I, PLATYPUS

Portrait of the Art Critic as a Young Man

Hoy-day, what a sweep of vanity comes this way!
They dance! They are mad women.
Like madness is the glory of this life.
As this pomp shows to a little oil and root.
We make ourselves fools, to disport ourselves;
And spend our flatteries, to drink those men
Upon whose age we void it up again,
With poisonous spite and envy.
Who lives that's not depraved or depraves?
Who dies, that bears not one spurn to their graves
Of their friends' gift?
I should fear those that dance before me now
Would one day stamp upon me: 't has been done;
Men shut their doors against a setting sun.
William Shakespeare. (Timon of Athens. Act I, Scene II)

TO THE BEST OF MY RECOLLECTION my first paying job was mowing a lawn. About an acre, belonging to my mother’s brother. Our near relatives lived next door to us, on a hillside. I had mowed my mother’s half-acre for a while, and it was rather rocky ground, but not too steep at least. When I moved up onto the slopes, I really did begin to sweat. Seems to me that it was about this time that I first experienced body odour. My own personal stink.

I was saving money to buy a moped. I needed £100, and each time I mowed my uncle’s acre I brought home £1. It seemed that it might take forever. About that time, a second paying position opened. I washed dishes after dinner parties. I would arrive in the kitchen as the dinner was being plated, and start washing anything that was no longer required, working my way through the pots, pans, whisks, and ladles to the demitasse coffee cups and little crystal glasses that liqueurs had been served in. After two or three hours, I had clean fingernails, a moist forehead, and a pound note.

I believe I managed to save the £100 in less than a year. Not bad, bearing in mind I had other expenses. What I did not spend on haircuts, I did use to buy the latest pop records and some rather dodgy clothes. I thought I looked good in flowered shirts with my hair covering most of my face and over my collar.

One short-lived job was tending the bar at The Wheatsheaf Inn, in Ludlow, Shropshire. A lovely old building, where I lived in the attic. I had to remember to walk down the centre of the room and duck my head as I rolled onto my bed. Just above the bed was a flat window in the roof, and as I looked out, I could see bats and night birds flying around the inn’s chimneys. I did not much care for the bar tending, but joined a crew of house painters in the neighbourhood and did that in the daytime. I was paid £5 a week, plus breakfast and lodging.

I was interviewed by the personnel manager at a branch of the Westminster Bank in Maidstone, Kent, and, despite having absolutely no experience of banking and finance, I was offered a job. The Bank advised me to buy a suit or two, and to get a haircut. I might expect £10 a week, before taxes. This seemed rather grand, twice my pay at The Wheatsheaf Inn.

The bank job did not happen. I had put out feelers at the Bermuda office of American International Group (AIG), and flew off to see what that might offer me, a still-greasy teenager. My mother’s brother, the one whose lawn I had mowed some years before, happened to be the president of AIG operations in Bermuda; I also knew many of the employees through their children with whom I had grown up. I was offered a job immediately. In my defence, my uncle did not know that I was applying for a position in his firm.

My talents were judged most appropriate to work in the Accounting and Finance Department. I dare say this was not because I had some experience in an office, but I had never even had so much as a chequebook to balance. So why? I had managed to pass GCE “A” Levels in Mathematics, though only just. There was nothing of bookkeeping in those courses, just a few months of calculus, some statistics, a bit of applied mathematics and physics. I could have worked out something involving Newton’s three Laws of Motion (sometimes I still recall the equations, though not tonight), but I had no idea what a Debit or a Credit might be.

Happens, I learned a bit about bookkeeping, and I worked in that field, for a few employers, off and on for the next 30 years. My mind has now been wiped clean; I now have no real notion of what one might do to balance books, by hand or on a computer. I let the bank balance things for me, though I have a vague idea of what level of poverty I should be classed in.

I have many AIG memories, but the one that comes to mind first involves my boss in the Accounting and Finance Department. The Treasurer was a very large, bulky man, not too many years older than my parents were, but his children were old enough to have been ahead of me academically and socially. I knew his name, but nothing else about him. Mr Dale had a buzzer system that he operated from his desk in his corner office. A single buzz was to summon his executive secretary, two buzzes meant his personal assistant should rush in, three and his chief filing clerk had to get hopping. There were other buzzes that nobody seemed to understand. Had Mr Dale buzzed five times, or was it a two and a three? Had he rested a ledger on the button?

