1st October, 2010

So, this was the week during which I marked a significant anniversary of my career in the City, (25 years to the day on which I joined Barings) with a restrained lunch at my favourite restaurant in the company of five of my fellow graduate trainees who started at Barings on the same day as me. I had asked each to bring a bit of Baring memorabilia. Someone, besides myself, brought their contract letter and it was most irritating to find his starting salary had been £250 more than mine. Another brought a Dunlop 65 Barings golf ball (genius) and someone else a Baring notepad and a card with the home telephone numbers of the corporate finance department dated October 1985. Emboldened by the second or third glass of wine I decided to ring the number of universally the most unpopular director, who had made our lives miserable during sojourns with his team, just to say hi. Luckily he didn’t answer the phone, but the voice on his answering machine message was definitely his! Hey ho. It’s a small world. Sitting at the next door table was a lady who had been in the BIM analyst team when we joined and in another strange coincidence, one of my lunch companions related a story that back in 1989, after a particularly big dinner, he had accidently climbed into bed with a gorgeous girl who was the wife of the Bear Stearns broker who had invited him up to the Midlands for a weekend’s pheasant shooting. My friend insists he thought he was getting into a large double bed that he had been allocated to share with a male Italian client of the said broker. The mind boggles. Client entertainment is so mundane these days. Anyway it transpires that the same lady, since re-married, is coming to dinner with us next Saturday! Yee haa!!