I must close the mind to these things. Last week I was fettered uselessly to the desk from dawn till dusk by the absence of my back-up and was therefore untroubled by what, to the diseased mind, looks like the provocative semi-nudity of the office girls of Chancery Lane.
Yesterday, conscious of what I might see on my way to lunch and the demons with whom I’d be wrestling later, I deliberately took the closest option for lunch. But even that 100 yard stroll was punctuated with enough thought-crimes to have embarrassed a sex offender on day release.
"Don’t reach over so to select that sandwich on the top shelf and strain further the fabric already tightly drawn across that chest," you mentally beg of the woman beside you at the chiller.
"Don’t throw your head back when you laugh and expose that scrotum-tightening gulch even more than you are right now," you plead of the girl having coffee just over there. It was like being the former head of the IMF (without the responsibility — or the glamour, for that matter) for five minutes.
The association of hot weather and sexual turbulence is a recurrent one, not just in my life. Byron, for example, with whom I have much in common — like breathing and being mad, bad and dangerous to read — and who, if he were alive now, would undoubtedly be a sales-trader in the City, wrote that "what men call gallantry and gods adultery is much more common where the climate’s sultry".
This is as sound a rationale I have found for continuing to live in the mild, moist climate of Britain. There are no benefits derived from a spell of unseasonably fine weather if you’re stuck in an office all day and all it means is a sweaty commute. At this time of year, by the time you’ve negotiated public transport home and cracked open the Meursault or the Château Sarsons, the sun has dipped below the crenellations of the next door neighbour’s defensive Leylandii and white wine doesn’t look so enticing unless it’s backlit by sunshine.
As for mornings, they’ve been a miserable trudge through orange sodium street lighting for weeks already and for months to come. I’m ready for the long, dark winter of the soul. You can walk to any sandwich shop for miles around and the female form is swaddled in fleeces and bundled in overcoats that do not trouble the prurient mind.
But if summer’s over, surely business must be picking up? Tuesday evening it did. I’d been the recipient of a Large Unauthorised Discretionary Order in HFK that promised to sort my week out if it traded up to the limit just above the previous closing price and the order kicked in. A tailwind from Wall Street and this would be enough on its own if not for an acquisition from James List then at least for a case of Coques Rotes and a cocker spaniel puppy for my daughter.
I checked the markets before I went to sleep. The S&P rallied 400 points in the last 45 minutes of trading. Kerching. I went to sleep counting not sheep but tiny little HFK dollars as this order ticked over quietly and the commission accumulated slowly while I slept.
I did something I wouldn’t normally do when I arrived this morning and opened the Order Management System — which normally is largely irrelevant to my requirements. Nothing done. HFK closed. Chung Yeung festival or some such malarkey. FFS.
I was in the process of the old "Doh! Sorry, I didn’t realise the market was closed" outgoing call, that trademark of the dozy sales-trader, when Fate’s trebuchet of turds lobbed one of the unbuffable variety into my lap.
It was an incoming call about somebody else’s order that had gone awry, executed by someone in Asia who, being eight hours ahead, had not unreasonably already scarpered to the nearest karaoke lounge. The inquest into the buy order that went limit up in our faces and the sell order that went limit down proceeded to occupy most of the morning, preventing me from being productive elsewhere/giving me a good excuse for being unproductive elsewhere (delete as appropriate). This was a cowpat that could not be polished and the only thing worse than your own cowpat is somebody else’s. The consequences of such horror show trade queries are always asymmetrically skewed to the downside.
The grief thing
Today was the financial equivalent of the day Diana Spencer died, that other wholly inappropriate carnival of woe. I just saw a headline: "Steve Jobs dies: latest". What can there be that’s later than that? Of course, the death of anyone is sad (with notable exceptions like Anwar al-Awlaki) but I don’t understand the public expression of intense grief for someone you don’t know and haven’t met.
Are people’s lives really so bereft of meaning that losers must find it in an entrepreneur about as far removed from them as a billionaire inventor of gadgets could possibly be? Maybe if I didn’t possess the technological aptitude of a block of cheddar cheese I would be more moved.
Financial news bulletins all day have been showing images of Steve Jobs in the trademark black turtleneck, holding up a gadget while someone plinks on a piano or a funereal dirge groans in accompaniment to manipulate you and let you know you’re supposed to feel sad. I used to work black turtlenecks in the early 1990s until premature hair loss gave me the look of
a circumcised penis — and so I stopped wearing them.
One thing about Jobs I did admire was his conviction that if told it would be his last day alive, he would spend it working on his Apple gadgets. I wish I could say the same about neo-classical sales-trading.
If the reaction to the passing of Jobs is like this can you imagine what will happen when Warren Buffett finally takes his last sip of cherry coke, does his last deal and shuffles off to the great big trading floor in the sky. If Steve Jobs were the City’s Lady Di, Warren Buffett will be its Queen Mother.