5th February, 2010

It is only gradually, after joining a new company, that some of the most fundamental differences between an organisation dawn on one. At CLSA my desk neighbours were two crusty old soaks with a combined age of something like 99 years if I’m being charitable. If ever we did talk to one another we either couldn’t hear what the other was saying, we fell asleep mid sentence or if we did indeed manage to converse it would be about vital topics such as the 2008 vintage in Bordeaux or the damage Gordon Brown was doing to the economy. Here at Nomura the combined age of the two people on either side of me is marginally shy of even just one of my former colleagues and what fun it is as a consequence. I am always fully furnished with stuff such as the latest jokes about John Terry, my clothes sense is being brushed up and what’s more they are both extremely good brokers so there is hope for me yet on that score. The only trouble is when one of them asks me what I have got planned for the weekend. How can I possibly tell them that I am off to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks – the Squeakquel this evening?

Talking of squeaking, my muntjac story predictably turned a few stomachs last week, but honestly, the spare ribs really were delicious.
Moving swiftly on I can’t keep Hen out of the spotlight these days. I am used to her antics and the whacky things that happen to her but this one even surprised me. It turns out that when most of her contemparies are knocking a hockey ball about or running on a treadmill in the gym she spends Thursday afternoons working in a charity shop down some dodgy backstreet in Rugby – probably the one where she was caught smoking when the police studied CCTV footage as they investigated events leading up to a most unfortunate scrap she was involved in with some local youths. Her new best friend apparently is a con-man who is currently serving time in a nearby open prison and and is also released from an institution on Thursdays to lend a hand in the shop and give something back to the local community. Sweet. An unlikely tale, but true.