Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 9:53 pm. 0 comments
Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, Geraint Anderson. (Headline, 2008)
Rating: 
Geraint Anderson, the London Paper’s cityboy columnist, writes up his 12 years in the City. His candid take on the highs and lows of city life is eye opening. you’d like to hope the caricatures he draws are exaggerated, but suspect the reality is not much. So, the effect is like someone writing amusingly about a horrifying car crash. You want to close your eyes, don’t want to crash and yet you look on with mind incredulous at what is unfolding. The effect is the moral equivalent of poking yourself in the eye over and over again, which makes it hard to say this book was ‘enjoyable’.
What it did tell me personally was that I’m glad I don’t measure my life in terms of success, or money, and whilst I may still say to myself that I don’t measure myself in terms of success and money, that what matters most is waking happy and falling asleep happy and that I jumped from the blue chip gravy train early on in my career I still haven’t jumped as far as my friend who spent her summer doing the job she enjoyed most ever – teaching people how to sail in Greece for a pittance. Still, I sometimes feel that what I do is..well..not pointless exactly but doesn’t energise and obsess me as much as I thought it would. I have a sneaking suspicion I’d rather be an architect or a developer, than an analyst . I just don’t know how to do that as well.I get too distracted by the joys of XML when I should be trying to herd cats write up business processes .
Anyway all that is a bit tangenital for a review of a book about city life. Despite a creeping culture of corporatism in higher education I’m still glad that at least I do something that is less destructive to my self and to society that the financial services industry at it’s worst and all through this book I just kept giving thanks that wasn’t my life. So if my life somedaysdoesn’t feel quite right – most days it doesn’t feel far wrong either which is not necessarily what you could say about the morally rapacious, coke snorting, sexually promiscuous idiots Anderson depicts.
Whereas most of cityboy just made me feel like the world is screwed. Anderson is acute enough to ask, really ask, despite all this to aks really, why aren’t we revolting and the iniquity and stupidity of it all. Bread and circuses is given as one reason, perhaps another is that these really big numbers are just totally meaningless to people and we can only get all outraged about financial things we can really relate to – like mind numbing conversations about how to split restaurant bills. If we put as much energy into that as we do to the rest of the economy surely we wouldn’t be in this mess.
The part of this book that struck me most was when cityboy called on Hegel: “history teaches us that history teaches us nothing” and we really are suffering short term memory loss as the cycles of boom and bust shorten. The world is probably split into those who enjoy this roller coaster, and those who think something a bit more simple and sustainable might be in order – and those like Anderson who have had the dubious (?) pleasure of being both.
