I tried, I really did, right to the bitter end. No column has made more effort than Any Other Business to spot pinpoints of light on this year’s dark economic horizon. If there was a Spectator Optimist of the Year award, I’d walk it. But with the Chancellor and the Governor drowning out the carol singers with what has become a dirge-duet about the long, hard and winding road to recovery — and with evidence even I can’t deny of an autumn setback after the late summer bounce — my self-appointed role in the national conversation has begun to look more eccentric than ever. All I can do at this stage is invite you to charge your glass for a toast or two, and offer my Christmas recipe for staying cheerful against the odds.
Here goes. First — this might sound a bit odd, I know — wear bedsocks. They guarantee a refreshing extra half-hour’s sleep because you’re not woken by cold feet. You can even reset the heating to come on later, making a useful saving to spend on the rest of this recipe and other diversions; if you’re a pensioner, you can blow your Winter Fuel Payment on lingerie and recreational drugs.
Next, offer a home to a golden retriever. They’re infectiously happy, surprisingly cheap to run, will impress your friends with party tricks — mine likes tossing live hedgehogs — and will agree with anything you say so long as it has enough emphatic consonants to sound like ‘biscuit’. ‘Vince Cable’s a Trotskyite!’ Wag, of course he is. ‘Wicked bankers should be made to sweep the streets!’ Of course they should, wag-wag, where’s the biscuit?
Having got the basics right at home, book a table at Brasserie Zédel in Sherwood Street off Piccadilly Circus. It’s huge, stylish, bustling, astonishingly good value — and all the smart people you’d really hate to sit next to are too busy power-lunching at the Wolseley up the road. Make sure your table’s in the middle of the room, and invite the most beautiful person you know (who could be your spouse, of course, unless you want to live dangerously) to join you, so other lunchers think you’re someone off the telly.
But don’t linger over liqueurs. Head smartly across town to the Aldwych Theatre for a matinee of Top Hat, a brilliant pastiche of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie with tunes by Irving Berlin, rekindling the madcap escapism that kept America’s spirits high as the Great Depression dragged into 1935. Sing along to ‘There may be troubles ahead …’ — which actually comes from
Follow the Fleet of 1936, but they’ve bunged it in this show anyway.
So far so good, and the day’s far from over. To collect you and your companion from the theatre, sustain the living–dangerously theme by booking a pair of motorbike taxis. I tried one last week and it’s a buzz.
‘If my wing mirrors go through this gap, so will your knees,’ shouted the pilot as we hurtled along gridlocked Holborn. Before mounting the pillion, impress the crowd by saying something like: ‘City Airport, my good man, the gate closes in 25 minutes and we’re due in Barcelona for dinner with my hedge-fund partners.’
But actually you’ll want him to take you home, where you can throw biscuits for the retriever, slip into his’n’hers bedsocks, toast whatever 2013 may bring in warming mugs of brandy-laced cocoa, and sing once more with feeling: ‘Before they ask us to pay the bill/ and while we still have that chance/ Let’s face the music and dance.’
Absent friends
Wearing my obituarist’s hat under a paper one out of a cracker, I raise a glass of mulled wine to those who died in the last year having left a mark on the financial world. The careers of the City cohort now marching towards the Pearly Gates peaked, in most cases, before the market transformations of the 1980s and ’90s brought to prominence a new breed of self-promoters and fast talkers; what was most distinctive about the old guard was how tight-lipped they were.
Morgan Grenfell chairman Tim Collins — having survived an encounter with mustard gas as a young naval officer during the second world war — was ‘much admired for sound judgment expressed in few words’. ‘Low-key’ Stock Exchange chairman Sir Andrew Hugh Smith was ‘widely acknowledged to have done an excellent job of holding that bruised organisation together’, and also commended for ‘calmness in dealing with agitated members’ as chairman of Brooks’s. Sir David Money-Coutts, seventh-generation head of his family bank, had a kind heart but ‘a reserved manner, and was a stickler for exactness’.
Bank of England enforcer Sir George Blunden needed only ‘an avuncular look [and] a dry sense of humour’ to exercise his authority. Lord Rockley of Kleinwort Benson ‘never raised his voice, wasted words or offered a hurried answer but, one competitor acknowledged, “When he did speak it was always good sense.” ’ Quiet reflectiveness was among a catalogue of qualities that turned out to be missing in the more recent generation of financiers.
A Happier New Year
In Nancy Mitford’s forgotten but very funny 1932 novel Christmas Pudding, Lady Bobbin’s family lunch party is disrupted by a furious argument that kicks off when her sister the Duchess of St Neots declares: ‘Yes, the day of the capitalist is now over, and a jolly good thing too… If, in a few years’ time, people like us have no money left for luxuries we shall all, as a consequence, lead simpler and better lives. More fresh air, more sleep, more time to think and read. No night clubs, no Ritz, no Blue Train, less rushing about. And the result of that will be that we shall all be much happier. Don’t you agree?’
Any Other Business readers, braced for five more years of austerity and tax grabs, may like to debate that proposition over their own Christmas puddings. But I hope you don’t end the festive feast ‘trembling with fury’ like Lady Bobbin. Indeed, I hope you rise from the table amiably strengthened for the challenges of 2013. I’ll do my best to help you keep your pecker up.
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