I am sick and tired of being lectured by aspirational business gurus (well that is what they call themselves) telling me that my time management is poor, my strategic thinking is blinkered and the feng shui in my office is showing that my desk is sitting on the dragons tail.
Pap – all pap – designed to make us feel insecure and second rate in our careers when compared with these so-called oracles of business.
How refreshing then to find a book that is not only a fascinating read, but also one that is written as an edifying insight into the life, experience and opinions of a thoroughly interesting individual. This book is a glorious collection of personal postcards of the financial events and histories we have lived through over the past few decades. Included are a cast of characters from the unsavoury to the deeply worrying, but ones that we either know or can certainly picture.
Martin paints a delightful picture of events and aspects of society that we can enjoy but at the same time, on occasion, feel a twinge of guilt – mine came with his reference to certain “exercise avoider, parping their horns like Mr Toad” rather than gathering their loins and leaping on a bicycle to pedal across France.
His is a glorious tale, outlining his time in the City post Big Bang to the reality of redundancy, and to achieving his first goal in life, namely to be writing for the Spectator.
It will make you laugh, it will, on occasion, make you squirm with embarrassment as some of his descriptions come rather close to home, but above all it will make you turn another page to read on and find out more about how a person should really run his life.
What larks.
Published by Elliott & Thompson
Justin Urquhart-Stewart is co-founder of 7IM
