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.