Although I don’t consider my life achievements
to amount to anything extraordinary, in writing this canned autobio I am finding
that I seem to have covered some quite varied terrain. As such, it is expanding beyond the
initial estimate of three posts, but I promise it will lead up to a climax
before Christmas. In the meantime, here’s a brief account of how I spent my
twenties and how I was sucked into the world of energy trading.
And so I
went to Canada. I had never been outside Europe before and never flown on an
aeroplane. I could scarcely imagine what it would be like to fly through the
sky at such a speed and worried that the plane might crash. A few of my friends
had been on planes before, but not many. This was in 1992 and I was 21.
I landed in
Toronto and went to stay with some people who had some kind of ancient and tenuous
relationship to my family. My mother had told me that everyone in north America
wore suits and had impeccable manners, but it turned out she was thirty years
out of date. I was picked up at the airport by the son of the family, a cowboy-hatted
truck driver, who greeted me with ‘Wanna get some hookers?’.
They lived
in the dreary suburbs of Mississauga and the father of the family was a cop. They
were hospitable and I hung around for about a week, but was eager to escape. On
my last day staying with the family the cop man had an all day whisky drinking
party in his basement with his cop buddies and we all watched a video of him
taking part in a long car chase, filmed by a news helicopter, and which ended
in a shootout and the suspect crashing his car. It was a well-worn video tape
and the cops cheered at all the right moments as if they had seen it many times
before.
I headed
for northern Ontario, hiring a canoe in Algonquin National Park and setting off
with my tent into the great outdoors. At night I could hear the wolves howling
as I quivered in my tent and it was the closest to a wilderness experience I
had ever had. But after a few days a fear of bears drove me back to
‘civilization’ and in any case I was covered in mosquito bites and half-starved.
From there
I headed south to the border and crossed over in the US at Niagara Falls. I
then spent a couple of months journeying around the country, mostly on trains
but sometimes by Greyhound bus, taking in Boston, Cape Cod, California (with a
day trip to Mexico), New Orleans and Chicago. I ran out of money in Chicago but
still had a bus ticket to New York. Penniless, I spent five days walking around
that great city with nothing to eat apart from what some girls I had met in
Boston gave me. I even spent a night in Central Park but managed to blag myself
some free floor space in a hostel in Harlem for a few nights after that. Eventually I rang my parents and pleaded with
them to send me some cash, which they did, and spent the last few days of my
trip eating out in some style and seeing all the sights that cost money.
All in all
it was an interesting trip, albeit a lonely one. The places I got on best with were
Cape Cod and New Orleans (I went for one night and ended up staying for two
weeks). I also enjoyed visiting California, although found it difficult to meet
people there.
Back in
England I embarked on my final year at university. The economics course I was on
became less interesting to me and had descended into advanced macro and micro economic
theory and statistics. Gone were the hippyish professors from the earlier years
who had taught political economy and philosophy and instead were sharp-suited
hard-nosed men who took no nonsense from the students. The saving grace of all
this was a module I took in oil economics, taught by a humorous Nigerian man
who managed to enliven what on paper had looked to be a dull course.
Just before
I took my final exams the phone rang. My sister told me that our mother, who
had been suffering from cancer, had taken a turn for the worse. She drove up
from Southampton that day, collecting me in London, but by the time we reached
Solihull my mother had passed away. Her death was a great sorrow to me, made
all the worse by the fact that the only person who seemed to have known the
full extent of her sickness was my mother herself.
I took my
exams and got a lower second degree. Not exactly great, but okay. I had no idea
what I was going to do next but managed to get an interview at a merchant bank
in London. At the interview they said I’d be working one week in London, one week
on Wall Street and earning a high salary. At the end of the interview they
asked me how I was doing and I said I’d just been to my mother’s funeral and my
throat froze up and I couldn’t speak anymore. This was probably a major faux
pas and they looked at me with their cold hard capitalist eyes and offered no
sympathy. I heard the next day that I didn’t get the job, which was probably a
good thing.
