Sign Off

A merry Christmas to all.

I'm off now, and with luck I won't be switching on a computer again until January. That is, assuming I have no urgent client demands from Dubai.

It's been a funny old year. I've enjoyed some of it. More, perhaps, than I would have expected at the beginning. And I've survived a little longer in this twitchy industry. Will there be a melt-down? Probably not, now. So I dare say I shall be at this game a few more years to come.

A few more office Christmas parties, that means. God. This year's was a particularly desperate one. Christmas, in my book, is a time for gentle merry-making with good friends and family - not ritual humiliation in the workplace. The sight of my younger colleagues drumming their bare chests and... But no, time to turn our thoughts to pleasanter things: crackling fires, good food, carols from King's.

Warm wishes to you all.

Last Resort

I don't know about you, but I can't help feeling slightly disappointed to see the ECB and Bank of England step in to rescue us all from our own stupidity. Same with the new guarantees for Northern Rock.

Obviously, it's good news for the markets, for clients, for those vanishing bonuses - I wouldn't have it any other way.

But one feels rather as a boy might on a school orienteering trip if, on getting lost, he was quickly recovered by a teacher who had been covertly trailing him against just such an eventuality. Yes, it is lovely to be warm and drinking cocoa again, but it does make one feel very small. Having problems? Here's 170 billion euros to sort it out.

Not very good for our collective backbone, that kind of fairy godmother intercession, is it?

Now lets all cross our fingers and ask Father Christmas to make those billions of cheap pounds and euros count.

Straw Poll

A good day. But will it last? Does anyone out there know what's going on?

Sometimes I'm tempted to move all of my clients' money into cash. Euros, probably. I think I may be too old for another prolonged teetering on the brink. Just too weary, too bored, too strained.

On the other hand, I had a drink this evening with a fund manager friend who is convinced this current uncertainty is going to make a lot of careers. Just choose the right way to jump when the cards tumble and you'll be lionised for years. Doesn't matter if all your subsequent decisions are mediocre. Your reputation will be made.

Which way to jump? Ah well, indeed. But perhaps it doesn't very much matter, so long as you jump with confidence and conviction - cleanly, and very visibly. If you get it wrong, well, lots of people will be in the same position. You lick your wounds, crawl around in humble pie for a while, and get on with it. But on the other hand, if you get it right! What glories await!

Strangely, I find that prospect less tempting than my fund manager friend. It grieves me that the appetite for glory has faded, but I fear it's undeniable. Is there a place for anyone in the City who doesn't have at least a hooded eye on the victor's laurel?

What do you think? Comments or emails please...

In case you're wondering, no we didn't get the pond lined with clay in time to capture all this wonderful rain.

Sod's law. Before we're ready for it, la deluge.

The pond would be half full by now, damn it.

The Pond

Today was Pond Day.

Every island should have a pond. Correction, according to my children it should have a waterfall and full river system, but resources, dimensions and gradients only permitted a pond. This, in case you weren't reading over the summer, concerns my ecological "island" - the fields adjoining our house which I am converting into a wildlife sanctuary for migrating birds and anything else that finds the end result convivial.

We have had a digger booked for sometime, a friendly local builder who is busy doing serious things during the week, but kindly offered to come round and make a hole for us on his day off. One might have wished for better weather than the grey, wet gloom we've had today, but no matter. We only needed to shift earth, not lay concrete.

Of course it wasn't that easy. Access was the first problem. We thought we'd solved this by negotiating access through the neighbouring fields, but when the new metropolitan owner of the farm saw the machine we intended to drive over his delicate thistles and dandelions, he had a change of heart. He is most definitely not in my good books now. Luckily an alternative (if not entirely legal or direct) route was possible through a woodland, and so a full-blown eruption of tears was avoided in my littlest.

Then the machine got bogged down.

For some naive reason, I've always imagined diggers couldn't get bogged down. I don't know why I thought they weren't susceptible to the same terrain difficulties other vehicles experience, but now I have learnt my lesson. It took a good hour to wrestle it free, using every rock and branch we could find to give it some traction. Lunch was postponed. The extra hot tank was switched on in readiness for all the extra baths our exertions made necessary. But eventually the digger dug and the pond came into being, minus the water.

My youngest has never been muddier. Or, possibly, happier.

It's about fifteen feet across and six feet deep. Quite a hole. The next stage is to line it with clay and then let the autumn weather do its stuff. I can't say it looks very attractive at the moment, although my daughter apparently sees it as the very best kind of adventure playground. Still, I can easily imagine it filled with reeds, a couple of coots and a heron making good use of its nesting/hunting potential. I might even find a punt for it - something I can lie back in and listen to the cricket without interruption.

A pleasant dream for a wet November afternoon.

And now, finally, for lunch.

Volatile Times

It hasn't been a very pleasant couple of weeks in the City. Too much uncertainty, too much worry about credit and interest rates and where the next slap of volatility is going to come from. What this means for the private banker is endless telephone conversations with nervous clients who want to know if now is the time to be buying gold (no!), or getting out of dollar-denominated funds entirely (possibly), and by the way what is going on with Northern Rock?

We factor in a certain amount of stroking time to this job, but the past fortnight has allowed me little chance to do anything else. It's hard enough keeping up oneself with what is going on in China, or the US credit market, without having to relate it to others the next minute in a smoothly-glossed patina of reassuring professional expertise.

The trouble is, of course, none of us really know what's going on. Perhaps a couple of geniuses out there know whether the FT-SE 100 is settling into a gentle downward slide that will continue for the rest of the year, or can predict which will be the next bank to announce a £1.3 billion write-off. But most of us are just blindly stumbling from day to day trying to do the best we can with the deeply questionable information we receive.

Brighter clients have always known this; they accept it and stick with us for want of any better alternative. The danger in times like these is that the less bright clients will start to wise up to our fumbling, and in panic withdraw their portfolios and bury their heads in nice safe gold.

There's an interesting thing you learn about private banking after you've been doing it for a while. Really, it doesn't matter all that much how good your investment performance is, so long as you can persuade your client that it is better than the general market. This can be done even in contradiction of the hardest of facts. It is the skill that defines the good "farmer". It combines good expectation management with a certain amount of technically-impressive bullshit.

I suspect I shall be getting a lot of practice over the coming weeks.

18th - Part 2

Another recollection from the weekend.

There came a point, around 1am, when all the young were in a state of some disarray dancing in the morning room (the only room the National Trust would allow to be used as a disco – and even then I bet there was a fair amount of tooth-sucking in NTHQ). At that point T and I and a few other oldies retired with glasses of brandy (good stuff, though I forgot to ask what it was) to the library. Our number included a couple of godfathers, T’s golfing partner, Sarah’s two favourite teachers, and a man called Suds (I believe) whose provenance was never clear to me.

Suds was rich. This much became quickly apparent. He made no allowance for the fact that the teachers were most likely on the breadline, instead launching – as soon as he discovered my profession – into a rambling monologue about the trials of great wealth. MiFID, the new financial services directive that has just come into force, was of particular concern to him. He spoke at great length about it, placing the rest of us in an awkward position: the teachers and godfathers, because they were alienated and bored by the subject; me, because it rapidly became clear that Suds had completely failed to understand the point of MiFID, and anything I said would only draw attention to his ignorance.

Inevitably, we reached the point where Suds leaned across to me, all confiding, and said, ‘Go on then, tell us. Where should we really be putting our money?’

I gave the usual non-committal spiel about spreading risk and bewaring property, but that wasn’t enough for Suds. ‘Just give us a stock,’ he demanded. ‘Something you have the inside track on.’

T embarked on a polite attempt to distract Suds, but he wasn’t to be drawn. ‘We deal mostly in funds, these days,’ I said. ‘Or funds of funds. I could give you the names of a couple of good managers, if you like.’

But Suds had written me off. ‘Bloody City lot. Always the same. Won’t let the rest of us near the golden eggs, eh?’

An unfortunate metaphor to use, given what happened to the goose, but there we are.

Later, as I was retiring to my (rather fine) room overlooking the herb garden, T accompanied me up that marvellous staircase and said, ‘Bloody Spud, always drinks too much.’

‘I thought his name was Suds,’ I said.

‘Is it? Oh, maybe it is,’ said T, leaving me rather puzzled.

Sarah, her hair flying wild, came scampering across the hall at that moment, pursued by a handsome young rogue with flapping bowtie and scarlet cummerbund. Luckily she didn’t notice us halfway up the stairs, so whatever spark of romantic thrill the moment held for her wasn’t spoilt by her daddy witnessing it. The amorous couple disappeared into what I believe was the billiard room. A number of ball-and-cue-related innuendoes came to mind but I managed to resist voicing them.

‘She’s had a good night, hasn’t she?’ said T.

‘Oh yes,’ said I, loyally. ‘The best.’

‘It makes it all worthwhile, you know.’

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of my own. It really does.

18th

I've been pondering a certain passage in my young friend's recent email with an uneasy heart: "PWM basically consists of babysitting rich, pampered individuals". He doesn't quite say it, but the implication is that we generally dislike, even loathe, our clients.

Is that true? It's been bothering me. Perhaps, in general, it is. Perhaps our dislike is all the stronger because we understand that we depend on them for our bread and butter. Albeit very good quality, handmade ciabatta bread and organic Belgian butter.

All the same, it can't be universally true or it wouldn't bother me.