Mr Dale travelled to the company’s New York City offices frequently. We were all glad when this happened. The first experience I had of this was within days of settling into my chair near the Xerox photocopier that I was supposed to keep full of paper, and ink, and to dismantle when copies (frequently) jammed in the works. I was truly clueless. As the boss prepared for his trip, his filing clerk was on constant alert to photocopy everything and anything that might be needed in NYC. This before computers, of course. Hard copy days.

The morning arrived and Mr Dale’s secretary came and asked me to carry his bag to the elevator, and then out to the company car in the parking area. I crept into the corner office, Mr Dale looked at me as if he had no idea who I was (I do not suppose he would) as I reached for the leather straps on a large canvas bag. I hefted and the bag stayed on the floor. I lifted again and it moved just a little sideways. I reached with both hands, got the bag airborne and wobbled towards the door with it. I was sweating by the time I pushed it into the elevator. Downstairs, out of sight of Mr Dale, I simply dragged the bag over to the door and signalled the driver to bring the car up.

I asked for an explanation when we were all horsing around after the boss had headed to the Airport. Turned out the very large, bulky Mr Dale was on a strict diet and his doctor had passed him along to a psychologist. The shrink had told Mr Dale that he must purchase lead ingots equal in weight to the amount he exceeded his perfect weight for his height and frame, put them in a bag, and carry it with him everywhere. He was not particularly tall, and was mostly fat. There was the better part of a man’s weight in the canvas bag. Rather than lift it himself, Mr Dale had staff members lug it about for him. To the best of my knowledge, very little lead came out of the canvas bag. His excess weight remained steady, or increased. Books badly balanced?

I have worked in insurance accounting offices, at a supermarket, at a Peugeot motorcycle and bicycle dealership, for a landscaping firm, in a convenience store taking passport photographs, in a petrol station, and as an assistant to a friend who needed someone to take her dogs to obedience training. I even taught night school classes in creative writing.

Almost exactly ten years ago, late 2001, when George Harrison died, I phoned our local newspaper and asked if I might write an obituary on the former Beatle (my favourite, it happened) for the weekend edition. To my surprise, the editor agreed and I banged out a thousand words. They came easily. A thousand words still flow easily (we are nearly at 1,500 here). I have been writing since I was editor of our grammar school newspaper. I have always kept up a considerable correspondence with friends. It is easy for me. Computers made it even quicker, as fast as I can type with two fingers of my right hand; the words are always there.

I offered the occasional article for that weekend edition, and it would run something most weeks, at $100 a pop. They wanted articles about things I remembered. Things I had seen. As if I was so very old.

Then the art critic for that weekender died. I did not weep long, but offered to have a go in her place. That turned out to be an interesting experience, one I enjoyed. My family has artists on both sides, not just painters, but actors and musicians. I tried to paint when I was in my salad days, not terribly well, but mixed with a fair lot of artisans. I knew painters well, and that lead to set-painters in local theatre, which took me into producing a couple of shows on a small scale.

I attended gallery openings, and first nights at the theatre, and managed to knock out the required column in short order. I only ever struggled when commissioned to write a group of articles on motor vehicles; I was not used to re-writes.

I am reminded of an opening at “Kofu Hair and Gallery” in Bermuda. The hair salon was on a rooftop in a dodgy part of town (one might be gunned down there nowadays) and the owner, a Jamaican with a Bermudian girlfriend, did the hair of black women, and hung paintings on every spare bit of wall space. One was given a programme and, working around the clients, chairs, sinks, and hair-dryers, could study the latest exhibition.

My first visit to Kofu was surprising. The quality of the pictures on show was surprisingly good, even if most of them were the work of the proprietor. There were a few odd things, chairs with nails driven through the seats, hanging from the ceiling. Then the owner took leave of the matron he had been seeing to at the sink, and invited me to go in the “Private Gallery”. I was told that I could not review, or mention, these special pictures, but he would like me to see them to better understand his work.

We walked to a closed door in the centre of one wall, and my host unlocked it, switched on a light, and directed me into the narrow corridor inside. I could tell the walls were hung with huge canvases, some reaching from ceiling to floor, but seeing them was extremely difficult as the corridor was so narrow. One could not get more than a foot away from the surface of a painting perhaps eight foot square.

