| Dear Mom, Sitting here in Alastair's waiting room crammed in with 224 other bankers, all whistling for their money back or preparing to wave it goodbye, I get overwhelmed by this wave of nostalgia or maybe it is nausea, it carries me back to a day when I am fresh out of banking college and have my first posting at head office, licking stamps. I can see the customer comes in to talk to the V/P who looks after his account, they shoot the breeze a while and pour some Bourbon, and then the customer asks the V/P how much he knows about the hog-rearing business, and the V/P says: Not much, so the customer tells him: Well, learn some more, you're in it on Monday. Later on I find out how this feels, I get into all sorts of businesses with the Last National's money, real estate, naturally, but also all those Boeings in the Arizona desert, and a tanker fleet until we think to pull the plugs out and bill Lloyd's of London, and the Casas de los Gatos motel chain in Bulimia we trade our sovereign debt for, but never until now do I figure to find myself part owner of the longest and deepest hole ever to have $9 billion poured down it. |