I've spent the weekend as the guest of a client. He's no one special, not even particularly rich. A light industry entrepreneur who sold out too early and hasn't found anything else to make money in since. Somewhere around the £4m investable assets mark. Ah, you'll say, but he must have a big house as well, and in this market... Actually, no. He doesn't even own a house. So, yes, he's a wealthy man, but as HNWIs go my client T is a pretty small fish.

I consider T a real friend.

He's a curious fellow, though. For the fourteen years that he has been my client, T has had just one enduring ambition: to give his only daughter an 18th birthday to be proud of, in a house to leave her friends speechless. His ambition has never quite been matched by his wealth, yet nine years ago T came up with an ingenious plan.

He discovered that the National Trust is occasionally prepared to rent certain of its properties to individuals of good character. I found this rather surprising, and I imagine you will too. Nevertheless, he applied to rent a particular house in the west country - a fine pile with a magnificent marble staircase - and was granted a twenty-year lease. He and his family sold their four-bedroom rhododendron-infested Barratt home in Surrey and took up their new position as lord-and-family of the manor.

His explanation to me, when I first went to visit him: "Look at that staircase. When Sarah is 18 (she was 9 at the time), all her friends will be here to celebrate her birthday and she's going to come down that staircase in the most beautiful dress money can buy, and everyone is going to be swept away by her."

So you see, it was all about the staircase.

This weekend was Sarah's 18th birthday. I was honoured to be invited - one of the few oldies. But then as I say, T and I are good friends.

It transpired exactly as T had always planned. Sarah is not particularly beautiful (please let T never read this!), but on Saturday night, as she stood sweetly hesitant at the top of that marble flight of stairs, I swear my old heart leapt in concert with all the young bowtied blades around me as we gazed up in respectful adoration of the birthday girl.

She did look so very lovely.

Was that moment worth twenty years' National Trust rent and the prospect of no house at the end of it? Perhaps it was. I find it so difficult to judge the value of things these days. Real things, I mean. All I can say is, it was a very special fragment of my time on this earth.

And it was a hundred times' that for Sarah and her tearfully proud father.

Wise Young Advice

Thank you to everyone who has written to me at the hushmail account. I'm glad people are still reading with enjoyment.

I particularly liked this email, quoted here with the permission of the sender:

I just wanted to say "thank you" for writing your blog. I only discovered it recently but have been reading voraciously ever since. I like the way you write: it's a charming mix of wittiness, honesty, pith, and is at times very insightful.

Reading your blog has been quite an edifying experience for me, in a way. I'm at that age when you're supposed to go do an internship at a bank (quite a weight of expectation from friends and family) and I always assumed that I wouldn't actually mind this sort of career. I'd done those Easter mini internships at several of the big banks and consultancies and everything seemed rosy enough - I rather fancied giving PWM a go.

Reading your blog, however, it would seem to me that a career in PWM basically consists of babysitting rich, pampered individuals and attending to their every need. Furthermore, and I hope you don't mind me saying this, it seems that to be successful in this area, you not only need to be a rampant sychophant (at least outwardly) but that you are effectively a parasite, feeding off someone else's wealth, which is something that doesn't appeal to me.

I'm only 21 and have no real life experience on which to draw so I apologise for the naivity inherent in what I'm about to say, however, I can at least claim to be looking at the situation completely objectively - not having met you and not standing to benefit/lose from whatever you choose to do. I think you should quit your job.

My father was until recently Finance Director at ***- a well-paid, prestigious job. He hated it. He ended up having a nervous breakdown and - although he didn't feel he could afford to - he retired early. It was easily the best decision he's ever made. He's a lot happier now and in fact he's back working, doing something related, but you wouldn't believe the difference it's made to him, his health, and the enthusiasm with which he now goes through life.

Reading your posts, what immediately jumps out is how much you enjoy being with your family and kids. You seem like a very reasonable chap, who has got his priorities right. Money certainly isn't everything and I'm sure you could find something else to keep bread on the table. I hate using such a cliched expression but life is short - why waste time doing something you clearly don't enjoy when you have other options available to you?

Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks again - please do continue writing - and best of luck in the future.

I will feel a little guilty if my young correspondent strikes private banking off his list of possible careers because of this blog - but only a little. Besides, two other young men have written to me to say I have inspired them to take up private banking, so I suppose there is some kind of grand cosmic balance at work.

Needless to say, I will think about quitting, as I do most days, but I expect I shall come to the usual gutless conclusion. Spots are jolly hard to change at my age.

Nevertheless, I appreciate the concern.

James the Hunter -- part two

My short time with James is over. I have given him the rest of the afternoon off.

To celebrate.

Somehow (and I'm not at all sure what strange Harrovian voodoo he employed), James has overnight acquired three clients of the first order. Two are investment bankers, young but already collecting exorbitant bonuses. The third is some kind of Lebanese social aristocrat with a passion for speedboat racing and polo, both of which it seems he can afford with enviable ease.

James has been coy about exactly what transpired in exactly which club last night. He has already acquired the private banker's taste for pantomime exaggerations of secrecy where his clients are concerned. "His clients"! I still can't get used to the idea. But it is true. He has contacted all three this morning, and after a certain amount of embarrassed but conspiratorial laughter about various (unrevealed) shared recollections he has ended up with faxed letters of agreement from all three.

I've actually found myself playing the role of his secretary for part of the morning. It has taken all my willpower not to ask exactly what form of words he used to ensnare his gold-plated prey. Undoubtedly they were clumsy and ingenuous: not words an older, established banker could make use of in his own hunting. But still - I am dying to know.

Perhaps it is just beginner's luck. Most probably it is. But who can say James isn't a demonically gifted hunter? Who can say he won't sustain it through a magnificent private banking career? I wish him all the luck in living up to his tremendous start.

And the best thing is he's extraordinarily grateful to me for suggesting last night's plan of action. He hasn't an inkling I meant it as a rather cruel joke.

A useful ally for my dotage, let's hope!

James the Hunter

James has turned out to be more ambitious than I realised.

He has found a hundred different ways of asking me how to find new clients. How to be a hunter. I have, in my own small way, something of a hunter's reputation within the bank and James is keen to learn. He has already confessed, charmingly and blushingly, a certain scorn for the farmers amongst my colleagues. Ironic, given his choice of tertiary education, but when I alluded to this James rather determinedly missed the point. He does not want to be known as a farmer. He wants to go out and hunt. End of story.

I think I have already been a disappointment to him. He probably imagined I would be spending our days together leafing through Debrett's, or the Rich List, or perhaps the Monaco phone directory, and then pouncing with debonair telephonic eloquence on unsuspecting heiresses. Instead he has had to assist with an impossibly tedious client satisfaction survey (tedious to the clients that is; mortifying to me) and listen to endless phone calls I've needed to make to track down a payment that had gone astray.

This afternoon, he said, "I suppose, in your day one could just, like, go and have lunch with people, but there are so many private bankers now. No one with any serious wealth will even take my call once they find out I've only just started. I wouldn't take my call. I honestly can see myself actually with no clients, even in, like, a year's time."

Mildly irritated by the "in your day", I told him to stop moaning and go out and hunt if that's what he really wanted to do. "Go to Pangaea or Boujis, or wherever it is Prince Harry hangs out these days, and start signing up clients. Now. Tonight. Go right away."

It was a bit of a cruel thing to do. He went all bright-eyed and inspired on me. I nearly told him to forget it, but then I decided he probably needed a good night out, even if it does end in humiliation and banishment from a couple of fashionable nightspots. So off went little James to play with the Princes, his pinstripe suit laden with business cards. I can't help thinking of one of those fairy story children who goes off to fight giants armed only with a wooden spoon.

I shall start to feel guilty only if he doesn't turn up to work in the morning.

Shadow

I am to be shadowed all week by a new boy. He is perfectly pleasant, if rather too chubby to be any credible shadow of mine. He doesn't quite roll over the arms of his chair, but he definitely gives the lift mechanism pause for thought whenever he chooses to activate it -- which he does, perhaps out of nerves, rather too regularly.

James (that is his real name, but then there are plenty of Jameses in private banking) is undoubtedly going to be successful in his chosen career. He has everything going for him. His mother is in some vague way aristocratic. His father has money. He himself was educated at Harrow -- something which he may be called upon to conceal, but only infrequently -- and then at Cirencester, where he didn't quite complete some kind of farming diploma. He is difficult to draw on the subject, and I suspect he may have harmlessly misled our recruitment team at some stage in the last few months. No matter. As I said, he is perfect for this job. He has the look of a man intelligent enough to add up but not so smart he might skim off your portfolio. His eyes are bright blue, his lips girlishly full, his voice a hesitant and friendly drawl.

He's going to be a nuisance to me, but less so than most of his City-bound peer group would be. There is no piercing intellect or naked ambition to trouble me in gentle James.

Friday Chatter

Overheard in the office kitchenette -

Back Office Girl 1: "Have you ever been to a strip club?"

Back Office Girl 2: "God, no. Have you?"

BOG 1: "Promise you won't tell anyone? Can you believe it, I had a private dance!"

BOG 2: "When? When??"

BOG 1: "Last night. Danny had a bunch of mates in town and I..." (breaks off abruptly as presence of your unworldly reporter noted)

AC: "Hello."

BOGs: "Hello..."

(AC leaves with cup of tea)

BOG 1: "Oh my God, how embarrassing....!"

M's Prospective Girlfriend

M chose a restaurant in Islington. A good one.