“What do you think?” The gallery owner asked, indicating a painting.

“I cannot really see it. What exactly would it be?”

Imagine a Jackson Pollock being sucked into a train tunnel. Or the open jaws of a feeding shark.

“It is my girlfriend’s pussy. Close up.”

Close up and eight feet across, at the end of my nose.

“You cannot write about this, of course. The police would raid us.”

This sort of thing might put one off, I dare say. I might have become a John Ruskin. Instead, I see the comedy in it. Ruskin, apparently, never got over Effie Gray’s pubic hair, or was it her menstrual blood, and I am guessing he never had a good laugh about it.

Nowadays I write blog entries. I am not paid, but for the occasional compliment. I also write Tweets, 140 character remarks, on Twitter. Moreover, on good days, I attach my blog entry to my Tweet, and somebody might wind up here.

How did you get here?

Just Another Spatial Twist Continuum

Balk logic with acquaintance that you have
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you;
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
William Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew. Act I, Scene I)

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF HEAVY RAIN, without let-up, we had a break yesterday. The day began with clear skies, a pale, frightened blue. However, one could see mists forming over the North Sea (by evening we were fogged in) and swirling around the keep at Warkworth Castle.

Warkworth Castle is awfully old, and tumbled-down, but still substantial. Shakespeare set a scene in Henry IV (Part 1) in the Castle. Warkworth was hardly new in the 14th Century in the days of Harry Hotspur (Sir Henry Percy) who may have been born there in the 1360s. (He may have been born in Alnwick Castle, a few miles inland, the other Percy homestead in this part of the world.)

With the break in the weather yesterday morning, I hitched up Cailean and we headed across town and sat out on the Amble Pier.

A full-bodied lady, not a young woman, in a sweat suit and scarf with a woolly hat under her hoodie approached us as we sat looking out at the Sea through the Harbour entrance.

“Is he friendly?”

“Well, yes. Just ignore the yapping, he feels it is his duty to protect me.”

Cailean is a talkative little fellow; miniature dachshunds tend to be chatty. He also likes to hop and put his front paws on one’s shin. A kindly reply (Aren’t you a lovely dog?) gets his tail wagging. A scratch around the ears gets his whole body wagging.

“Not as cold as it has been.”

“No, this is rather pleasant. Even with the breeze off the water.”

And I mentioned the days of rain. The English like to form queues and talk about the weather.

“This has been a brutal winter. Still, mustn’t complain.”

For some reason we mustn’t.

And I watched two ruddy-faced women packing up their fishing gear, industrial-size rods, not the hook-and-sinker hand-lines that I grew up with. The women looked alike, almost twins. With them was a younger girl, as pallid as they were red; washed-out, straggly blond hair, and, I’m thinking, the features one associates with Down’s syndrome. The girl was so very white that I wondered if she might be an albino. Rare genetic misfortune if so.

There were several members of a family, all albinos, at Hurricane High School in Utah back in the 1990s. That was a close-knit community, and one might expect oddities with families doubling back on themselves.

The girl on the Amble Pier was mumbling to herself. I’m hard of hearing thanks to decades of extremely loud music (I have felt too embarrassed to consider a hearing-aid, but my eyesight is crap too and I have difficulty reading the captioning on the telly, so I really should have my ears looked into). The girl didn’t seem threatening.

In July of 1968 I spent several weeks in London with my mother. One day we were sitting on a bench at Marble Arch and a woman appeared, screaming obscenities, which she soon directed at us. We’d stayed sitting while other people in the area got their skates on. This mad woman was, I suppose, quite mad. Nowadays we have tablets one can (and really should) take.

When I was in Lower 4 at Warwick Academy, our Physics master was a Welshman with a Spanish surname. Go figure. One day one of the few girls in the Physics class must have been grappling with some demon, perhaps her blob, and she took umbrage at something the teacher had said, had addressed to her. He may have asked her for a formula. (I still recall a few formulas relating to motion ... S = UT + ½ AT² ... though I couldn’t explain them.)

