Let me start with the part I can actually explain, because it's short: I built a website about buying less crap and investing the difference. That was the plan. Simple, sensible, mildly preachy in a friendly sort of way. I write about ETFs and index funds and the fact that a few quid a week, invested consistently and left alone for decades, does something quietly remarkable. I tell people not to buy rubbish. I tell them to buy the world instead, held in a cheap global fund, and then to go and have a nice life. That has been the whole project, and I'm proud of it. It's rooted in everything I actually believe about money, which is that the game is not complicated, it's just boring, and boring is the bit that works.
And then, at some point I genuinely could not identify after the fact, a King turned up. With a Donkey. And a goat called Keith. And a goldfish named Tristan who has opinions he refuses to share. And a donkey who is, by some distance, the most sensible character in the entire enterprise. I did not plan this. Nobody greenlit it. It simply appeared in a very obvious place and pretended it had always been there, which is — and I want to be clear about this — exactly what the books are about. I have now written five of them. Five. I set out to explain the S&P 500 and I have ended up as the reluctant custodian of a fictional universe staffed almost entirely by livestock. Don't ask why. I'll explain anyway.
👑 The Wingle Universe
Five Books. One Donkey. No Explanations.
Illustrated comedy about a King who should not be in post. Also a goat called Keith.
Book One
I'M THE KING. DON'T ASK WHY.
Book Two · Maybe
I'M STILL THE KING.
Book Three · Classified
I'M THE KING NOW.
Book Four · The Wingle Chronicles
I'M THE KING AGAIN.
Book Five · Probably
I'M THE KING. PROBABLY.
And after that?
Still nobody knows. Frankly, that's how we got here.
── What The Books Actually Are ──
Here's the pitch, stripped of the nonsense: they're short, illustrated, funny books about a King who is not qualified for the job and knows it, surrounded by advisers who are even less qualified and don't. The comedy is the comedy of every institution you've ever worked in — meetings that create meetings, job titles that change more often than the work, broken systems declared a success because nobody wants to be the one who says otherwise. The King is incompetent but likeable. The Donkey is quietly the smartest one there and gets no credit. Keith the goat eats things he shouldn't, including, at one point, a chapter. Tristan the goldfish is consulted on matters of state and has never once given an answer. It is extremely silly. It is also, people keep telling me, weirdly accurate about the workplace you spent all week surviving.
── The Wingle Universe, In Order, Badly Explained ──
Book One is I'm The King. Don't Ask Why. — where it all starts. A King, a Donkey, a crown, a kingdom, and a red button nobody must press, which is of course pressed. It sets the tone: nobody is in charge, everyone is confident, and the Donkey is the only one paying attention. If you want to know whether the whole thing is for you, this is the one that tells you, in about the time it takes to drink a cup of tea.
Book Two is I'm Still The King. Don't Ask Why. — subtitled, with total honesty, 'Maybe'. Nobody asked. Nobody confirmed. Nobody knows. The King has discovered the concept of a second term, which nobody else was aware was on offer, and the kingdom is now coping with the consequences of a leadership style best described as 'vibes'. There are magpies. There is a throne. There are sunglasses, which the King believes make him look decisive. They do not.
Book Three is I'm The King Now. Don't Ask Why. — classified, apparently, although everyone already knows. This is the one where the Donkey ends up on a throne, surrounded by politicians and officials at a very long desk, and the entire machinery of government grinds on around a plan that nobody has read. The secret is that there is no secret. The secret is that this is exactly how it works.
Book Four is The Wingle Chronicles — I'm The King Again. Don't Ask Why. Same King. Same Donkey. More departments. Much worse ideas. General Brassington has returned. Queen Penelope is concerned. Sir Biscuit has been promoted to Chief Morale Officer. Gordon P. Clipboard has improved things by 17%, and nobody knows which 17%. Mr Rule is everywhere, the Two Tonys still disagree about everything, and the Wingle Kingdom Improvement Plan is now on Phase 17, having been on Phase 1 last week. The donkey has been promoted sideways. This one is about bureaucracy, which is the funniest thing in the world as long as it's happening to somebody else — and it's never happening to somebody else, is it. It's happening to you. That's the joke.
Book Five is I'm The King. Probably. Don't Ask Why. — and this is the new one. The Official 5.62.5 Wingle Edition, a version number that means nothing and is not a reference to anything. The King has decided he is a thought leader. Nobody briefed him. Nobody briefed anyone. Somewhere between a carrot farm and a summit, between a mop and a dustpan, between three Tonys who disagree with each other on principle, our reluctant monarch has stumbled into business, legal, mediation and a small island he may or may not own. There's a bucket, a broom, several Tonys, four penguins of unclear purpose, and one man in sunglasses who is absolutely, definitely, probably in charge. The donkey has been promoted sideways again, which is a different sideways this time, and worse.