As cover I took my PA, who found the whole escapade great fun. It's a terrible thing to say, but I realised I hadn't ever spoken to her in depth before. Over duck terrine and salmon risotto, she revealed all kinds of interesting things about herself and her aspirations, and I was thoroughly enjoying the conversation - to the extent that I forgot briefly why we were there. It turns out she has an ambition to become a concert pianist. Unlike to happen at this stage in life, I fear, but it's nice to think of that talent lying just beneath the surface.

Then M arrived, and my goodness, his girlfriend-to-be was an attractive young lady. They were led more or less straight past us, and M had to feign great interest in some colourful prints on the wall to avoid seeing me so early on in the proceedings. He wanted time for her to get settled before judgement commenced.

In due course he "noticed" me and came galloping over, red-faced, to act out his delight. I rose, introduced him to my PA, then in turn was introduced to the gf-to-be.

'How do you know M?' she immediately asked, and although we'd rehearsed this one I still found it remarkably difficult to reel off the line about family friends. I'm a terrible liar/actor. It didn't help that M was growing redder by the second.

We talked about this and that - the weather mostly, I fear, and a Gorky play at the National. Gf-to-be revealed very little, but did it charmingly and with buckets of respect for my advanced age. Her teeth were her great asset, glowing magnificently when she smiled. Which she did most of the time.

Somewhat blinded, I made my excuses and got back to dessert and tales of piano recitals in the suburbs. The bill, when it came, bore the grand total of NIL.

Three hours later, M rang me.

'Nothing to worry about,' I assured him. 'She's absolutely lovely.'

'She is, isn't she?' he said, gratitude flooding the line.

'She really is,' I affirmed.

And that's why there's no point telling him she's going to take him for a small fortune.

Saturday morning. The day looks like being overcast but pleasant. My youngest has demolished two bowls of weetabix and is alight with excitement at spending the morning "with Daddy on the island".

My wife is having a well-deserved lie-in. Mind you, if she is wise she will be bracing herself for whatever wildlife trophy is to be rushed into the bedroom in about an hour's time. Family bliss.

LL has donated all the fivers to Oxfam, including - and he made a point of saying this - the one he thinks was his. He spent most of yesterday, once he'd got over the initial embarrassment of his windfall, pretending he thought the matter had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. 'I think I've made my point,' I overheard him say. Poor fellow.

He will recover in time, I'm sure. And now, enough thoughts of the office for this weekend. I'm going naturing.

Decorated Desk

LL isn't in yet, and he really should be because his desk is quite a sight.

After the stern reprimand on office humour yesterday, LL must have felt even more of an ass because he sent out another memo: I like a joke too, as you all know, but not when clients can hear. Lets try to be professional. The five pounds has still not been returned, so I hope whoever took it will have it back on my desk by tomorrow morning. It's between you and your conscience.

Well, it seems a lot of consciences have been pricked, because LL's desk is this morning covered in five-pound notes. I count 18, bluetacked to his monitor, his framed yacht photo, his intray, his mouse, even the little ball he kneads when stressed.

Needless to say, the entire office is on tenterhooks for his reaction.

Much mirth has been had at LL's expense, over the five-pound note business, and I regret to say he has not taken it well.

The last straw was the freshman colleague who, passing LL's desk, asked, 'Has that stolen cash turned up yet?' An innocent question you might think, even if the look of concern was somewhat insincere. LL did not take it as such. He happened to be on the phone to a client at the time, and considers the possibility that said client heard the quip too awful for words.

LL has now taken the case to senior management. The following memo has been issued: Jokes about theft in this bank will not be tolerated. This is a highly serious matter.

Of course it is.

LL in the lift, a look of saintly suffering on his face.

'Going to lunch?' I said. You have to pretend you like your colleagues at least.

'Too busy,' he said grandly. 'Just grabbing a sandwich.'

I couldn't resist it. 'Need to borrow a fiver?'

'That's neither funny nor original,' he snapped.

Oh dear.

Breaking news!

My sweet, trust-fund-laden boy-client, M, wants me to meet his new woman. He thinks, for some reason, that I will be able to determine whether or not she's trustworthy.

An extraordinary assignment, but I'm to get a free lunch out of it, and that is always welcome. It's to be rather cloak-and-dagger so that she doesn't realize she's being inspected. "By chance" we shall happen to choose the same restaurant some time next week, and M will introduce her to me without revealing our professional relationship. A little small talk, and then I shall return to my dessert, opinion to be forwarded to M later in the day.

It adds spice to life, does it not?

Bank Theft

Here's a Monday morning nonsense to take your mind off Northern Rock.

LL has put out a memo demanding the immediate return of the five-pound note that (I quote) "was illegitimately removed by persons unknown over the weekend" from his desk.

Quite apart from the fact that LL earns well over 300K and should be a good few miles above this kind of schoolroom communique, does he honestly think the demand is going to have any effect? Suppose some light-fingered lad in the Middle Office actually did purloin his fiver - and I struggle to believe it - the last thing he's going to do on receipt of this stern bulletin is rush to expiate his grievous sin. Like the rest of the office, he'll be too busy laughing. This is a bank, for goodness sake! You can't go around accusing people of theft in a bank. That is, I mean to say, not on such a risible scale at least.

There is no love lost between LL and I, but I do feel sorry for him that he has made such an ass of himself so early on in the week.

In to Lunch

I'm not a great one for standing on ceremony, but I do find the habit of eating lunch at one's desk quite repellant. It's not that I think everyone should be patronizing a reputable restaurant every day of the week. I choose to do so on a regular basis, but I'm also happy to procure a salad or a sandwich (if freshly made) and eat it in one of the lovely little enclosed gardens the City keeps hidden for its own. In rain or cold, there are plenty of indoor options for fast, cheap food. Yet still, so many of my beloved colleagues insist on dribbling crumbs into their keyboards and smearing mayonnaise over their mousepads.


It is barely past midday, and already one of my younger colleagues has set to on a carton of teriyaki, or laksa, or perhaps it is Thai red curry - some delight of the East anyway, emitting altogether far too many rampant odours. Fish sauce and lemongrass are fine in their place - but not this close to breakfast or, for that matter, to my desk.


It's all about face time I suppose. Bankers seem to believe the longer they are seen in the office, the higher their bonuses will be. Twenty minutes lost at lunchtime, to them, is wanton in the extreme. Never mind that they'll be doing nothing more useful than surfing the internet or completing a sudoku. Being seen is all that matters.

I'm going to lunch. I may be some time.

Paranoia

One of my more paranoid clients came by for a chat this morning.

Normally client paranoia concerns what business partners might be up to, or feckless children, or even what we bankers might be doing with all that hard-earned/inherited cash. This chap, unusually, was losing sleep over his love life.

M is a sweet boy - into jazz, golf and croquet. Has never done anything useful in life, but then has never done anything destructive either. A straightforward example of the British inheriting class.

And he's met a woman.

'That's great,' I said, wondering what he really wanted to talk about. Poor portfolio performance, presumably.

There was a pause.

'I hope so,' he said guardedly. 'I don't know. I'm not very experienced. Only had two... g-girlfriends before.'

He's 26, and perfectly good looking. Not particularly shy. The only reason he hasn't let himself go more freely with the fairer sex is paranoia. He's terrified of losing his inheritance to some fly-by-night Jezabel.

'What if she's just after child support?' he blurts out after I've failed to find an appropriate answer. 'Some girls are, aren't they? They do their research and find some rich idiot, then - bam!'

'But I thought you said she was a nice girl.'

'Oh, I really don't know anything about women.'

'Well...' I tried to think of a delicate way to put it. 'If you take it slowly... And make sure you use a condom...'

'There are ways round that,' he said, dismissively. 'You know what happened to Boris Becker.' (I didn't, but I looked it up later - how devilish) 'She might prick the condom with a needle. Or slit it with her nails... Or get me in such a... froth I say to hell with it and...'

M was very red-faced by this stage. It was painful to watch. Mind you, a mischievous part of my brain was wishing my secretary would walk in. Would have been priceless.

'I'm very fertile,' M added uncertainly. I didn't ask how he knew.

'Have you talked to your family about her?'

'No, of course not. I couldn't talk about this with them. Anyway, they want me to marry Elizabeth.'

'What exactly do you want from me?' I asked.

'Do you think I should trust her?'

'Yes.'

'Oh God,' he moaned, pressing his face into his hands. I've never seen anyone look so miserable.

Perhaps he's gay and this is all semi-conscious evasion.

A happy Sunday

My youngest has today conquered her fear of spiders.

Somehow this seems more important than anything just now. I'm sitting back with a gin and tonic, and the banking can go to hell. Summer is nearly over, we've barely seen any of it, but at least my little girl has broken the back of her phobia.

She has spent the day with me cataloguing the surprisingly plentiful wildlife in our little ecological island. There can be no greater joy than pottering with your offspring. She is going back to school tomorrow; I must face an angry Mancunian client in the aftermath of a back office cock-up. But both of us felt glorious all day long, gloomy weather and all.

She said to me, "Daddy, I've decided I'm going to pick up a spider today."

It was as simple as that. After years of bolting in fear at every 8-legged alien in bathtub or cupboard, she calmly went off in search of her nemesis and did the deed. God knows what courage it took. But her hand, when she presented the creature to me for inspection, was perfectly steady.

Brave, brilliant girl.

Private Banking for All

I have just been contacted by a young employee of a certain high street bank.

'Do you earn over £100,000 pounds?' was how this fresh-voiced child began.

'None of your business,' I said.

'Right, uh, yes, well, do you have £50,000 to invest?'

I like to be consistent in my responses, with a slight variation of tone to indicate a growing irritation.