Instead I
went to France and worked in a train factory, halfway down the Atlantic coast in
La Rochelle for three months as an intern. My father by now was a director at
GEC in the UK and could pull strings. I worked in the purchasing office of the
factory that made the high speed TGV trains and also the trains that would go
through the still-being-bored Channel Tunnel.
The job was
dull and perfunctory. I had to learn all the technical terms for train parts in
French and make sure they were translated correctly on purchase orders. I also
had to answer the phone, which I dreaded on behalf of my half-baked French, and
deal with various supply problems. Apart from the dull nature of the work
though I enjoyed my time there. Lunches were long leisurely affairs with
excellent food and wine. I would spend weekends cycling around the beautiful
nearby Isle de Ré and generally living the French good life and wondering why
people in England didn’t live the same way.
It was in
France that I picked up a dog-eared copy of Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This book had a profound effect on
me, opening up my mind for the first time to the fundamental cyclical nature of
reality. This led to a fascination with Buddhism and opened up my doors of
perception a crack. What particularly appealed to me was the relief I felt that this book was telling me that the world was not two dimensional and flat, which is the myth we are fed from birth, but in fact was infinitely rich and packed full of hidden dimensions that could be experienced and explored not just in the sacred but also the profane. It is the only book I have ever re-read the moment I finished it.
When I got
back to England, for reasons that are still unclear to me, I decided to do a
master’s degree in IT at Warwick University. By doing so I could live at home
with my father, who was still struggling with grief. As soon as I started the
course though I knew I had made a mistake. I had to wear a suit on campus and
missing a single day meant expulsion from the course. Nearly everyone else on
the course was from the Far East, sponsored by the governments of Malaysia,
China or Japan. As such they were the cream of the IT whizz kids and they were
expected to get perfect results.
The course,
although IT based, was business orientated. For my project I designed a
shopping trolley that scanned items that you put in, eliminating the need for
cashiers. We had been taught that this kind of thing was the future.
Unfortunately my tutor was not impressed, saying that such a shopping cart had
already been invented and that I was copying it. I thought, screw you, and before I left the campus
that afternoon dropped a note into course head’s pigeon hole saying that I was
dropping out. Nine months and a whole lot of cash wasted.
I applied
to go and work as a volunteer in Canada, doing forest conservation work in
British Colombia. I sent them the cash and just before I left they asked me to
confirm that I was a Christian and that I would refrain from doing un-Christian
things at their camp. I didn’t bother going. Instead I went to Thailand with my
good friend Toby, whom I had worked at the Treasury with.
Thailand
was a major eye opener. It’s fair to say that I probably experienced the last dying
moments of that country in its ancient and traditional form, because almost overnight,
I was to discover, the country was vandalized on a grand scale. When I was
there it was still all dirt roads, colourful buses, friendly people and street
food. At the end of the trip we stayed in the small hamlet of Hat Rin on the
island of Koh Pha Ngan, and to get there we had to negotiate probably one of
the worst dirt roads in the world.
Although it was already a backpacker magnet famous for its full moon
parties, there were probably no more than 100 beds to be had, mostly in
thatched wooden huts on the beach. These days, I am told, there are some 50,000
hotel bedrooms and a smooth tarmac road conveys tourists there from the
airport.
Anyway,
after this adventure I developed an insatiable wanderlust. Back in Solihull I
spent the best part of a year unemployed, as there were few jobs to be had in
those days – well, at least the kind of jobs that and economics graduate was expected
to apply for, I could have worked at the local factory where they made Land
Rovers. Instead I did odd jobs for Sam, in London, which usually involved me
driving around the country buying huge wads of Air Mile coupons, which in those
days were transferable, with Sam selling them on at a considerable profit. I read lots of books, notably George Orwell
and Alan Watts. I moved into a shared rented house and managed to get a job as
a customer services clerk at the newly-privatized wing of the gas distribution
network of British Gas.
