Amygdala

It came to me that something had gone wrong when I was in Tokyo. Well I’ve had that realization several times much closer to home, often led to it by the therapeutic support of the police, but this time I was hung over and leaning heavily on a podium. For reasons that were clear to no-one, but involved the lack of anyone else willing to do it, I was opening a conference on securities clearing and settlement. It doesn’t matter what securities clearing and settlement are except to say that you’d be happier listening to a man in Carphone Warehouse explain mobile phone tariffs for six hours with than sitting through one session of this terrifying bollocks.

As I cleared my throat, I looked out at the implausibly full room in front of me and that’s when I saw it. Absolutely no women at all. All of us in that room, I’m pretty sure, saw it when I did and we all thought the same two thoughts. First, what the fuck am I doing at a conference on securities clearing and settlement? Second, how in God’s name did I pick a career in which there are no women to leaven the life-sapping vapidity of it all?

Don’t get me wrong. There are women in banking and they get to the top. Robin Saunders raised two kids, had a million dollar wedding and took hip-hop dance lessons while helping WestLB into the securitization market in a very senior capacity. Perhaps it did not end as we all would have hoped, but it’s recently become clear that that wasn’t her fault. Banking is like politics: every career ends in tragedy. It’s just that with banking the tragedy is everyone else’s.

Blythe Masters blasted her way to derivatives stardom and to the best of my knowledge is still there. And there are others who are less interesting and indeed in many cases less photogenic. But in general it seems to me that while women embraced medicine, the law and every other profession, they took one sniff of banking and didn’t like what they smelt. For women perhaps and not so for men, no money is worth that shit.

So, as I sat not listening to a string of men not care about the speeches they hadn’t written, I wondered what other careers I could have chosen that would have been as frighteningly exclusive. Could I have had even less fun with just my fellow man for company? What other depths do women refuse to plumb that men embrace?

I could have been a professional angler. Women don’t fish. Women don’t sit alone in the dark waiting for carp. Women do not go competitive bass hunting and talk about current flow and wind speed and humidity and lure depth. These details seem to glaze them over. Women do not appear to move their entire families to Ireland in pursuit of the elusive tench.

I could’ve become a professional birder. Generally speaking, women are sound enough not to twitch. The virtual collection of rare birds holds no pleasure for them. So much as mention the Siberian Frog Gobbler and they’re off with their friends to enjoy a glass of wine and the pleasures of adult conversation. In the same vein, women do not spot trains or planes. This is birdwatching for people who’ve stripped the collecting tick down to its essence. Why waste time learning the feathers and beaks of a thousand birds when all you need is a book of numbers and a 2B pencil? Why chase up to Orkney from Tolworth four times a week when the machines will come to you? Think of the petrol.

I could have become a full-time yachtsman. Women do not usually race yachts. That is not to say, in this or any other activity, that they could not do it well, and in yachting of course Ellen and Dee have achieved the astounding. But I do sail and I know that normal women were born to be apart from the winching, and the lugging and the freezing and the chafing. For men, carbon fibre and kevlar, titanium and a lack of acceptable toilet facilities are cool and hard and rugby-bath sexy. They love the banter and laugh at the challenge of shitting in a bouncing bucket in a hurricane. Women see through the joys of living like a tramp in a washing machine.

I could’ve been a professional rugby player.

Actually lots of women do play rugby so I’ll move on before I get into trouble. Which is what I did with rugby as I weighed 23 pounds when I was 14.

Best of all, I could have been a pervert. I think I can say with some faith in my facts that woman do not get their bits out in front of you on the tube and invite you to inspect their grubby charms. They don’t groom young boys in internet chatrooms, corrupt choirs or lead scouts into temptation. They don’t get nicknames like ‘Minty’ and fondle your head in maths when you’re 14 and the first blush of peachy down is forming on your pert, young cheeks. Ahem. Women’s mechanisms seem a bit more robust; their clockwork has fewer bugs.

So there it is. I could have picked any of those careers and I’d probably have met as many women as I did as the parasite’s perfect parasite. Yes, you have more chance of meeting a women who wants to talk to you if you jump out at her from a bush naked than you do if you write about investment banking. What do you do about it? Well, you do what the bankers themselves do. You take the cash and you tell yourself that when you’ve saved enough, then you will start living. And in the meantime you hope that the plane taking you home from the conference doesn’t hit the Atlantic with you shouting, “I knew it. I just knew it. I’ve become the kind of man I’ve always hated and it’s going to kill me. Perfect.”