'Oh, OK,' he said breathlessly. 'It's just that if you do, you may qualify for our Private Banking service. We provide an exclusive service to High Network (sic) Individuals such as your-' He broke off from his script, remembering I hadn't confirmed my membership of such a giddily wealthy community. 'Um, well, it's an exclusive service,' he tailed off.

'£50,000? That's your threshold?'

'Yes,' he said eagerly. 'Or something close to that, anyway.'

Now I'm well aware that not everyone has £50,000 savings. But millions do, in this country alone. Exclusive? What the hell do these high street banks think they're playing at?

City Breeding

The City, as I’ve already observed, belongs to the young. It is also increasingly the preserve of the Etonian. I suppose this is just a return to the good old days, but it is striking how the barrow boys of the eighties and the classless nerds of the nineties are being replaced in the sandwich queues by the kind of children you would expect to see tumbling out of a King’s Road nightclub in the company of a girl named Allegra. The accents are getting podgier, the haircuts floppier. Why it is that the investment banks are turning once more to the upper classes, I don’t know, but as someone who has grown up more or less on the cusp of public schooldom I find it mildly distressing.

Mind you, their fathers probably own half the Home Counties. I should really strike up conversation with a few of them over roast beef & trimmings in Fuzzy’s Grub. A little sucking up to the younger generation never did a private banker any harm.

Everyone's in a foul mood in the office today. There is a general suspicion that someone on high isn't telling us something.

A band of foot-and-mouth now lies between here and home.

None of the clients I need to speak to are answering the phone. On holiday, of course. Abroad. Of course.

Dreadful bloody weather.

I am feeling distinctly subprime.

Mrs X on the Rampage

An extraordinary evening.

By chance, I worked late yesterday and so happened to be in the office at nine o'clock when my phone rang and a policeman asked to speak to me. He had been given my number by Mrs X.

It turned out that Mrs X had been celebrating her last evening in London with an old school friend, a celebration that involved several stiff drinks in Covent Garden. At some point, the school friend took her leave, and it was only after she had gone that Mrs X discovered she had lost her handbag. Whether it had been stolen, as she believed, or merely misplaced in a moment of tipsiness, couldn't be established. But the end result was not pretty.

It seems Mrs X has, when in her cups, a wild side of which I have thus far been entirely ignorant. The good lady is in her 70s, yet managed to launch a robust attack on the establishment in which she had passed the greater part of evening. When they dared to point out that a sizeable bill remained unpaid, she became positively Visigothian. The authorities were summoned, and I was named as her champion.

Needless to say, I hurried over to the establishment in question, to find Mrs X swaying contentedly in the corner, assuring the police officers that the bill need not be cause for concern. 'I have a fortune tucked away in Singapore, you know,' she was earnestly telling them when I arrived.

I was effusively greeted as "my precious bank manager". Then she was back on that Singapore fortune.

It took all of my considerable social dexterity to shut her up. I paid the bill, expressed our joint appreciation to the police and the various serving staff, and then hurried her out of there.

Dear Mrs X, sozzled as she was, couldn't remember at which hotel she was staying. I tried ringing a few likely candidates, but none of them recognized her name. Eventually, there was nothing for it but to check her in somewhere else. By the time we had cancelled her credit cards and found an express supermarket that could provide her with toothbrush, face cream and a couple of other items I won't mention, it was getting on for 11 o'clock.

I escorted her back to the hotel and bade her goodnight. 'What about a nightcap?' she cheerfully suggested.

I explained about last trains and hurried away, hoping the staff would be good enough to make sure she found her room.

This morning I was back there, first thing. Mrs X was having breakfast in the dining room, bolt upright, bright as anything. 'I don't know why you brought me here,' she chided gently. 'I'm staying at ---.'

Her handbag, I'm glad to say, turned up inside one of the shopping bags her schoolfriend carried off last night.

I suspect I shall have to charge the hotel and bar bills to our expense account. So it seems, despite her generosity in taking me to lunch, Mrs X. has done rather well out of the bank this week.

Cornish guilt

I have just been out to lunch with Mrs X, my Cornish widow. I should be more precise: I have just been taken out to lunch by Mrs X. This is not a normal state of affairs, as I tried to explain to her. It is for the banker to entertain the client. But Mrs X was having none of it. 'I'm the one with all the money, aren't I?' she said. I submitted that my bank - and its expense account - might be the wealthier party, but she dismissed that argument out of hand. 'I'd like to treat you!' she said.

This London visit had an air of the Grand Tour about it for Mrs X. She rarely comes to the capital, and she has planned a splendid programme of arts and cultural betterment. Lunching with her banker was an elemental part of the Grand Tour. I got the impression she would have wanted to do it even if there was nothing to discuss, simply for the joy of an old-fashioned formula.

In fact, there was something to discuss. 'I've been feeling guilty,' she confessed, 'about Singapore.' Mrs X, I might remind you, has a good deal of "undeclared" money in Singapore. 'It didn't feel so naughty when it was in Switzerland. I mean that's traditional, isn't it? Quite respectable. But Singapore feels almost illegal.'

I liked the "almost".

It is not a banker's place to spell out what he has already intimated - that holding undeclared offshore funds does not fall, by any interpretration, within the sphere of law-abiding behaviour for residents of the United Kingdom. So I passed over that gloriously naive concern and paid deserved compliments to the chef's work. Mrs X had chosen an extremely fashionable restaurant in the West End, against whose unconventional decor she looked quite lost at first, but which produced a marvellous St Emilion, and a pretty good steak tartare.

'I mean, I ought really to be paying tax, oughtn't I? For hospitals, and what-not.'

It pained me to see her persist in this destructive line, one which I could only pretend not to hear for so long. 'I assure you, you're in very good company,' I tried. 'Plenty of our clients have the same arrangement.'

'Oh!' she said. 'Good show.' She really did say that.

But although her sense of guilt had diminished with my intervention, it hadn't entirely disappeared. 'I suppose,' she ventured cautiously, 'all this money you're making for me tax-free... I could give some of it to charity?'

I think I might have flinched at that.

There really is some kind of virus going around.

Is anybody out there?

I do slightly wonder if anyone is reading this anymore. Anonymity is all very well, but one can't help craving a little reaction to one's musings.

Feedback, please, or I shall just continue droning on about island ecology and keep the juicy client stuff to myself.

If you don't want to add a comment, you can contact me at absolutelyconfidential@hush.com

Island addendum

It occurred to me belatedly that writing about creating "islands" in the UK this weekend might not have been entirely sensitive to our friends in the west country.

My apologies to anyone reading this with their lower limbs submerged in Severn water.

On the positive side, if your butterflies have had to flee in search of dry refuge, they are more than welcome in Sussex.

Island Weekend

Inspired by another piece about threatened butterflies in The Times this weekend, I made a start on the wildlife island sanctuary that will be my mental and moral salvation. My children and I set out bravely and steadfastly into the wilds of those abandoned six acres we intend to transform into Eden. I can't say in all honesty we achieved very much beyond consumption of marmalade sandwiches and other such Enid Blyton delights, but we did manage to survey the plot, and we now have a serviceable map of the fields.

There are fences to remove, ponds to dig, trees to plant and wildflowers to nurture. Lots of work, all of which I expect to be entirely therapeutic, even if the current expectations of my excitable children leave me somewhat exhausted this Monday morning. My youngest wants hedgehogs, my oldest deer. And my son, bless his uninherited genius, wants a fully self-sustaining ecosystem of carnivores, herbivores, parasites, saprophytes, and a dozen other biological components I had never heard of.

Any advice from people who know about this stuff will be most welcome.

Stage Angst

My clients have so many different anxieties about their money, but some are more peculiar than others.

D is an actor, middle-aged and British, who a few years ago went from penury to moderate affluence when he was given a part in a big-budget Hollywood movie. To be honest, I took him on in expectation of further parts with bigger paycheques, but he went around grandly telling people he was a stage actor and wasn't interested in mass market celluloid, and regrettably the studios took him at his word. He soon became one of those awkward clients who simply wasn't rich enough to justify the time I had to give him.

Until last year.

Bizarrely, he was approached, on the basis of his Hollywood role, to star in a rather saucy series of TV advertisements in a certain Latin American country. It seems the film has achieved a kind of cult status there, with his character especially adored. The remuneration was, shall we say, hefty, and his portfolio is now really quite respectable - and lucrative to the bank. Now, of course, he wants to spend a few million on a house and a yacht, perhaps some horses, and here we come to his particular problem.

No one in England knows about the Latin American advertisements.

D is revered, apparently, in the London theatre world. I've been to a couple of his plays, more out of duty than desire, but I couldn't tell you if he's as talented as they say. Nevertheless, he assures me that he will be the laughing stock of Shaftesbury Avenue if his peers learn he has sold out to a foreign clothing company. The Hollywood movie was accepted by all as an ironic gesture (whatever that means). The ads most definitely won't be.

So - how to explain the sudden riches?

D's whole persona is founded on the basis of lofty talent, not wealth. In public, he scorns luxury and makes a point of wearing shabby clothes and eating in substandard restaurants. It's a dreadful bore having to meet him for lunch in some faux-Napolitan dive. But now that he's rich he's suddenly seeing the attraction of the country manor and the roar of a premium marque car. He wants the good life he's never had, and is terrified he will be found out the moment he reaches out and takes it.

