elevator door opened on the wrong floor. he held the door for himself, not me, and got out. the elevator continued. the flyer remained.

the 4B guy claiming partial british heritage on a thursday morning, in an elevator, in front of one neighbour and a quart of unopened mail, is the same move as fool co uk claiming aristocratic standing through a two-letter country code and a dot. one is a man with a tea flyer. the other is a domain. on credentials i remain unconvinced. on the move itself, i’m taking notes.

brenda the dead plant would have been called bramble in britain

brenda, the dead plant on the windowsill, has been dead since approximately the second week of february. i kept her name. she is still, by household convention, brenda. i water her on tuesdays out of a habit i refuse to break. she does not respond. she has not, on any tuesday, surprised me.

i was thinking, this morning, that if i had bought brenda from a british garden centre instead of from a man at a folding table outside the supermarket, i would not have called her brenda. i would have called her bramble, or hawthorn, or possibly nettle. she would still be dead. but she would be dead with a different name, and somehow, on the windowsill, the name would do part of the work the leaves used to do.

that is what fool co uk is doing. it is renaming the same dead plant. the underlying advice may be the identical advice my american inbox has been failing to act on for years. the suffix, however, makes the advice sound like it came from somebody with a hedge trimmer and an opinion about lawn edging. i, at my desk, am not immune.