Riding the downturn

Alternative Investments contemplates a former existence

The sun is my adversary. At dawn and dusk on the atoll, this barren jewel in Juan Fernandez’ crown is almost close to being the postcard paradise people imagine when they say “desert island”. I swim and condition my beard with kelp. I am a grateful gatherer of flotsam donated by the tides.
Occasionally I sport with dolphins, though they’re libidinous and bad tempered beasts, and their teeth are very sharp – as I discovered when a young bull took a fancy to me in early October.

Still, they’re not an entirely bad lot, and remind me curiously of my brief time as an oil consultant at Grenfell & Colegrave. Such larks we had, such larks. Where are those lads now?

Everybody assumes the 1970s were a time of undiluted kitsch and bad dancing – the whole world in purple loon pants, obsessed with the Osmonds and Robert Carrier, but they are wrong! It was a deeply serious era. (The self-important 1990s had as much gravitas as Emma Bunton’s solo career, if you ask me.) The Thatcher revolution began – while the old crone was still dreaming of stealing children’s milk and hard-hitting handbags – with the oil crisis. That’s when the world changed, and we all began to despair of centrally directed economies.

We at Grenfells were as serious as the age. We knew Johnny Arab had tilted the world for good and all – and we liked him for it. I remember Mahmoud and I getting absolutely...well, that’s a story for another time. But I particularly miss Toby de Lotbiniere. He was a strong swimmer amid high tides of hostile petrodollars – and had magnificent fins, I can tell you.
Oh well, what’s past is past. I have a dinner of herbs to fetch and slaughter. Inwards, then, towards the island’s occluded centre – where strange trees grow, where the monkeys feel appetised by the chattering insect life, and where all is feverishly fertile with strange growths.

I haven’t got very far into it, to be honest. It scares me a little, but I have discovered some curious things to eat and, of course, I have no choice. The heat! The heat! A less robust economic mind than mine could go quite ya-ya out here. Luckily I’m entirely sane, as rational and efficient as the finest economic theory, and buoyant as the Laffer curve, Reagan’s economic miracle maker. (Which was not “voodoo economics” as that fool said at the time. It was bloody magic.)

Things could be a great deal worse: I think of myself as experiencing a timely correction in my life. These events can be painful, as anyone with Enron shares well knows, but the market is a rational if sometimes fierce and savage creature and is ultimately looking out for us. It may be necessary to wait a while, and feel the pain – but as John Major might have said during his spell as Chancellor: if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working.
I don’t like not having a ready source of readies, that goes without saying.

But I have decided to think of my current desolation as a small, humble service to the market. I am, one could say, working for the market – employed by it in a way. Don’t imagine I’m losing my grip in saying that: I’m still quite sane. Think back to the British recession of the early 1990s if you don’t believe me: as Major knew, we needed workers to be idle then, just as we need them to provide us with dividends when times are good.
Was it not after all Zizek, the Slovenian genius, who said that the worker must “reduce the precious core of his being to an object that can be bought for money”? And if no-one’s buying my being at the moment, well and good. I can butch out a downturn and come back stronger for having experienced the contraction.

Just you wait and see if I don’t.