A quick call into one SSA desk to find out what the market was caring about this week at first seemed to be a bit of a bad line, with some rather odd noises coming through our earpiece.
“Should we call back and hope we get a better connection?” we asked.
“Oh no, that’s just me eating a pineapple — very Caribbean,” replied the banker, in an accent that was as far away from Caribbean as you can get.
Other members of public sector teams have been tackling the onset of cold weather with more defensive tactics. After Blog confessed to suspecting a frequent cougher on a plane of giving them the lurgy, one head of SSA syndicate said he was worried by a snuffling colleague. Blog suggested some sort of face mask.
“Oh no,” he declared confidently, “I’m in full-on surgical kit.”
Reports that a fake doctor is plaguing the streets of Canary Wharf insisting on bandaging everyone and everything were unsubstantiated at the time of going to press.
Others are turning to the one sure way to make the longer nights go faster: alcohol.
One ex-pat, hailing from the US and therefore predictably obsessed with quintessentially British supermarket Marks & Spencer gushed: “There are already mulled wine spice packs on the shelves. I bought seven.” (He later recanted after Blog asked for some).
But supermarket tactics were not to the liking of another SSA big gun. “I can see Christmas things in the aisles already,” he seethed down the phone. “The Christmas period begins in December. We haven’t even had Halloween yet. This would never happen in the supermarché back home.”
That did give us a great idea for a Halloween costume though — we could dress up as Tesco’s balance sheet.
But all the efforts to bring warmth to the office were later trumped by Blog stalwart Nigel Owen of National Australia Bank, who wasn’t happy with just creating an imaginary feeling of warmth — he’s actually set to jet off to Australia and New Zealand.
The trip’s for business rather than pleasure, but we’re sure Owen won’t mind switching autumn for spring and a raincoat for a pair of business shorts.
On the issuer side, flying the flag for summer was the funding team at the International Finance Corporation.
Marcin Bill, Andrew Cross, Ben Powell and Koji Yasuno competed in a Tough Mudder last week and we have a post-run picture of the boys in their action shorts — and an awful lot of mud — to prove it.
But there are rumours that it may have been Photoshopped. A source tells us that Ben survived the recent World Bank/International Monetary Fund gig solely on pickled onion Monster Munch that conference attendees from the UK smuggled over for him — yet in the photo, he doesn’t look out of breath at all.
Perhaps Monster Munch could turn out to be the superfood the world’s athletes have been waiting for.