Like nearly
all office jobs it was yet another exercise in boredom and clock watching. My
job was to deal with large-usage customers who had some form of complaint – the
kind who had already demanded I want to speak
to the manager to some other hapless clerk. It was something I was
considered ideally suited to because of my laid back nature and the fact that I
genuinely didn’t give a damn about (or even understand) the problems of the
angry customers. To me it was all like water on a duck’s back. Memorably, one
man threatened to come down from Manchester and ‘grind my blood and skin into
the office carpet’ because his feckless son had racked up a multi thousand
pound bill by leaving all the appliances on for several weeks while he was on
holiday in some other country.
After a
year of this kind of abuse, and with wanderlust pumping through my veins, I had
saved up enough cash to launch myself on a yearlong adventure. To warm up for
this I decided to travel by bicycle from one end of Britain to the other –
Land’s End in Cornwall to John O’Groats in northern Scotland. I brought a tent
and camped in fields and campsites along the way with a friend.
Shortly
after this I flew to India to meet Toby and plunged myself headlong into a year
of escapades which involved trekking in the Himalayas, travelling around India,
Nepal, Thailand and Malaysia. I contracted some type of strange disease in
Malaysia which saw me bedridden for two weeks and I lost a quarter of my body
weight. When I was on the mend I flew to Australia and spent a number of weeks
recuperating in Perth before embarking on a lengthy trip around the entire
country on a Greyhound bus.
In
Queensland I went out diving on the Great Barrier Reef. On the boat was an
Italian-looking girl from Denmark and, cornily, I brought up a shell from the
deep and offered it to her as a gift. It must have impressed her because she is
now my wife.
As was
becoming a habit of mine I ran out of money and ended up stranded in Sydney. I
wasn’t ready to return yet so I got a job on a Victoria fruit farm and spent
two long months picking two tons of pears a day in a place called Mooroopna aka
Fruit Salad City. The work was mildly
unpleasant due to the pesticides and the snakes and some of the other pickers
were hillbilly alcoholics who would drive around our camping field at night in
their beat-up cars firing shotguns in the air and yeehawing. But this work
enabled me to save up enough money to travel around New Zealand for a month,
spend a couple of weeks in a hut in Fiji and then a week in Los Angeles on my
way home.
Upon my
return home the economy had picked up and I got a job in London’s opulent Covent
Garden working for a small gas marketing firm which had been one of my main clients
at British Gas. Michelle had followed me back and we rented a tiny room in a
large house in Muswell Hill and, later, a larger flat in High Barnet. I would
cycle to work every day through London’s dangerous traffic, a round trip of
about 30 miles. I was only knocked off my bike three times in all my years of
cycling in London; twice by people in taxis opening doors on me and once by a
stoned pizza delivery boy who started crying when he saw me lying on the
pavement. I was never injured.
My job at
the gas marketing company initially was to deal with corporate customers but I
was quickly promoted to the role of energy analyst on a small team that worked
a 24 hour shift. Our job was to figure out when it was profitable to buy and
sell gas, and to operate a private pipeline by remote control. Within a year
the company was taken over by the behemoth PowerGen and I was offered a promotion
if I moved to the company HQ in a lifeless business park in Coventry. They
would give me a good salary, pay for all the costs associated with buying a
house and numerous other benefits if I worked for them for three years. My
other option was to work for a rival firm based in the US but operating in
London. This rapidly expanding company was offering us all huge salaries –
three times what we were currently making – but the word was that there was
something not quite right about it all. Where did all their cash come from?
I opted to
go with the ‘safe’ choice – after all, Coventry and the Midlands was my home
patch. My family and friends were happy that I was ‘making something’ of myself
and that, finally, I seemed to be doing something respectable.
And so I
signed my soul over to the devil and became an energy trader. Still, at least I
didn’t go for the job at the rival company, which went bust some time
afterwards, and could perhaps now be considered as the canary in the coalmine
that warned of greater fraud-related collapses to come. That company was called
Enron.