The solution, in his opinion, is to reverse engineer a spectacular portfolio, to explain how he's turned his modest Hollywood fee into such splendid riches. Investment genius is acceptable, if not admirable, in the Green Room. So this is how I am having to spend my afternoon: going back through the past few years and picking out the most extraordinary equity performers, the cleverest derivative plays, so that D can sit at his manor dinner table and airily explain to his thespian friends that it was all a matter of inspired investment.

Apparently he is rendered almost entirely naked in the final advertisement. I shall be scouring YouTube one of these days.

The Philanthropist

Mr N has been pressing me for his philanthropy consultant. My delaying tactics have not worked. As a result, today I had a certain Dr D come in to see me.

Dr D spent an hour talking about sinking wells in Zambia, bringing justice to the oppressed in Uruguay, protecting widows in India from the contempt of their neighbours, and developing a vaccine for malaria. He managed to sound entirely saintly, and make me feel thoroughly unworthy.

I asked him about his fees.

They were outrageous.

Dr D is taking the piss.

I’m going to find some other way to satisfy Mr N's new-found altruistic urges. I’m damned if Dr D and his ilk will see a penny from the assets under my management.

Down with the Rich

We seem to be enjoying a resurgence of millionaire-bashing by the Labour Party, as they change their indistinguishable guard, and the feral media, incensed over this private equity nonsense. Presumably it will pass, as indignation in the face of the rich always seems to pass in this country, but that doesn't mean I'm going to let the opportunity to stick my oar in drift by unsnatched.

Let's be grossly simplistic here:

1. No one should pay more tax than they absolutely have to.

2. The rich are able to afford people like me to ensure they abide by 1, even if less well remunerated people do not.

3. This may seem grotesquely unfair, but it is neither a. illegal or b. immoral according to any intelligible natural order.

4. If you want to make the rich pay more tax, you need only persuade the (Socialist) politicians to change the tax code, a thing they are most unlikely to do given how fluid global capital is these days and how quickly it can vanish from an environment that develops hostile characteristics.

The truth is, objecting to the rich is about as productive an occupation as striking one's head repeatedly against a building one has taken a dislike to. Believe me - I've loathed enough of them in my time. And let us not forget that the richer they become, the more likely they are to hire plumbers to install jacuzzis, beauticians to paint their dogs' toenails, and astrologers to advise their children on the seating plans for their fourth birthday parties. It is a myth, these days at least, that the rich do not spend their money. Much as I would love them all to keep every penny locked away under my management, very few do.

And who knows? Your very own most hated billionaire may be about to donate half his net wealth to your favourite charity. It's happening more and more, it grieves me to say.

Private Equity

The grilling of Buffini et al in Parliament: delightful!

My clients have done very well out of private equity over the years, but one can't help enjoying this circus.

Future generations will look back on the current obsession with a cleaner's tax bill in utter bemusement. Since when did cleaners pay tax anyway? I thought they were all undeclared Somalis and Lithuanians. We should surely be commending the private equity crowd for their principled employment practices.

My Island

I’ve been musing on the question of a project to save my soul from financial corruption. My psychotherapist has berated me twice now for not doing anything positive on this front. Go travelling, she says. Learn Arabic. Anything, so long as it’s unrelated to banking or money.
And this is what I’ve come up with.

Adjacent to our house is a small patch of farmland, just six acres, which I bought years ago when the local farmer was in need of a new tractor and offered the land to me cheap. I’ve allowed him to continue using it as before and in return he’s kept our household in fresh lamb and eggs. A happy arrangement, which came to an end this year when he sold up and moved to Florida. The new owner of the farm has no interest in farming, and is busy turning his fields into a sterile parkland complete with non-indigenous deer and the most dreadful uplighting under every newly-installed mature oak. We loathe everything the man, a Norfolk property developer, is doing to our environs (although needless to say, I’ve already been round to enquire discreetly whether he is entirely satisfied with his current banking arrangements).

Anyway, the question is what to do with our six abandoned acres.

I read an article some time ago about the depletion of natural habitat for native British wildlife, and it occurred to me that our little scrap of land could prove a useful refuge for all those birds and hedgehogs and butterflies that are apparently finding the south-east of England an increasingly barren domicile. The theory is that if enough people provide “islands” of pesticide-free, undisturbed wilderness, then all those endangered species can survive even as Mr Prescott’s tarmac and concrete despoil what remains of their one-time home.

My younger daughter loves the idea. She’s six years old and adores anything small and cuddly (which she appears to think hedgehogs are). My son, who’s becoming a science freak at the tender age of thirteen, tells me it will help reduce climate change.

I might have to make a go of it.

Salad Days

Today I had a depressing encounter with a young man in the queue for my favourite salad bar.

The structure of the queue was rather chaotic, with people having to press through it to reach the pre-packed salads and the little pots of extra toppings, and it wasn’t always entirely clear who was where. Still, I was reasonably sure that this young man had been behind me in the queue, so when he pushed forward to the counter I told him so.

‘Excuse me?’ he said tersely.

‘I said, I think I was next.’

‘I don’t think so.’

By now one of the salad wallahs was hovering in front of us, waiting for an order.

‘Look, I don’t want to make a big thing about it,’ I said, ‘but you were behind me.’

He had closely cropped hair, thuggish shoulders, and a leather strap around his wrist. I was rather expecting him to swear at me, or in some other way deliver an attack that would allow me to enjoy the moral high ground even as I lost the battle. But instead he sighed and just said, ‘I’m sorry, I’d let you go ahead, but I’m just too busy. I have to get back to work.’

And with that he turned back to the salad wallah and snapped out a brisk, complicated order involving caramelized onions, pine nuts, roasted red peppers and a dozen other exotic ingredients.

What upset me more than the patronizing and withheld offer to give up his rightful place to me was the suggestion, blatant in his words, that he was busier than me. He had looked at this greying, middle-aged man and assumed I must hold some backwater job, entirely removed from the high-octane responsibilities he bore in corporate finance, or bond trading, or whatever. Because no banker of my age who’d really made it in the City would a. still be here b. be queuing for his own lunch, or c. use such feeble language. The worst of it is that he was right. Private banking is still a sleepy beat. Nothing is so urgent that we can’t take a few minutes longer in the salad queue. And that, of course, is why people like me can still hold on to our jobs. Our competence is not dependent on adrenalin.

It’s a disconcerting thing to walk through the City thinking these thoughts. You start to look around more than is good for you. You realize that of all the people around you, perhaps only one in a hundred is anywhere near your age. The streets of the City come to feel like a university town, where all the students have been given good haircuts, expensive clothes and bristling attitudes. And what does that make me? A don? One of those port-stained figures that the students laugh at behind their backs for their quaint old ways and deficient personal hygiene? A dinosaur, allowed to stay on to add colour and eccentricity to the scene until hard times make his dispatch to penurious early retirement unavoidable.

God, this is an unforgiving place.

Good Causes

My client, Mr N, is asking for a philanthropy consultant. He has decided he’s got too much money and wants to give a chunk of it away. This is one of those situations where the human and the banker in me are at severe odds. Of course it’s lovely that Mr N wants to help children in Africa, but every pound he sends them will be a penny less in fees each year. As he’s talking about ridding himself of 25 million quid, that will be 250,000 pounds of annual income lost on my watch. Not great for the bonus.

It’s all the fault of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. When someone goes and donates 37 billion dollars to a good cause, people the world over start wanting to do the same thing. Which isn’t helpful to those of us – parasites that we are – who depend on their fortunes for our living.

The thing that irritates me most is this new industry of “philanthropy consultants”. These are, by and large, former private bankers or management consultants, so we can be fairly sure they’re not out to save the world. They’ve cleverly identified a new market and they’re cashing in fast. But why on earth should Mr N need to pay someone to tell him how to distribute his largesse? What’s wrong with sending a cheque to Oxfam? Mine is the agent’s irrational grief at seeing the boss waste his money on agents.

I’m going to stall him as long as I can. Mr N leads a busy professional life: with any luck he’ll forget about this for a couple of months. And by then, all kinds of scandals may have rocked the charity world. He may yet be dissuaded.

Did I really make merry on the subject of divorce last week? I've just spent the most wonderful bank holiday with my family and am now feeling a twinge of mild remorse. My wife, whom I would never dream of divorcing, came with me for a long walk on Sunday, even though the forecast was horrendous. She fought her way through torrents of rain without the slightest murmur of complaint. By the time we got home, her skin was blue from the cold.

My God, I love that woman.

Divorce

I felt a shiver of vicarious pain at the news that the £48m award against John Charman has been upheld by the appeal court - not for the man himself, you understand, but for his banker. Many is the time I have watched assets disappear from my clients' portfolios just because they were foolish enough to be caught with the babysitter or (actually more common) riled by years of nagging into demanding divorce. While my clients would rage at the wickedness of women in general, I would be silently rueing the loss of management fees in particular, as I expect is Charman's banker today. £48 million could be worth over £500,000 a year to a private bank.

But perhaps we're coming at this the wrong way round. Perhaps we private bankers should accept and exploit the reality of the new English status quo - the recent rulings that make England the most "wife-friendly" divorce regime in Europe. After all, for every loser there is a winner, and there are a lot of ex-wives out there who are newly independently wealthy. 160,000 divorces a year: quite a few of those must involve significant lump sum pay-outs. Don't these women (or men in the odd case, I grant you) need the services of a reliable private banker?

It smacks a little of ambulance-chasing, but really we shouldn't be shy of this business. I dare say plenty of bankers have already contacted Heather Mills in hungry anticipation, and we ought to be following their example with less prominent windfall wives.

