The high price of getting bored too easily

These days I am officially a pensioner, thanks to the extraordinary diligence of an Australian bank.

They went to the trouble of employing a detective agency to track me down in rural Northumberland and ask whether I was the same Keith Hann who, in 1978, started work for a London stockbroking partnership they had since acquired.

My first place of work in the City, happily long since demolished

It seemed needlessly cruel to point out that they could have answered this question much more cheaply by just clicking on my LinkedIn profile.

They kindly sent me a useful lump sum to help celebrate my 60th birthday last month, and started making monthly payments into my bank account; which, though very modest, do at least exceed my income from journalism.

It led me to wonder how much better off I would have been if I had stuck with the broking game and been entitled to retire on a full pension, instead of the small stipend accrued through five years of not particularly well-paid work.

I gave it up in 1983 because it bored me. I thought a change of scene from London to Edinburgh might cure this, which just goes to show how phenomenally stupid I am. I lasted a day and a quarter at my wee desk in the New Town.

Then I somehow got a job at a London financial PR agency that was, with the benefit of hindsight, an earthly paradise.

My second place of work in the City: built nearly 300 years before the first one, but happily still there

You could smoke at your desk, and almost every room contained a cupboard stocked with life-threatening quantities of alcohol.

Lunch started each day at 12.30 sharp and concluded around nightfall. To cap it all, many of my colleagues were beautiful women and, for the first and last time in my life, not all of them wept with laughter when I subtly enquired whether there might be some chance of sleeping with them.

I got bored with that, too, which clearly demonstrates a fatal lack of judgement.

Stockbroking had been an odd choice of career for someone who was practically innumerate until Clive Sinclair invented the pocket calculator in 1972. To be honest, my main reason for choosing it was the Gamages Christmas adverts in the old Meccano magazine.

Each year they used to advertise a range of Hornby Dublo trains and Meccano sets, with the most expensive preceded (in lieu of a drum roll) by the words “And, if Daddy is a stockbroker …”

I always wanted a top of the range Meccano set, so it seemed a logical move. Added to which, I came onto the job market as a terminally bored PhD student just at the time when City firms were beginning to think they should recruit more people who were, on paper, academically bright. A marked contrast with their traditional intake of the dimmest sons of the existing partners, supplemented by retired Army officers from decent regiments.

I had remained at Cambridge to pursue a doctorate because I was too lazy and disorganised to find a proper job when I graduated. Not for me the quiet tap on the shoulder that came the way of one good friend who had tried and failed in the examination for entry to the Foreign Office.

Our tutor invited him for a sherry, commiserated on his disappointment and asked whether he might be “interested in serving his country in another way?”

Not being the sharpest knife in the box, my pal asked what exactly this meant. Half an hour later he was in the college bar buying drinks all round. “Great news, lads! I’m going to be a spy!”

No eyebrows were visibly raised but he heard no more, and very slowly it dawned on him that he might have failed some sort of test.

Reading the Russian archive reports this week on the low opinion they held of their famous Cambridge spies, as an incompetent bunch of hopeless drunks, I can’t help wondering why both the British and Soviet secret services ignored me all those years ago.

I was a mentally unstable borderline alcoholic with zero judgement, at the right university. Why on earth did they not fight to snap me up?

And what sort of pension might I be collecting now if only they had?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Hann Perspective: In Defence of the Business Lunch

According to Kingsley Amis, who knew a thing or two about English, the most depressing words in the language are “Shall we go straight in?” Uttered on arrival at a club or restaurant, to suggest that lunch might be commenced without one or more appetite-enhancing and conversation-stimulating alcoholic sharpeners.

Sir Kingsley Amis

Evelyn Waugh, as I recall, suffered a similar sinking feeling when asked “red or white?”, implying that the table was not to be graced with an ample sufficiency of both, doubtless followed by something sticky to accompany pudding.

We must consider it a mercy that neither of these great writers lived long enough to observe what has become of the British business lunch in 2011. So you will just have to make do with me.

I am perhaps unusual in having embarked on a City career less because I cared about money and more because I really enjoyed a first class lunch. True, I was initially dazzled by the wealth of the partners at the stockbroking firm where I started work. But I soon realised that this had nothing to do with their professional endeavours. They had simply inherited tons of the stuff, and did not have the intellectual resources to fill their days without going to an office and losing some of their cash on dodgy share tips.

Stockbrokers' annual sports day

But they certainly knew how to put on a good lunch. I have fond memories of the chief executive of one major British business falling over backwards in his chair towards the end of a well-lubricated discussion with his shareholders. Though it was not this mishap that prevented my colleagues from following my earnest (and, for once, accurate) recommendation to pile into the company’s shares.

“We couldn’t possibly, Keith. Didn’t you see? The chap’s a wrong un. He was wearing brown shoes with a grey suit.”

It was on such laughable principles that the City of London operated in the long-gone days of gentlemanly capitalism, when stockbrokers and stockjobbers were hereditary asylums for less intelligent younger sons and everything stopped for a three-hour lunch, after which it might well be prudent not to return to the office.

Then came “Big Bang” 25 years ago, the end of so many of the City’s quirky traditions and the entry of American and European investment banks. This brought a massive extension of working hours and the rapid erosion of the business lunch. By now working in financial PR, I made it my mission to try and keep the keep the flame alive.

Partly because, like many Englishmen, I start out with the handicap of being at least two units of alcohol below par. That is what it takes to kick-start my still limited abilities in the field of small talk. Similarly, I have always found sharing a bottle of wine over a decent lunch invaluable in building and sustaining good relationships between business leaders, commentators and financiers.

But along comes Gordon Gekko pronouncing that “lunch is for wimps” and soon everyone wants to spend their short midday break in the gym. Forcing the PR man to lower his aspirations to engineering a quick and inevitably dull meeting over a cup of coffee. Decaffeinated for preference, obviously.

Gordon Gekko

Now you might say “And a good thing, too,” bearing in mind the well-publicised risks to health from alcohol. Yet there is no evidence that the demise of the traditional business lunch has done anything to reduce Britain’s ever-increasing overall booze intake.

And you might consider it hypocritical to argue that chief executives should be enjoying a glass or two of wine during the working day when their HR departments would no doubt descend like the proverbial ton of bricks on any junior employee who returned to the office the worse for wear.

I, too, accept that there are sensible limits. I would not want to receive the professional attentions of a heart surgeon or taxi driver who had sunk the best part of a bottle of wine before arriving at their place of work.

But at the higher levels of business, finance, the media and politics, I remain firmly convinced that the old-fashioned extended lunch was a force for good. Would newspapers have needed to hack so many mobile phones in the days when they could gently persuade people to blurt out their secrets over a few glasses of Chassagne Montrachet and a nicely grilled Dover sole?

And what did the sober, gym-honed, working-all-hours bankers of the twenty-first century bring us? The sub-prime mortgage crisis and the near (and possibly yet to come) collapse of the entire global financial system.

Instead of being chained to their desks dreaming up ever-more bafflingly complex financial products, they would surely be much more safely employed sitting in restaurants browsing and sluicing in the humane and civilised company of entrepreneurs, executives, journalists and PR advisers.

Keith Hann is a PR consultant who feels that the old ways were often best

www.keithhann.com

Originally published in nebusiness magazine, The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.