The girl, who would have been about 12 or 13, stood up and screamed abuse at our teacher. It was the first time I’d ever heard a girl swear, and she did it with considerable volume and variety. I wasn’t sure how Gabe (the teacher) could possibly do the disgusting things that Carol (the girl) suggested he do.

Carol disappeared then and there. She walked out of the Physics class and Lower 4. I think she was switched to a Commercial course and spent the next few years typing and doing shorthand. The Academic students rather looked down on the Commercial boys and girls. Commerce was for dummies.

My first job was in the accounting and finance department at AIG.

Gabe was not a very inspiring teacher of Physics. I have an unsettled grudge against him. At the end of a term, back in Lower 4, we had to sit an examination. When Gabe had marked the papers and brought the results to class, he was in a state of bloody-minded rage that was almost a match for Carol’s. Gabe said that all the pupils that had failed the examination would have to take it again. And it turned out that only one of us passed it. Me. And the vile man suddenly decided that I should stay after school and take it again too.

I wasn’t too fond of Physics after that. Certainly no fan of Gabe.

That said, Gabe and one other teacher were the only members of staff from Warwick Academy who attended the funeral of my step-mother who’d taught History at the school.

I’m sitting on the Amble Pier watching the mists forming in the Coquet Estuary to my left; Cailean is watching a piece of paper that has blown past us.

I have a GCE “O” Level in Physics, and I took Physics and Pure and Applied Mathematics at “A” Level, along with classes in Statistics and Engineering Drawing. I picked up an “A” Level in Biology too.

When I studied the mechanics of DNA, I think the scientists had the strands spiralling in the wrong direction. Cannot say that ruined my life, I didn’t come undone when I found out years later.

I’m reading a life of Alan Turing, his was possibly the greatest mathematical mind of the 20th Century, and there’s rather a lot of Physics to wade through. And Scientific Philosophy. And there’s no way one can measure how long a piece of string is. In fact, existence itself is dodgy at best. “What is?” We cannot really answer that, so how the devil can we deal with “What will be?”

“We were talking about the space between us all ...”

I've wondered why the Mormons don’t come knocking at our doors here, or gather in pairs in railway stations. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?

Saw a programme on the telly the other night, on Time. The presenter and his guests all had ideas about time. And space. Apparently, if aliens don’t invade us and carry us off into Captivity and make us build pyramids for their worlds, our sun is going to burn out in several billion years’ time. That would be the end of the Earth’s time, and our solar system. Galaxies will dissolve; the Universe will expand until the spaces are so vast that the stars seem to go out. The Big Crunch is not a definite.

At the end, perhaps, all time will exist simultaneously. Carol will shriek her vulgarities at Gabe. I shall squint through the fog at Warkworth Castle. Harry Hotspur will say his lines in the Globe Theatre. The Angel Moroni might even drop through Joseph Smith’s ceiling.

“Is he friendly?”

“The Angel Moroni?”

“No. Your little sausage dog.”

“Sorry. My mind was wandering a little. Yes, he’s quite friendly, just likes to yap a bit.”

One Year On (and On and On)

"Attention," a voice began to call, and it was as though an oboe had suddenly become articulate. "Attention," it repeated in the same high, nasal monotone. "Attention."
Aldous Huxley (Island)

EXACTLY ONE YEAR AGO I decided to have a go at a blog. It seemed pointless to be half-hearted about it, I decided to post something at least once a week. The business of producing a thousand words (or more, or less) had been mine about ten years ago when I persuaded the editor of Bermuda's weekend newspaper, The Mid-Ocean News, to run a column that I'd turn in on Tuesday, to be published on Friday. I was allowed to tackle whatever subject came to mind (and I did), but it was soon clear that my theme was to be "I remember back in…"

And, so, I revisited my childhood, my schooldays, my travels, books I'd read as a young adult, and films that made an impression when I was growing up. I had another quirk regarding my weekly foray into the past: I would write about two (and, rarely, more) different things, and, somehow, resolve them at the very end so that some notable connection between them was made clear. Perhaps a book I was given as a toddler created a situation that occurred when I was thirty.

I did get into the psychological aspects of my life (and those of others) having been in therapy since I was 22. After a few decades on the couch one becomes a would-be expert as it is the only way to retain one's sanity.