But then why stop there? How about actively generating new business through this channel? The method would be straightforward: identify those enormously wealthy men who have somehow resisted all advances to take up one's banking services, and invite their wives to a few soirees populated with handsome young gigolos. Sow a little discord in the marital nest, remind the husband that pre-nups hold no water in England and that the courts usually tend towards 50:50 divisions, then invite him to settle the matter amicably over a glass of cognac.

Have I gone too far? I feel the bank holiday looming, and I'm feeling irresponsible...

Cure

My psychotherapist has decided the root of all my evil is money. I thought she was joking, but it seems not. My conscious and subconscious thoughts are apparently too steeped in the financial for me to live a healthy life.

She told me to change my profession.

I said I couldn’t afford to.

She said I had to learn money isn’t important.

I suggested in that case we could dispense with her sizeable invoices.

She told me to find something in life that was completely detached from money. She told me I need a project that will take my mind off pounds and dollars and euros for a few hours each week.

That way, she assures me, lies my salvation.

Dress code

Just been to see my tailor.

There seems to be a perception among people I meet at Sunday lunches around Sussex that the City is full of immaculately-suited gentlemen with bowler hats and furled umbrellas straight out of Mary Poppins. True, the denizens of the Square Mile are still a great deal more smartly dressed than most of the population, but that’s hardly saying much. Insurance brokers, fund managers, market makers, a lot of them don’t bother to do more than pull a couple of high-ticket suits off an Armani rack and treat them with the same level of care they’d show a football sock.

My tailor hasn’t entirely understood the deterioration in standards either. Though his custom must be much reduced, his conversation suggests he still thinks I am typical of my breed in my sartorial concern. ‘About time you had a new suit or two,’ he said this afternoon. ‘Got to keep you looking smart for your clients.’

I haven’t the heart to tell him the wealthiest people on the planet go to work in jeans and t-shirts. The only clients who still care how I dress are those whose fortunes are in rapid decline. Hardly worth trying to impress them.

Offshore Banking

I've been ruminating on the suggestion by Professor Alan Blinder (poor fellow: A. Blinder - no wonder he never got the top job at the Federal Reserve) that millions of high-skilled US and UK jobs might be effectively outsourced to cheaper staff in India and China. He has focused on accountants, computer programmers and lawyers, but why not bankers too?

Certainly our Back Office could all be sent to Bangalore, as could most of the Middle Office. Those various consultants that have been inflicted on us over the last few years always long to consolidate the equity and fund research teams that are currently scattered across the world. Why not replace them altogether with a cadre of Chinese brains accessible via broadband?

But then we come to the core of the business. Could my job be done by a bright young Indian graduate based out of Mumbai? On the face of it, that seems a ridiculous proposition. This is a trust business, we all cry. Clients demand long term relationships with their private bankers. They want to be able to drop in at any moment and chat about their portfolio over a superior glass of claret. Doesn't that protect us, at least, from the Blinder effect?

I wonder. Quite a few of my clients now communicate with me almost exclusively by email and telephone. That's how they like it. I may go and visit them once a year to reinforce the relationship, but that could just as well be done as part of a grand annual tour by that young Mumbai fellow. Not great for his carbon footprint, but probably much cheaper than keeping me on.

I'm not too worried about my own job. This isn't the fastest-evolving sector of the banking industry, and I only need a few more years. But it might be another reason to discourage my son from following in his papa's venerable footsteps.

I'd be curious to hear views from bankers of all stripes. Are any of you concerned about your long-term prospects?

Did I mention I’m seeing a psychotherapist? She asked me yesterday to rank the ten most important things in my life, and when I’d finished with children, freshly mown lawns, Bordeaux and so on, she said, ‘What about money?’
It hadn’t occurred to me to mention money. ‘Obviously that’s top of the list,’ I laughed.
She didn’t laugh. ‘That’s so sad,’ she said, meaning it.
She’s Jewish and lives in Hampstead and thinks I have an unhealthy relationship with money.
I’m starting to wonder.

What extraordinary things we have learnt about Lord Browne today. But is it true he doesn't drive? How refreshing to hear that of an oil CEO.

To be honest, I'm rather saddened by the whole miserable business. It seems such a stupid coda to a great career. In ten years, will we remember anything else about him?

Pity the giants. Their weak spots are such easy targets.

The List

Ah... the Rich List. Every year, I experience the same curious sensation when the Sunday Times puts this out. That inner glow that comes from knowing a large part of the country is thinking - for a few hours at least - about the stuff of my daily grind. This year I have the added joy of seeing not one but two of my clients join the list for the first time. Actually, the estimates of their wealth are way off the mark, but that doesn't really matter. Both have called me today, astonishingly to thank me - as if I had anything to do with either their personal wealth creation or the compilation of the list. Of course they're not really thanking me. They're celebrating, and they want me to celebrate with them. The "thank you" is only to excuse the disturbance of my Sunday. Really, I should have called them first to offer my congratulations and so head off all the younger, hungrier private bankers who'll be placing calls to their offices tomorrow morning. The energy just isn't in me these days.

The Sunday Times's wealth estimations are compelling, I'll admit, but ultimately rather useless. Two different measures would be much more informative:

First is the amount of investable wealth, the only figure that my sort ever cares about. It's all very well that the Swire family's stake in the eponymous Group is worth one and a half billion, but it's not as if they're free to do much with it. If Sir Adrian were to grace me with his business, I could certainly suggest a few ways of raising spending money against his paper, but I doubt very much I could invoice him annually for 1% of £1.5bn.

The other measure I'd be curious to see is the effective wealth of these individuals. The Queen may only be worth £320m, but she enjoys a lifestyle (tupperware cereal containers aside) commensurate with a fortune ten times that sum. The ST figure is really rather meaningless in her case. Similarly, a number of the relatively impecunious celebrities at the bottom of the list probably attract freebie vacations, jewellery, cars and travel to match the spending power of the much richer but duller men of finance, property and (I love this one) baking. In the final analysis, isn't one's effective wealth the only measure that really matters in this life? I dare say Keira Knightley, on her paltry £14 million, is having a pretty good time of it.

The latest revelation from the consumer organization Which?: "Free banking is a myth".

Good Lord, these people are geniuses.

Unwired

There seems to be an unreasonable degree of nervousness setting in amongst my younger colleagues, now that the Barclays-ABN merger is official. They all fear the move will send a tsunami of consolidation through the industry, leading to mass-redundancy and the end of our glorious summer of bonuses and expense accounts.

I have a different kind of worry. I was walking along Cornhill this afternoon when I felt an unusual prickling sensation in my scalp. I know I will only confirm my standing as a technological ignoramus if I try to connect this with today's launch of the City-wide Wi-Fi network, but intuitively I know this to be the cause. Has anyone seriously studied the health implications of bombarding us all with yet more radio waves (or whatever the hell they are)?

What I don't understand is why they had to do this here. Can there be a square mile anywhere else in the country with as many broadband connections as the City of London? Why not start in a place with no existing broadband - somewhere French perhaps. Who on earth do they think needs the extra connectivity around here? Are there City workers who take their laptops into McDonalds and run analyses of public companies with a Big Mac in one hand? These are not film students with nowhere else to keep warm, or a desperate yearning for the company of Starbucks staff to save them from lonely oblivion. If they honestly can't do without email in the taxi home, their Blackberrys will function all the way to Notting Hill - unlike The Cloud's offering. Skype, you say? Don't make me laugh. Have you ever met a banker who worried about the cost of his calls? No one's going to lug their laptop over to the Royal Exchange just to save their bank a few quid when phoning home.

I wish The Cloud every success, speaking as a kind-hearted capitalist, but I don't expect they'll find their silver lining in the City.

Boy Wonder

Now I know I'm in trouble. Thank you, "lucy", for the news that the FT piece has been picked up by The Week. A number of clients who would never dream of buying the FT, including Mrs X of Cornwall, are devoted readers of The Week.

I look forward to Cornish storms hitting a small corner of the City sometime tomorrow.

My son, by the way, has spent the day training for next year's London marathon. Is there a lower age limit? If so, he is several years short of it (although I don't think he has been made aware of this yet by his mother, to whom I always delegate such high-risk news-bearing). Nonetheless, he thinks he is in with a chance of winning. He had me time him over a distance of two hundred metres in a nearby lane, then extrapolated - using unfaultable mathematics - to a time of just under two hours for the whole course.

I shall be the proudest father in Christendom.

"Come back AC"

When I was fourteen, I did something rather foolish at school. In these Cameron salad days, that admission sounds alarmingly trendy, but in fact my transgression was rather more serious than an indulgence in soft drugs, and I very much hoped it would remain undetected. Therefore it was not a pleasant feeling when my housemaster, in an announcement after lunch, used a formulation of words which – though innocent to the rest of the boys – made it clear that he was on to me.

A similar effect was achieved by the front page of the FT last week. The innocent formulation that caught my eye was this: “The tale of poisoned goldfish”. Anyone who has read my first post will understand why my stomach turned in on itself in a manner I haven’t experienced for a number of decades.

The revelation that this blog has caught the eye of Jonathan Guthrie, columnist for the Financial Times, coming as it did somewhere between Sussex and a London rail terminus (I find myself suddenly coy on the more specific details), brought with it a number of emotions. Aside from the initial nausea, the predominating reaction was one of wonder that I could have laboured so many years in the City without once doing anything to merit the several column inches devoted to this frankly trivial diary. Admittedly, private bankers aren't supposed to attract attention, but all the same it feels like a terrible indictment of my lacklustre career.

