and when she is busy, she is very busy.
In Cairo I stayed with an old university friend called Andrew, who had done a Cat Stevens. I had to come to terms with calling him Osman, and being greeted by a bearded kiss on both cheeks, and Gen had to be dissuaded from jumping on Osman’s back when he prostrated himself at odd times of the day, but Andrew didn’t mind, and was delighted with Gen’s wailing impression of the Islamic call to prayer. Overall we had a tremendous time. Gen shouted his head off inside Tutankhamun’s tomb and inside the Great Pyramid of Cheops, where, being only three foot tall, he could charge up the tunnel inside while I was on my hands and knees. He might also be the youngest person ever to have visited the top of one of the great pyramids illegally (the small one on the left of the Benson and Hedges advert, jolly big when you get up it). The only hazardous moment came when we got lost in a Nubian village on Elephant Island in Aswan, trying to find a shortcut to the five star hotel to watch England vs West Germany on the lobby telly.
A friendly young man in flowing robes approached me, and seeing Gen perched on my arm, pointed at some mangos in a tree.
‘Third World interacts with First World in harmony,’ I thought. ‘We are going to have a beautiful experience.’ When he had got me round the corner he leant on my shoulder and gave me an enormous kiss. ‘When in Nubia, do as the Nubians,’ was not my first reaction, but although disconcerted, I remained polite. To make his meaning less ambiguous the young man then attempted to mount my leg, like an untrained male Labrador excited by the sudden arrival of, say, Joan Collins.
I didn’t stay to discover where the mangos fitted into the man’s imagination. Gen and I made it to the hotel where we settled down with a group of bricklayers from Hackney to watch the match. West Germany beat England on penalties. Gen was not as concerned with Chris Waddle missing the net as he should have been. He kept asking in a loud voice, ‘Daddy, why did the man in the nightie kiss you?’
I had a one-day attack of the Pharaoh’s Revenge, but Gen was fed for the sake of his health on Fanta, bananas, peanuts and crisps and was fit throughout. He has been asking to go back ever since.
I started at Merrill Lynch in the middle of July.
Two weeks later, on August 2nd, 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
Chapter 3
A huge wave of relief might have been expected to sweep the financial markets with the Gulf War ceasefire. Instead it was the signal for a return to stock market torpor. The start of the war had got people frantically dealing, so the end proved to be an anti-climax. It was already too late to buy.
The grim reaper moved away from the Iraqi slit trenches and visited the equities trading floor at Merrill Lynch, where a market maker, a salesman and the two most attractive girls in the office were made redundant.
The salesman was delighted because he had taken out redundancy insurance, which for surprisingly modest premiums would pay him more than he had been earning anyway for two years. In his spare time he had been contributing to the Jewish hour on Spectrum radio, and he could now pursue his ambition to build a career as a disc jockey. His name isn’t yet sufficiently well known to drop, but I have seen him a couple of times on Sky Super Channel. (Just in case he gets famous I mention that he has changed his name from Mark Jaffé to Mark Jeffries.) The thought crossed my mind that I should investigate this insurance.
The girls were tearful and, being ‘foolish virgins’, had no insurance. They were going to be a great loss to sexist bastards like myself who enjoyed looking them up and down but apart from the intangible economic benefit of keeping morale high with male staff (the overwhelming majority in any City office), they were an obvious area for cost cutting.
The market maker, Ron, trying to look brave and not unmanned, was ashen-faced.
‘You’ll get another job with your experience, Ron.’
‘It’s not the environment, Jim, but I’ll be all right.’
Since the 1987 Crash, mass redundancy had been a feature of City life, but virtually everyone who lost his job soon found another, frequently better paid. I feared that for solid, competent, but unexceptional people like Ron, such times were running out.
On the other hand I was slightly envious, having had no holiday in the eight months since joining Merrill Lynch. Egypt was a distant, fond memory. A skiing holiday was coming up soon but a decent spell of redundancy would not go amiss, if healthily paid for by the Prudential. Insuring myself would be prudent; my Japanese clients had been decidedly quiet thanks to Saddam Hussein and although I was in constant receipt of assurances that Merrill Lynch were Here-For-The-Long-Term, the place had the feel of Bomber Command circa 1943. There was a pervasive if forced jollity as people failed to come back from sorties into the boss’s office. At the back of most people’s minds was the thought, ‘Ron bought it in the last lot, who’s next?’
Despite the change of firm, I still didn’t like stockbroking. I was like a Norwegian Blue pining for the fjords. From where I sat it was impossible to tell whether it was a sunny day outside the airless office in which I squandered my disappearing youth, but much as I’d have liked to have been doing something completely different, I was in a trap. My mortgage was larger than the value of my house in fashionable Camberwell, I had a free-spending wife, a fearsome Japanese of Korean descent, and four-year-old Gen due to go to an income absorbing school soon, plus an overdraft that seemed to grow in direct proportion to the amount of money I was earning. This last, a not inconsiderable amount, was scarcely stratospheric by City standards, even if it was more than the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
I glanced at my Reuters screen in an attempt to piece together clues as to which way the dollar might be going, and what effect that would have on European company profits. It didn’t take long to decide that I didn’t care.
At times like this, when the stock markets were quiet, which despite the popular image was almost all of the time, I would ring up a tame client called Mr Hoshide. I had no sensible advice to offer him, and he had only a tiny fund. The importance of the relationship lay in the fact that we could engage each other ad nauseam in inane conversations about interest rates, or interim results, thereby looking busy and professional to our respective colleagues. I could speak Japanese to him, and thus appear to be working when in fact we might be discussing sumo or rugby. If I called him five times it would look as if I had called five clients.
Mr Hoshide worked in the tiny London investment office of a giant life assurance company. A charming and amusing man, he had the faults at times of being a bit over meticulous, and pedantic, but at heart was a long way from the stereotypical Japanese, being comfortingly idle.
The stereotype is in any case wrong. Idleness is a trait you find in more and more Japanese, particularly of thirty or under. Office workers put in fabulous hours, but they don’t work hard. Japan is beginning to suffer from advanced country disease, with a real option on leaving school of decadence rather than work.
The Japanese people suffered during the war, then suffered building the world’s mightiest economy. The parents and grandparents of the current generation of young adults don’t want to put their children through what they went through. People like Mr Hoshide were thus thoroughly spoilt and pampered as kids. So was my wife.
Mr Hoshide was on a two-year stint in London. He was thrilled to be away from the one-and-a-half-hour each way commute he had in Tokyo and the long, long hours in the office, a lot of them spent reading cartoon books to pass the time, followed by the duty of going out to get pissed with workmates. Mrs Hoshide liked London because she didn’t have to put him to bed drunk so often, then kick him out of bed at 7 a.m., still stinking.
As a salesman, the best use I could be to him was to supply easily reworkable reports from our analysts that he could send back to his head office, passing them off as his own work.
Most evenings I followed a complex routine of picking up Gen from his friend Rory’s nanny, whipping round Tesco, then processing him for bed, my wife usually being busy until late with her Japanese TV people. Normally I would have to read half a dozen Thomas the Tank Engine stories, but that night, with the Gulf