My editor encouraged me to touch on subjects that might be a little controversial. He was delighted when I mentioned once, in conversation, that I had personal experience of the dodgy accounting at American International Group. And that before AIG went tits up. I trotted out a few stories about the people I worked with at AIG, treating them fairly kindly, I did not point out that the place ran on alcohol and cigarettes. I also recalled, in the Mid-Ocean's pages, that the quarterly bottom line was decided on some time before all the numbers had been collated and consolidated. I don't suppose anyone outside of the AIG High Command believed me.

A year ago, when I filled out the forms for Barking Mad in Amble by the Sea, I had intentions of being right up to date. I would not be thinking back too far, but would tackle current events, a weekly diary. And time is always a curious thing, and old became new, and AIG went down the tubes. I can write about it and be right up-to-date with my distant memories. I'm blessed with a very good memory, by the way. This is remarkable bearing in mind all the drugs I've taken in over 40 years, and all that therapy. I can recall, exactly, my first hours at American International in late October 1968. I am poring over profit and loss statement forms that someone has jotted figures into in pencil. All the words, all the numbers, mean nothing to me. I am to check that everything adds up correctly. I do not have an adding machine; I am to do it in my head. And I do. I have to make special marks below the columns I've checked, and, in my memory, I make them now.

In the past few months not only AIG has come around again. I have also been moved by the weekly (often daily) reports of deaths of "our boys" fighting wars overseas for, I believe, no good reasons. A week or so ago the American news presenter Walter Cronkite died. I recall, painfully, Cronkite's nightly reports on the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So many GIs had died, but so many more of the Viet Cong. Accounting, profit and loss reports, interest and bonus, war is a business. The bloody preservation of all we hold sacred makes my skin crawl in 2009 as I watch the hearses crawling down the main street in Wootton Bassett so conveniently on my television in the middle of the afternoon, as it happens. Live, we watch the dead.

In the past month I have invested in a number of books and DVDs that are not necessarily new releases. Perhaps there comes a time when one cannot really enjoy every new film, every book off every press. When I was 20 I would buy several dozen books at once: I had all the time in the world to read them, and more besides, which I'd buy the next Saturday. I suppose I am fairly well-read. But, this summer, I have felt a great urge to revisit some "old friends". Many of them. I don't feel that I have an endless summer to read and watch, but if they are here in the flat, I can open covers and boxes and enjoy an hour or so with DH Lawrence or Virginia Woolf or Aldous Huxley. I can watch a Joe Orton screenplay, or the mini-series version of Sons and Lovers. The Merchant-Ivory films of the 1980s (of stories I read a decade or more earlier) are not just moving wallpaper in my front room. I'm going to look in on Glenda Jackson in Sunday Bloody Sunday. I recall exactly sitting in the Leicester Square Odeon in 1971 watching that film for the first time and being rather stunned. I came out of the film into the London light wanting more … of the Soave sia il vento from Cosi fan tutte, the repeating theme music of that film. It was, and is still, exquisite.

I have Aldous Huxley's Island on my coffee table. To be honest, I'm rarely without it, but I tend to give my copies away. The way one once might have passed on a copy of the Book of Mormon with the whisper: "This will change your life." Just so you know, Island changed me more than the Mormon scriptures.

Island opens with a chanting mynah bird saying: "Attention! Attention! Here and now, boys! Here and now!" And that is better than good advice. When I first read Island back in the late 1960s, the here and now was mostly brand new, I had fewer than twenty years of memories to clutter up the immediate. More than forty years on, it is difficult to ignore the past as it seems to always be present. So, I invite it to the get-together. When I talk to an old friend on the phone (and my friends are getting old, despite their continued loveliness) I talk to the boy or girl, as well as the person who remembers me (or perhaps does not recall me so well) in my salad days.

When we discuss a recent production of Henry V, I am also in my Fifth Form English Literature class (which I failed, by the way), whispering: "If we are marked to die …"

I'm rather enjoying being quite a complex person, bubbling over with memories good and not-so. It is all experience. If I did not pay attention then, perhaps there will be time to give it my attention again in the here and now. Tune in. Stay tuned. Don't drop out this go round.

Thaw

I WOKE TO MORE MUMBLING than usual this morning. I've been falling asleep with the radio on recently and it doesn't seem to bother Cailean, so I've allowed it to continue. There's something very pleasant about drifting off to sleep to music, or a book at bedtime, without fretting over switching the radio off at some last moment.

