7.55AM Catch Tube at Holloway Road. I notice a higher than usual preponderance of very pretty East Asian and East European girls using iPods or MP3 players. My Law of Good-looking-Girls-Will-Have-iPods is once again reaffirmed. The iPod is a piece of armoury used by attractive younger women to ward off unwanted and random advances. It is the modern western equivalent of the veil. It makes the wearer more aloof and remote and who can blame them? Today I am listening to Rousseau’s Confessions as read by Gerard Depardieu. My French is not what it used to be but the effect is pleasing. I look across at a girl, perhaps Finnish or Icelandic – her hair is ash blonde and her features pointy and vaguely Asiatic despite her snow-like complexion. She is the ash princess. While listening to Gerard I imagine myself in wig, ruffle and waistcoat, in an altogether different kind of carriage, with only Olga and myself being thrown from side to side and the sound of tube on tracks replaced by wheels clattering on cobbles. New technology can be the key to escaping the hi-tech era if used imaginatively. I put Gerard on pause temporarily and above the din of the moving tube can just about perceive that Olga is listening to some kind of thrash metal, which in hindsight should have been obvious considering her all-black designer punk attire and cool to moody frozen expression. Just the kind of girl I doubt I could ever fuck, and all the more suited to my harmless attention. I imagine us together flying into the volcano with Wagner blasting on her headphones. She is the daughter of Vulcan, and he has been a metal fan since at least the Vikings.
8.43AM Arrive at Fenchurch Street and make my way to the office. The digital news screen at the station shows pictures of the volcano, followed by images from a crime scene with American police milling around, and a mug shot of an infamous banker, Harvey Magdoff, chairman of Moneybank. ‘Bank chief shot, critical’, says the headline. I am surprised it has taken this long. Magdoff was the most notorious banker in a nest of notorious bankers. I once worked for the magazine The Financier as a junior reporter, in the days before the Great Crash. I used to interview people like Magdoff, and write fawning profiles on overpaid suits who worked in huge glass towers in the City, and lived in big Georgian houses in the country or in those Thames-side apartments built in the 1980s. Magdoff had been charged with financial fraud along with his firm a few months back for doing something that was considered perfectly legitimate only a couple of years back. The official investigation was due to begin this week, with a Congressional panel calling witnesses to give testimony, including Magdoff himself. Who had shot him was not clear. What was clear was that the investigation and any subsequent trial would have to be postponed, perhaps indefinitely.
This had very little to do with me, except indirectly, in that I had lost several thousand pounds in the crash after foolishly trying my hand at playing the markets. And my flat in Holloway was worth something less than the price I paid for it since the subprime crisis burst the property bubble like a naughty child with a balloon and a pin. I had at times fantasised about shooting bankers, but the only gun I had ever fired was in a computer game called Grand Theft Auto IV. In truth I preferred games with swords or rusty Colt 45s than the usual shoot’em ups, and I had sold my Xbox as part of my economy drive and my efforts to start living a purer, simpler life.
8.58AM. Buy an Americano at Leo’s. It’s not actually called Leo’s but I call it that, as Leo, a Romanian who pretends to be Italian, is the main reason I go there. Leo makes out like we are lovers, and is relentlessly playful and cheeky. He always makes pointed references to my editor, Max; by suggesting he is sexually attracted to me. I play along and allow him to rib me. When I first encountered Leo I did not appreciate his game and became defensive. I realised later this was futile and, as long as you played along, it was actually quite enjoyable. Leo’s attitude to life seemed to be psychologically very healthy. He did his job well, and he did not take life too seriously. His boss was a tiresome, humourless nag, but Leo did not let it get to him, being subtly subversive in a way that his boss was too boneheaded to register. I had much to learn from Leo. I could see how his juvenile innuendos at the expense of his regulars were an act of love; they forced us out of our protective shells and compelled us to engage with his banter. All were equal under Leo’s deprecating fire and only fools would take umbrage when he asked you, smirking with eyebrows raised, if you would like a sausage with your egg mayo bagel. "Come on, I know you like the sausage."
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