Of course, I'm grateful to Mr Guthrie for his kind review of my ramblings. It is without doubt the first time in my life I have been accorded the accolade, "a rare flash of talent". Mind you, I have a suspicion Mr Guthrie was merely hoping to soften the blow of his next, more accurate appraisal: "burnt-out". Ouch. Still, I can't fault the judgement of a man who uses splendid words like "helot" (which sent me scrambling for my dictionary).

I'm glad to say I can set the good Guthrie's concerns to rest: I haven't been fired. Admittedly, the likelihood of that fate is somewhat greater now. Indeed I've spent the last few days keeping a very low profile and praying that LL in particular should not have his attention drawn to the FT piece. But a week has passed, and I think I've got away with it. LL isn't terribly bright as it happens, so he might not actually recognize the published description of our shared contretemps. Have I been "toying with career suicide"? Perhaps, but interestingly my fear has always been that this might be read by clients, not colleagues. No doubt that says something about my naivety, but at least it shows I've been well trained in the private banking code of client confidentiality. As the internet address was not published, I'm counting on the general laziness of my colleagues to prevent them seeking out this blog.

No, I haven't been fired. In fact, the reason for my silence has been rather more serious. I have been ill. Not physically, but to my shame I have recently gone through what could best be described as a minor breakdown. It hasn't been obvious, I hope, to my colleagues and clients, but since this blog is all about honesty I may as well come clean on this matter too. I like to think I'm fairly robust, and that when push came to shove I wouldn't be too traumatised if someone took away my iPod or likened me to Mr Bean. But around the end of February, something just stopped functioning in my brain. It had a lot to do with the sense of futility I experienced at the beginning of the year, and I don't want to dwell on the gloomy details, but suffice to say March was not a good month for me (or my poor, long-suffering family). At the time I suspected that this bloggish introspection might have contributed to my malaise, and so it seemed wise to stop it for a while. However I've since taken a very pleasant and relaxing holiday, and am feeling much more positive about this banking life. So what if it is futile? The money's good, and excellent restaurants are always close at hand. Besides, nothing could better stroke a burnt-out banker’s ego than a direct appeal for more from the pages of the FT. Jonathan, how could my vanity resist your flattery?

Tears everywhere

It's been an unhappy day in my family.

I got home to find my elder daughter in tears because Britney Spears had shaved her head. She's threatening to do the same "in solidarity".

My son had managed to burn his little sister with candle wax, making both of them cry.

My wife was in a fury because she'd taken the children into London for a half-term Natural History museum outing, and she wasn't aware that the congestion charge now applied to K&C. Believing entry without prior payment meant an automatic fine of hundreds of pounds, she took it out on the children when she discovered her mistake. Then she decided - now she was "in the zone" - to make the most of it and visit me at work.

This is generally a bad idea anyway, but today it was hopeless. Most considerately, she turned up at lunchtime, not realising that 12-2 is often my peak slot. Never more than today, when I had three investment banker clients all wanting to talk tactics against the event that Peter Hain's insane suggestion (city firms should give away two thirds of their bonus pots to charity) ever becomes more than wishful thinking. I don't think this is likely, but there's not much any of us can do if Labour go down that route. "Emigrate" will be my professional recommendation.

Anyway, these three bankers all wanted to see me in their lunch break, meaning mine disappeared into back-to-back meetings, complicated by the fact that we couldn't let any of them spot each other near my office. By chance, all three work for the same firm - we really can't let them know they also share a private banker.

When my wife finally got the message that I wasn't able to see her for an hour and a half, she shouted at the children again and raced back home. (She doesn't normally raise her voice - the CC fine spectre had a powerful effect on her) My attempts to soothe matters this evening were not successful. I explained that the congestion charge can be paid after the event, even did it for her, but this had the opposite result to the one I expected. Instead of saying, "oh that's all right then," she too started crying, and yelled at me, "so I shouted at the children for NO REASON!".

I suppose it's all my fault somehow or other. I'm taking refuge in my study until her sleeping pill kicks in.

Postscript: Is it true that Citi Private Banking is piling back into Japan? Brave souls after last time...

Swift Leaks

It's rare for a private banker to feel like the world revolves around him. We do too much scurrying after clients to suffer that illusion. But just occasionally a warm sensation comes over one as it becomes clear that it is the client who has done the scurrying. This being a very straightforward money-measured business, the richer the client the warmer the sensation.

An American client, JL, came to see me this morning. He is, let's say, a captain of industry on the East Coast, an exceedingly dignified and busy man. He keeps about thirty million dollars with us - perhaps a tenth of his total liquid wealth. I've never really established his reasons, but thirty million is a nice lump to have. My occasional suggestions that he might like to place more with us have always been met with silence. Money comes in and goes out, but the balance remains the same.

When I asked what brought him to England, he looked at me rather peculiarly and said, 'You'. Obviously. 'You've come all this way to discuss your portfolio?' But he was agitated and not in the mood to answer questions. 'This Swift thing,' he said. 'It's a disgrace.' 'Indeed, it is,' I said. 'You Europeans need more spine,' he said. 'We sure do,' I agreed. 'You should stand up to us,' he continued. 'We really should,' I nodded vigorously.

'This Swift thing', in case you're not aware, is the latest attack on privacy justified by the War on Terror. SWIFT is the Belgian financial messaging company across whose wires a large proportion of European transactions are conducted. They have an inordinate amount of information on European money flows, and they've recently been shown to be slavishly supplying the whole lot to the CIA. Pressures have been brought to bear by Washington, but still it's inexcusable and deeply worrying for several of my clients.

Not that I'd expected it to be a problem for JL.

'I have a problem,' he said. 'Oh?' I said. 'Some of my transfers,' he said. 'I would hate for them to be seen by my government.' 'Oh,' I said.

I've always hated this bit, although there's also an undeniable morbid fascination to a client's sudden confession. Everyone, even the most unlikely people, seem to have skeletons.

'Look, it's much better not to tell me if the money's coming from some unconventional source.' We have these neat little words that make 'illegal' sound so much more palatable. They trip off the tongue so easily after a few years in this job.

'The source is fine,' he said, 'It's where it's going.' 'Oh,' I said. 'Senators,' he said. 'Oh dear,' I said. 'Right,' he said.

So that's his little secret. The reason we enjoy his business. A neat little offshore operation to [excised in a moment of paranoia brought on by the FT]. Well, there are various solutions, most of which involve getting his funds even further offshore - to a handy Pacific Island perhaps. The challenge now is to convince him we can still handle it. We're actually very good at establishing concealed trusts in far-off hot places, so I'm hopeful we'll keep the business. There's not a lot I can do about his transactions to date though. Fingers crossed the US Treasury and the CIA have more important things to look for.

Colourful Clients

A clash in the meeting rooms this morning.

LL, who’s a shit, had a client from the music business in, and he was under the impression that he’d booked the best room. It has a couple of old masters and some very fine walnut furniture, which younger clients are surprisingly taken by. Actually, I’d booked the room (though LL still disputes this) for a meeting with one of my clients, also in the music business.

Huge mess when LL walks in with his client, dressed tastefully in chocolate gabardine and a hundredweight of silver and gold, only to encounter my client, dressed just as tastefully in all-white nylon and a cream baseball cap.

Gabardine and Nylon do not see eye to eye, according to the tabloids. There were some indigestible words exchanged, a well-practised warm-up, and both gentlemen seemed to be enjoying the confrontation, until it dawned on them that this was no club or recording studio but a rather conservative financial institution, the likes of which they would never publicly admit to frequenting. For such clients we have underground parking and a secluded lift, so that no one need know the shameful fact that they are careful with their money. I gather certain brothels have the same arrangements.

Unfortunately for Gabardine and Nylon, they had inadvertently caught each other in flagrante. My client's full portfolio was spread out on the table, and until the interruption he’d been making not a bad fist of understanding the little graphs and pie charts we like to knock up. Nice chap, Nylon, although he turned livid when he realized there was a witness to his financial prudence, especially one who, in his words, had ---ed his momma with a spanner on the piano (this sounded rather more rhythmic and fiery than it’s coming across here).

I tried to point out that both clients were in the same position, and therefore a pact of silence might be invoked, but neither was content with that. LL kept an icy silence as he steered his client out, throwing me a venomous look when neither client was looking.

I’m going to have to give Nylon a fee holiday, I fear.

Why life is more expensive

The ONS has released a personal inflation calculator. I wanted to try it out but got defeated, as usual, by the technology. Couldn't make it work. Oh well. I already know my personal inflation is a bloody site higher than 2.7%. Look at what I have to pay for: school fees, petrol, my wife's salon visits, my own restaurant habit, endless decorating and plumbing work, and gas to heat the worst-insulated house in the country. A rough guess would put my inflation rate somewhere around 15%.

Could this be a useful statistic for the next salary negotiation?

Interest Rate Rise

A VERY wealthy client has just been on the phone to me grumbling about the latest quarter of a percent. He has a mortgage, and he's concerned about the increase in interest payments he will face. I think he expects me to do something about it, although exactly what influence he imagines I have with the Bank of England I'm not clear.

It may seems strange that the rich use mortgages, but really it's just a way for them to get hold of more money to invest - at a cost of only a little over five percent (or rather, as of next month, five and a quarter percent). This particular client has an eighteen million quid mortgage (it is a very large house, on a very large estate). Does that make you feel better about yours? As a result of this rate rise, he'll have to fork out an extra £45,000 a year. The pain! The hardship! Of course, if I told you what his pre-tax investment profits were last year, you wouldn't feel quite so sorry for him.