There's a temporary female presenter on the Radio 2 early morning show, her name is Sarah and she doesn't seem to be young. Normally it would be Sir Terry Wogan who is definitely not young. In any event, this Sarah is taking requests for show tunes. I wish I could recall what today's featured song was, I can only recall it was sung by Jimmy Durante. It was pleasant, cheerful.

At seven o'clock I was still in bed, waiting to hear the news headlines and the brief run through of the front page stories in the daily newspapers. Sarah tried, again, to pronounce paraskevidekatriaphobia … a word meaning fear of Friday the thirteenth. Today is one of those days.

And the headlines:

A commuter plane has crashed into a house in Buffalo, New York, with 49 deaths. Remarkable that only one person on the ground was killed. And I thought to myself, again, that I'm glad my travelling days are done with.

A regulatory body is investigating the financial services products division of AIG in the UK. I tried to figure out just how worthless my AIG shares would be now if I still had them. A bit like the currency of Zimbabwe.

A thirteen-years-old boy has had a child with a fifteen-years-old girl; the boy was just twelve when he did the deed. The commentator on the radio had the benefit of a photograph of the proud father. "He looks young for his age…" I wondered if the child might be guilty of rape. The baby and its young mother are living with the mother's mother on a council estate somewhere. What a world, babies having babies and scrawny Madonna flashing her crotch in music videos at fifty and bidding for babies in fifth world countries with other celebrities. Ugh!

A Dutch politician with a name somewhat more muddling than paraskevidekatriaphobia tried to visit England yesterday to present a seventeen-minute film he has made, to be aired in the House of Lords of all places. The film, apparently, is anti-Islamic. The Lowlander believes that the Koran should be outlawed as terrorist material. He may be right. The Old and New Testaments should go on the dung-heap too, if that is the case. The point of the Dutchman's odyssey was to toy with our freedom of speech laws. He was put on the next flight back to Holland. So much for freedom of speech in Britain. Does MI5 read my blog?

Prince Harry has to go on a course to brush up on his social skills because he made some sort of racist remark years ago. Harry called a fellow soldier a Paki, meaning, I think, the other soldier was of Pakistani heritage. Poor Harry: His heritage, parentage, is a never-ending source of comic comment. Yet nobody leans on the comedians when Harry is the butt of jokes that must be hurtful. I'm a little torn on this matter, not really believing in the Royal Family business. Prince Philip notably referred to some oriental folks as slitty-eyed some years ago, but has not had to do a refresher course in polite speaking.

Cailean started getting restless about then, and out into the snow we had to go, me in my Bermuda shorts and t-shirt. A fashionista would have a field day.

We had several inches of unexpected snow on Thursday, yesterday, causing the usual chaos. I'd walked Cailean early in the day, though it was snowing before we got home. Cailean made a snowman of sorts for the first time with very little help. I made a fist-sized snowball which Cailean then rolled about with his nose, and it grew and grew until he couldn't push it further, larger than a football. Cailean loves the snow.

Today, after my news headlines and the coffee that gets me going, I padded along the street for a few groceries. There's not a cloud in the sky and the temperature is finally above freezing. The snow is melting in the sunlight. The rooftops facing the south have water coming down over the guttering as the heaped snow is melting so rapidly. I was quite spattered with water by the time I reached the butcher's shop. There was something most pleasant about it. The icy water might have been the trickle of sweat on one's neck on a hot summer day.

I cannot be one hundred percent sure, but this feels like the thaw … at last. All will be spring from now on.

Friday the thirteenth … Lucky for some.

CA VA SANS RIRE

His lord answered and said unto him,
Thou wicked and slothful servant,
Thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not,
And gather where I have not strawed:
Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money
To the exchangers, and then at my coming
I should have received my own with usury.
Take therefore the talent from him,
And give it unto him which hath ten talents.
For unto every one that hath shall be given,
And he shall have abundance:
But from him that hath not shall be taken
Even that which he hath.
St Matthew 25: 26-29

I HAVE JUST BEEN WATCHING a few former banking executives in fine suits answering questions at the House of Commons. This quizzing is a committee of enquiry into the collapse of the banking system in 2008, a system that is still swaying and subsiding, despite a vast input of public taxpayers' funding to prop it up. The Members of Parliament can invite these bankers over for a chat because the Government is suddenly very involved in banking matters. You knew that.