── Why A Money Bloke Wrote Comedy Books ──
This is the question I get most, usually phrased as 'what?' — and it's a fair one, because on the surface nothing about a website about compound interest suggests it will eventually produce a fictional kingdom staffed by livestock. But the two things are the same thing, and I only worked that out afterwards. Buy Less Crap is about the difference between what things cost and what they're worth. It's about not buying the thing that impresses strangers and buying the thing that improves your actual life instead. It's about noticing that most of the expensive decisions we make are made to look a certain way to people who aren't paying attention. And the books are about exactly that, pointed at institutions rather than shopping. A kingdom run on vibes. A government department with a Phase 17. A Chief Morale Officer. These are all just very expensive things that nobody needed, wearing a crown.
There's a second reason, and it's less clever: writing about index funds is fundamentally a message about patience, and patience is quite hard to make funny. The books let me say the same thing in a way people actually want to read. The Donkey is rewarded for being sensible and ignored for it. The King is rewarded for being confident and eventually has to explain a bucket. If you've ever watched somebody get promoted past their competence and then watched it work out exactly as badly as you predicted, you already understand the whole series. It's not satire aimed at any particular person, which is why it doesn't date. It's aimed at the shape of the thing, and the shape of the thing hasn't changed once in recorded history.
── The Honest Bit, Which Is Also Funny ──
I'm 66. I built a personal finance website and it went rather well, and then I wrote five illustrated comedy books about a monarch who should not be in post. Neither of those was a plan. If you had told me five years ago that my retirement project would involve publishing fiction about a goat, I'd have assumed you'd been at the cheap cider. But here's the genuine lesson underneath all of it, and it's the same one as everything else on this site: the interesting things in your life come from doing things and continuing to do them, not from carefully choosing the perfect thing to do first. I didn't sit down and design a Wingle Universe. I wrote one silly book, and there was a second one in it, and then a third, and now there is a shelf.
That is compounding, by the way. Not the money kind — the other kind, which is the one that actually runs your life. You do a small thing, you keep doing it, and one afternoon you look up and there are five books where there used to be nothing and you cannot entirely remember agreeing to it. Same mechanism as the index fund. Same mechanism as everything. Small, repeated, unglamorous, and then suddenly undeniable. If reading a website about ETFs has not yet persuaded you of that, perhaps a donkey can.
── Where To Get Them ──
All the books live at dontaskwhy.co.uk, which is the official home of the whole Wingle Universe, and each one has its own page there with the cover, the blurb, extracts and the general air of an operation that got out of hand. If you want to go straight to buying, Book Four — The Wingle Chronicles — is on Amazon now, and the rest are linked from each book's page on the site, format by format: Kindle, paperback, hardback and, apparently, audiobook, whatever that means. Book Five is the newest and is arriving, as it puts it, sooner than you think. The King is still negotiating with himself.
One warning, and I mean it: nobody in these books is competent, nothing gets fixed, and the ending is never a resolution — it's a sign-off. If you're the type who needs the plan to work out, these will infuriate you. If you're the type who has sat in a Thursday meeting about the meeting on Friday and thought 'none of this is real, and yet here I am', these were written for you specifically. There's a character called Barry in Book Four who is a spider, and he may be the most stable member of the organisation. That tells you everything about the tone.
── And The Actual Money Point, Since This Is A Money Website ──
I promised myself I'd put the sensible bit in, so here it is, and then I'll leave you alone. There are two ways to spend a tenner this week. One of them is a comedy book about a donkey, which will make you laugh on a Tuesday and then sit on a shelf. The other is two coffees you won't remember drinking. Neither of those is a terrible use of money — this website is not, contrary to popular belief, against joy, and I am not going to pretend that buying a funny book is financial planning.
But if there's a third option — skip something you won't miss, and put the difference into a cheap global fund that you then ignore for twenty years — that's the one that changes the shape of your later life. Not the book, not the coffee, not the thing. The difference. That's the whole website, that's the whole kingdom, and, if you squint, it's the whole of the Wingle Universe too: everybody running around buying things they don't need, and somewhere in the corner a donkey quietly doing the sensible thing and getting absolutely no credit for it. Be the donkey. It's not glamorous and nobody thanks you, but it works, and in about thirty years it turns out you were the only one who was right.
Go and read about a King instead, if you'd rather. I'd understand entirely. Don't ask why. Nobody does. That is genuinely the entire point of the series and I'm no closer to an answer than I was five books ago.
As ever, the small print: this is a blog post about comedy books, so it is emphatically not financial advice, I'm not regulated by the FCA, investments go down as well as up, and no donkey has been consulted on any investment decision — which, on the evidence of the last five books, is arguably a missed opportunity.
