As far as I was aware, no one, apart from me, had taken financial reporting as a first choice. On the geek-o-meter, it was the equivalent of taking a night class in Klingon. Most of our group had been forced into the financial reporting by early indecisiveness and then a shortage of space in other, cooler courses, such as crime, fashion, or, most glamorous of all, foreign reporting. Unlike the other students, I had no interest in the latter whatsoever. I couldn’t speak a foreign language and I hated any kind of physical discomfort. I had flown only once before, on a high school skiing trip to Switzerland, and wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. The idea of covering a famine in the Sudan or a civil war in a failed Balkan state was enough to bring me into a hot, prickly sweat. I had never even been camping before—unless I counted one trip to a caravan park in France, or a couple of Cub Scout outings to youth hostels. There were many reasons for my lack of adventurousness, most of them physicaclass="underline" I had a sensitive stomach, for a start, and my forehead turned crimson if exposed to sun. It had been hard enough to endure my family’s annual vacation to France.
I was easily the least cool student at City. Part of the reason was my age—at twenty-one, I was one of the youngest—and another part was the fact that I had never lived in London before. I also looked a mess. My ginger hair, long and greasy when I was an undergraduate, had been cut into a failed attempt at a floppy Hugh Grant–style, and I sported a scruffy ginger beard, an incongruous throwback to the days when I wanted to look like Kurt Cobain. My eyesight, meanwhile, had recently deteriorated to the point at which I had to wear my glasses all the time. My specs were a nasty eighties design, with circular gold rims. I couldn’t yet afford to buy a new designer pair or, even better, switch to contact lenses. My clothes, like my haircut and beard, also confirmed that I was lost in a fashion wilderness somewhere between university and adulthood. I wore steel-capped boots with blue Levi’s and a patterned, designer-label work shirt, tucked in instead of out: an aspirational gesture toward grown-up respectability. My unfortunate concession to the dance music–inspired fashion of the time was a purple jacket, made from a rubbery waterproof material. The ensemble looked ridiculous. Needless to say I was single, and doomed to remain so for a long time.
But even for me, the finance specialty was a compromise. I took it largely because I had a good contact on The Times’s business desk—a result of me winning a student essay writing competition, cosponsored by The Times, on the oxymoronic subject of business ethics. I won the contest almost out of default, because only a handful of other students had bothered entering. I picked up the three-thousand-pound prize from Lindsay Cook, The Times’s petite and fashionable business editor, at a surreal ceremony in London. My plan was to use the cash to pay for the City course, then beg Cook for a job on The Times’s business desk. If she gave me one, I thought, I could later decamp to a more interesting section of the paper.
It was, of course, a catastrophically successful plan.
The finance geeks, being the lepers of the City journalism course, stuck together. There was Jamie, a tall, curly-haired five-a-side footballer who looked like a cross between a Greek god and Jesus Christ; Chris, a scholarly and urbane wit with an intimidating arsenal of degrees from Oxford University; and Georgina, an English rose whom everyone fancied. The honorary member of the group was Glen, an acerbic public schoolboy from Sussex who had already managed to get himself into The Times’s graduate trainee program, allowing him to sit out the competitive shuffle of the other students. I admired Glen because he had a better Hugh Grant hairdo than mine, and also because of his devotion to a grungy Islington nightclub called The Garage, which he patronized every Friday and Saturday night without fail. Glen and I became good friends, sharing many a Garage night together and later a squalid apartment in Clapham.
There were upsides to being a finance geek. One of them was avoiding the dreaded “off-diary” classes given by Linda Christmas. The purpose of the classes was to teach students what hardworking reporters did when there were no scheduled press conferences taking place. In reality, of course, reporters get drunk and smoke cigarettes when there’s nothing to do. But Christmas would give each student a grid reference on a map of London, then instruct us to go to our location and find two “exclusive” stories. “Get out there and talk to people,” was her only advice on how to complete the task. “This is real journalism, folks. This is what you should be doing instead of rewriting press releases.” The grid reference always just happened to be in one of the most violent, piss-reeking slums of the East End. We had to get the stories, write them, and file them—all by 4:00 P.M. the same day. Some students gave up before even getting on the subway, knowing they would have to endure a “private talk” with Christmas—who always power-dressed in monochrome pantsuits—and also probably a public humiliation, in class the next morning. There were, however, more serious consequences to displeasing Christmas: She regularly had lunch with senior newspaper editors, who would quietly inquire about the performance of individual students.
To me, the jargon and statistics of finance reporting were infinitely preferable to Christmas’s “real” journalism. It might not have been a particularly glamorous form of reporting, but it seemed civilized and dignified—like a proper job. There was no way, I concluded, that a business reporter would end up being dispatched to anything more traumatic than a bankruptcy hearing.
“He’s here! The man himself!”
Jamie stood up and raised his pint glass as Robert Cole made his entrance. A low cheer went up from the table. Cole was in his usual outfit: wool suit, trench coat, and hat, the latter resembling a cross between a farmer’s flat cap and a French beret. He carried a leather briefcase. All this made him look like a 1930s Fleet Street caricature, and about a decade older than his real age, which was somewhere in the mid-thirties. The caricature was completed by the fact that Cole smoked Silk Cuts, twirled an umbrella, and affected an ironic Old Etonian accent, calling people “old boy” and “dear chap.” In fact, Cole had grown up in Surrey, and, like me, had gone to Hull University, a redbrick institution favored by socialist-worker types.
“Right-o chaps,” he said, removing his coat and sitting down. “Time to get this over with. Sorry I’m late: deadlines.”
I sucked on my pint of warm Stella Artois and felt my forehead become flushed with alcohol. I was a terrible boozer: a one-pint wonder. But it was important that I fight off the drunkenness. Today’s lunch, after all, was business, not pleasure. It was the culmination of nine months of tutorials, assignments, and disappointing grades, scrawled in red ballpoint across inkjet manuscripts.
Cole, a portly and sometimes moody fellow with a bald pate and round bookish glasses, was a senior financial editor of London’s Evening Standard. He was one of City’s “visiting” tutors, which meant he was a professional journalist who took one day off a week to teach a specialty class. Cole was also our hero. We read his columns in the Standard with awe. Cole’s technique was to tackle tedious money matters using the matey first-person persona of a pub raconteur. He used man-of-the-people metaphors and a slap of irreverence to make complex, technical arguments. Cole’s populist writing style had even produced a book, albeit one with the rather off-putting title of Getting Started in Unit and Investment Trusts. To us, Cole was a genius. He was also a celebrity. And we all desperately wanted his attention.