The four former bankers all apologized without reservation for the huge losses their banks made for depositors and shareholders. At least one banker pointed out that he'd personally lost money on his investments as well. He'd held shares in his bank. I imagine, companies being what they are, that some of those shares were part and parcel of bonuses for a job … well … done, even if, as we now know, it was not done well.

The bankers have said they are sorry, and that they obviously made some mistakes, but so far as I can tell not one of these gentlemen has said what exactly the mistakes were. Bad investments. Certainly. But isn't the problem that force that drives a banker to invest in risky ventures? Wasn't the mistake simply succumbing to greed, avarice, lust? Wanting too much. More than you can cram into your mouth at once.

The accountants at any big business answer to the senior executives, who answer to the Board of Directors. In theory, the Directors answer to the Shareholders, but … in my experience (and I'd best write from my experience) … the Directors of the company worked for each other. They tended to own or control large blocks of shares and the rise in each man's personal worth (perhaps I should say wealth, for worth suggests value and that was not always present) was important.

The small shareholder received his small reward; the tycoon had an extra glass of Bolly.

When quarterly pamphlets were posted from my employer I was usually roped into stuffing envelopes and sorting the items by country. I worked for a huge international firm that operated in 130 countries and probably had small shareholders in many, or even most, of those. I only ever received one complaint. A pamphlet had been posted to the President's wife, she held shares too, and there was something visual about the envelope or pamphlet inside, a smudge, the address label crooked. Something silly. She raised hell. The President raised hell. I didn't give a hoot.

The President's wife did not complain about the numbers in that quarterly report, for they were a given. The company's directors pretty much promised a 15 to 20 percent rise in profits, year on year. We even created five-year forecasts of straight-line graph results. Like the flight of a jumbo jet taking off from Bermuda's airport, up over the fence at the end of Kindley Field and off into the clouds. That was the bottom line.

How can you do that? In our case, we fiddled reserves, salting away tens of millions of dollars against a bad day during the good times: A bit like Joseph in Egypt, saving in the years when the harvests were good against the years of famine. Only we did it with pencils and green accounting pads.

Creative accounting also included remarkable transactions to maintain the consolidated US Dollar equivalent value of real estate in foreign countries. The theory being: The US Dollar equivalent value was something that could only hold or increase, never decline. Never mind real property values on an island on the Pacific Rim. God help us if property values might ever plummet.

There were other tricks of the trade, like moving chunks of bad business to the books of one subsidiary where taxation might be a factor from a subsidiary that had not a great deal of worry from the taxman. All done on a multi-columned sheet in Head Office, really. A multi-national can do that sort of thing.

I didn't work for a bank, though the insurance giant I did work for owned a few banks. It seems that becoming international makes the longing for regular, almost boring, growth even more important.

What might one suggest? Perhaps one should grow potatoes and sell them in the fine weather, but save some, hold them back from the shop floor each day, and at the end of the growing season you'd have many bags of potatoes in the cellar which you could bring up in the hard months and sell for a somewhat inflated profit owing to the demand for out-of-season vegetables. It makes sense, it really does.

Or should one be somehow up-to-date with one's accounting and sell the potatoes when they come from the field, but have a different, timely, crop grown for sale in the next accounting period? Tomatoes, perhaps? And in case either crop should have a dodgy quarter, grow parsnips and broccoli and sprouts, a few extras as reinsurance? Should one do that? And it might be a good idea to get a few hens, a goat, no two, cows, sheep, hog futures. Get somebody else's critters on spec. It makes sense.

Suddenly you've got so much in the pot that you're banking a fortune. In your own bank. You bought one when you needed that security.

I'm sounding like a capitalist, and I suppose I am. However, I feel one must not seek the sort of success I've suggested just to make some enormous bonus out of all proportion to the day-to-day lives of the people that matter. Why should bonuses be necessary at all? A good day's pay for a good day's work. Surely?

Offices may have denim days, but the suits still have those suits from the great fashion houses and the kid at the photocopy machine is threadbare. Sad bastard doesn't even have a tie.

What would you do given the state of the world's economy?

Plant some tatties!