Luckily he didn't notice the immediate fall in the market when the rate rise was announced at noon, or he might have given me grief about that as well. By the time he called there had already been a full recovery (which of course, I did my best to claim credit for).

Anyway, he wants me to find him a cheaper mortgage. I shall of course go through the motions - send him lots of useless offers from other institutions - until he is either convinced that our in-house product remains the best value... or else he is too dazed by all the papers to bother with it any further. What's £45,000 extra a year, after all?

Confidential or not?

I've been staying away, not writing.

I got nervous, to be honest. Something about that Turin client and his goldfish murders. I have no idea if anyone's actually looked at this blog yet. There's no way to tell how many hits it has had (unfortunate term give the business my Turin client is associated with). But as I've told myself already, there's no way any of my clients is going to find this blog in a million years.

If I’m going to do this, there's no point panicking about clients reading it.

My oldest client, Mrs X, resident in Cornwall, domiciled in the UK, has 14 million quid stashed in Zurich. Undeclared money, in the delicate language of our Swiss cousins. Or rather it was stashed in Zurich, but what with the European Savings Directive, we’ve moved it to Singapore for her to avoid this wretched new withholding tax. It’s making about a million a year in income that Gordon Brown will never get his mitts on.

There. I’ve just committed the gravest sin in the private banking universe. Goldfish indiscretions are nothing to this.

It’s curiously liberating to cross the line.

Le Chiffre

An excursion with my son to the cinema last night. Would you believe, the villain in the new Bond film is a private banker! We're so used to them being oil magnates or silicon chip billionaires - the people on the client side of the private banking desk. I vaguely remember the book from years ago, but only for its torture scene (lovingly recreated in the film, to my son's rapt delight). I had forgotten Le Chiffre was one of us (was he, in the book?) - mostly because I wasn't in this business then.

Further wonders, a key part of the plot was Le Chiffre's attempt to short the stock of an airline company. New Bond, new sophistication. I've tried to explain shorting to any number of Sussex friends over the years and always drawn a blank. But how can you sell shares before you buy them? It doesn't make sense! Now I need only refer them to Casino Royale.

What makes Britain rich?

Did anyone see this on TV last night? I rather hoped it might feature lots of new young millionaires in need of a reputable banker, but in fact it was more of a survey of the economy, with Peter Snow looking astonished that agriculture should now account for a smaller hunk of GDP than "finance" (us). I nearly turned off when they interviewed some moron who had remortgaged his house to soup up his car. Fifty thousand quid he'd spent. On brakes and a sound system. Insane. He made some joke about his daughter forgiving his squandering of her inheritance, although I strongly doubt she has.

Anyway, they got to the HNWIs in the second half of the programme. John Caudwell was shown looking very comfortable in his Jacobean mansion, confessing to having made the whole of Stoke-on-Trent "a little bit wealthier". They were trying to get him to say that his wealth must have come at the expense of someone else, but he quite firmly set them right: "wealth creates wealth". Bravo.

They interviewed only one private banker - some Citi fellow I didn't recognize - who cheerfully informed the public that the rich were getting much richer, and you could sense the mental rubbing of hands together as he said it. More clients, more assets - more fees...

But the prize has to go to Felix Dennis (who is apparently spending £250 million to create a new broadleaf forest of 30,000 acres). When asked what the wealthy have in common, he declared that most rich people are "shits".

Good for you, Felix. If any of my clients caught that, I'd love to have seen their faces.

I had a dream last night that my Turin client read this.

I've been feeling edgy all day. Which is ridiculous. There's no way a multi-millionaire Italian grandfather is going to spend his time surfing English blogs, and anyway the internet's a huge huge place. He wouldn't find it in a million years.

Still, I feel rather foolhardy to be doing this at all.

Email-free Christmas

I'm under something of a black cloud.

Going back to work yesterday, expecting a relatively easy week, I found myself being summoned by the Boss the moment I stepped into the office. It was clear something was wrong, and I had one of those dread headmaster's office moments that one never really leaves behind, made worse by the fact the Boss is younger than me.

It seems a client of mine, a rather successful barrister with a splendid line in consumer product prosecutions, took it into his head over Christmas to buy a house in Dubai. He was out there with family, sunning himself on the beach, when someone suggested acquiring a piece of one of those huge palm islands they're building. Some clever salesman convinced him that if he didn't put the money down there and then, there would never be another house available at such a reasonable price, ever. So this anxious barrister picks up the phone to our office, expecting to find me at my desk on Boxing Day apparently, with an order to liquidate a chunk of his portfolio and speed the winnings to the UAE.

Now feasibly we could have done this for him when the market opened on the 27th. Except that no one who knew anything about his account was in the office until the new year. And what's more, no one could find a home address or phone number for me. As our house is in a valley with absolutely no mobile reception, those diligent worker bees whom my barrister managed to reach on the 26th resorted to email.

This is where the black cloud comes in. No one here, it seems, can credit my protestation that I simply don't check email over the Christmas break. Ever more urgent messages were piling up in my inbox, with me blissfully unaware and attending instead to the fowl drama taking place in the woodburner chimney and the even fouler drama of my children around the Christmas tree. By the 29th, the barrister - who is not a client with whom I can claim to have much rapport - had escalated the matter to a board director who, regrettably, he happens to know. This particular seagull did what all seagulls do from their great height, and unfortunately the Boss caught most of the consequence - at home, on New Year's Eve, just as he was about to go out to some fabulous Notting Hill party.

I spoilt his evening, apparently. Oh yes, and I've lost a client. Luckily he's agreed to remain with the bank, so I'm not in too much trouble, but there's still a certain disbelief all round that I could make it through nine days without email. When I explain to my various colleagues that I don't regard sifting through advertisements for viagra a particularly festive way to spend Christmas, they say things like But what if there's an important message? I would have had a stronger riposte before this debacle.

Anyhow, it will blow over. But I do seem to have cemented the perception in my younger colleagues' minds that I belong to some technological stone age where bankers went about their business in coffee houses and knocked off at a quarter past three. I don't mind being seen as an old-fashioned type - I'm rather proud to be the only banker I know without a Blackberry - but it will become a problem if they start to doubt my competence in assessing, say, hi-tech or media stocks. And I'm going to have to work a bit harder at demonstrating I'm right up to date on the latest funds and instruments (which I fear I'm not, but that's a different matter).

Moral of the story: be prepared to wade through viagra at least every other day.

New Year's Resolution

It's been a grey old Christmas, and the family's going through a swill trough of bad feeling because of some misunderstanding over the placement of the angel on the Christmas tree. Two of the dogs are sick, a favourite plate from my college days has been broken (culprit to remain unnamed), and some poor bird has gone and blocked the woodburner chimney, meaning that we are without that comforting glow in the corner of the kitchen until we can find a sweep willing to interrupt his holidays. Saddam has been killed, so Blair and Bush can tell themselves they've achieved something, while in Romania and Bulgaria officious leaflets are apparently being circulated by the Home Office to spoil the EU accession celebrations with grim warnings about work permits and heavy fines. Actually, my sense of gloom stems mostly from the realization that this will be my nineteenth year as banker to the wealthy. One can't help dying a little inside at that thought.

I don't mean I want to get out. It's a stable job, well paid, and pleasant enough most of the time. And anyway, I'm too old to change career now. But something about my work has been bothering me the last few months and I don't know what it is. I've never really reflected much on the job - just got on with the business of making the wealthy even wealthier. Now I find myself trying to grasp at some ill-defined source of unease. My New Year's resolution is to tackle the question head on, and writing a blog seems as good a way as any of doing that.

So this is just a kind of therapy, really, as I don't suppose anyone will read this. A middle-aged banker doesn't have quite the same draw as a London call girl (although we probably share a number of clients). But then, who knows? Above all, people have always been interested in sex and money, and if forced to choose, they usually plump for the latter.

Private bankers – the kind who deign to serve only the very rich – know a lot of secrets. We look a boring lot, but you can’t deny the insides of our heads are interesting places. Rich people tell things to their bankers that doctors and priests won’t hear. Never having been rich myself, I can only guess why they do it. My theory is this: if you’re rich, the thing you care about most is your money; you have to trust someone with it, so you might as well trust that person with everything else (those embarrassing little secrets). Sometimes there are good reasons to confide in a banker, for example if there’s an illegitimate son to provide for that the wife doesn’t know about. But it’s hard to explain the more bizarre revelations.

A few weeks ago, I was required to travel to a certain small village west of Turin so that an ageing patriarch worth ninety million euros could share with me his guilty secret: for twenty years he has been putting vinegar in his favourite daughter’s fish tank. The fish have been dying prematurely, causing the poor girl continuous grief, and the patriarch has no idea why he keeps doing it. He just felt the need to confess to someone. When I asked if he’d like to consider a restructuring of his portfolio, he smiled faintly and told me I could go. A whole day wasted, with nothing to show for it – it’s not like we can charge for our time in this business.

The trouble is, these days we really are the only confessors around. Hardly anyone bothers with a priest, and the Hippocratic oath is difficult to take seriously after the Green Wing. Only private bankers really look like they will keep a secret. That’s the Swiss marketing machine for you. The odd thing is, it seems to work. Occasionally I try to wheedle client gossip out of my colleagues, but they always turn grave and say things like well of course I can’t go into that, now, can I?

Makes you want to explode sometimes, the confidentiality. Some days I long to get up on my desk and yell the truth about that fat bastard in Italy who’s been emotionally torturing his daughter.

Perhaps that’s the real attraction of writing an anonymous blog.