Mostly, I work at home. But once every couple or weeks I visit my client in the City of London and, apart from the commute, I love it. It’s a newly redeveloped building, everything STINKS of new, it’s all white leather and orange scatter cushions, sculptured floral arrangements, wall to wall glass and achingly hip kitchens. Best of all, I have an office. With my name on it. With a door. That shuts. And no one ever, ever asks me for a drink or a snack and if they did I would point them in the direction of the embarrassingly over-stocked kitchen down the hall with Coke, Sprite etc etc on tap, every tea under the sun, coffee the same, mineral water (sparkling AND still of course) blah blah blah. The place is is dripping with cash. And I love it.
The photo above is the view from my office. Actually it’s 50% of the view from my office as alas the iphone camera just isn’t wide enough to get the whole lot in. As views go it’s pretty stunning, and somewhat distracting. Certainly it’s an improvement over the last office I had which, whilst a corner office (KUDOS), was directly over Blackfriars train station. I could see the Thames, but only by wedging myself in to a corner and standing on tiptoes. Not really a room with a view.
I don’t miss London. I lived and worked there for oh-so many years butI don’t miss it, not even one little bit. But I do enjoy working in the City, and I don’t think I will ever lose the adrenalin rush of it all. I’ve worked in the City since 1992, when it was still (just) awash with the late 80s flood of money and excess, greed and naked ambition were the name of the game. Personally I’ve never ‘really’ been part of that scene, I’ve just skirted around the edges but have thoroughly enjoyed being part of it, observing it and (getting lucky to be honest) riding the back of it.
The City feels so different now than it did 20 years ago, and I feel so old to remember the days when we all drank wine at lunchtime as standard. And pushing off to the champagne bar at 1pm on a Friday and not going back to the office was expected, and all charged to the company card. These days it’s considered positively DARING to risk a glass of wine at lunchtime. I attended a business lunch this week where one of our number pretty much forced herself to have a glass with lunch so our guest didn’t feel uncomfortable drinking alone.
The same..but different…that’s how the City is for me….one square mile packed full of money and memories. I’m hopeless with maps and have such a poor sense of direction, but I can reel off my memories of every street and every landmark building and every tube station around the City without pausing. My own, personal topography of the City involves places like St Swithin’s Lane…near Bank…where I traipsed across London to one Saturday morning to buy text books from Bankers’ Books in 1990…only to find that, durrr, everything is shut in the City on a Saturday…where I had lunch with a lovely friend who subsequently died whilst heavily pregnant with Diggy…where I had lunch this week and kept glancing over at the table where I’d lunched with my friend and wished it had all turned out different.
St Paul’s…name of a tube station on the Central Line where I got off at for 6 weeks or so for one job early 1990. Every day I looked up at the big church nearby and thought, ‘Wow! That’s so big! It looks just like St Paul’s!’. 6 weeks in someone told me, quietly, that it actually WAS St Paul’s. It took me 15 years of working in the City before I actually stepped foot in the place.
Monument…in theory a station you can change to at Bank. This is nonsense. A huge long walk underground in tunnels soon teaches you it’s quicker and more pleasant to get above ground and walk there.
Poulty…not chickens but the name of a street in the heart of the City. I worked there very early on my City days when my skirts were short and my glasses the size of mixing bowls. I wore striped City shirts with silk knot cufflinks and hung out with the traders. Thankfully the Mixing Bowl glasses put them off and I didn’t have to marry any of them.
The Bishopsgate bombing, the ring of plastic, no bins anywhere, Canon Street awash with young men in bright jackets, May Day riots, being locked down in the office on 9/11, the same for 7/7, sitting on the grass outside St Paul’s without a care in the world gossiping with a new friend..sitting in the same place 10 years later and weeping as she told me she could never have children…
And on it goes…on and on…my personal map of the City, which bears no relation to an actual map or even how to get from one place to another. It’s all about personal memories and anecdotes really. In the mid 90s I worked for a firm of stockbrokers who, out of pity, continued to employ a man so old he looked like must have personally been acquainted with Dickens. He’s shamble in mid morning, the read the paper, sleep, go out for lunch, sleep and go home. He hoarded food in the drawers of his desk and attracted mice. I sometimes wonder if I might become one of those City relics? It’s been a long time since I saw anyone in the City wearing a bowler hat but I have done in the past. THAT is how old I am, and how long I’ve worked in the City.
The fancy building I now work in used to be the London Stock Exchange. In the Old Days I used to hang out at the reception delivering documents from listed companies who were announcing ‘stuff’ that they were up to which the SE needed to be informed of. Basically i was an overpaid, under skirted courier. These days my skirts are longer, actually mostly trousers, and I’m paid ‘appropriately’. But the irony of the circle of life…the circle of City life isn’t lost on me. Once I hung out round the back, now I’m swanking it way up high in an office. That’s what age and experience does for you.
A more helpful sign of the times is that I was once sent home for wearing trousers to the office, that was in 1993. I was sneered at, laughed at, addressed as MrSpud and was eventually sent home to change my clothes and I did so feeling utterly ashamed. If any man attempted to do the same these days it would be me sneering and laughing at him. Not all change is bad.
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