April 2016 Credit Management magazine

FEATURE
SPECIAL
I
am detained momentarily by Waterstones’
decision to give Hemingway’s A Moveable
Feast the full ‘rediscovered classic’
marketing treatment.
The book – an autobiographical memoir
of Hemingway’s time in Paris in the years
after the end of the First World War – is a
rich evocation of a battered city getting back
on its feet in the aftermath of the carnage of
the great conflict.
As anyone familiar with Hemingway’s
work will be aware, drinking and the culture
of drinking is deeply ingrained within this
homage to a giddy, exhilarating time in the
Nobel prize-winning writer’s journey.
And, as our alcohol industry begins to
count the cost of the Government’s revised
guidelines for booze consumption and more
normalised habits are resumed following the
gimmicky ‘dry January’ pressures, I wonder
what Hemingway would have made of it all.
At least by rooting himself in various
European capital cities in the 1920s,
Hemingway escaped the worst of the
Prohibition laws that pervaded his US
homeland from 1920 to 1933.
Promoted by the ‘dry’ crusaders, a
movement led by rural Protestants and
social Progressives in the Democratic and
Republican parties, and coordinated by the
vigorously enthusiastic Anti-Saloon League,
and the Woman's Christian Temperance
Union, the banning of hooch in the States
nearly 100 years ago bears worrying
resemblances to the current witch-hunts we
are seeing perpetrated in some quarters over
here.
As someone who participated in a wholly
dry January, I can see (and feel, more to
the point), clear benefits from laying off
completely for a month. But we also need to
be aware of how well-timed government PR
can be used as a stick to beat and shame
the extremities of so called drunken Britain.
Our A&E wards continue to creak and
shudder under the weight of the weekend
binge boozers imbibing like there is no
tomorrow, and the drain on the country’s
finances is severe. So something clearly
has to be done. Around 80 percent of all
weekend admissions to A&E are alcohol
abuse related. That is not why our NHS was
set up. And it is not why we send our young
people through seven years of complex
medical training.
So I am all for radical moves to try to
head anti-social drinking off at the pass. And
I would be more than happy to see outlets
promoting ultra-strong, impossibly cheap
alcohol to be castigated for the part they
play in encouraging the appalling sights we
endure on our streets and in our hospital
wards as a direct result of exposure to dirt
cheap rocket fuel.
But as I see more and more for sale
signs outside local neighbourhood public
houses, and the culture of supermarketdriven
home drinking sales soaring at the
inevitable cost to local pub culture, I kind of
miss the way it used to be.
One of my clients recently opened a new
craft beer brewery, based in a lovely part
of Shropshire and marketing home grown
ale at reasonable prices to reflect modest
margins.
But the Government’s gloomy
announcement at the beginning of the year,
that we are all going to Hell in a hand cart
if we have more than five pints/a bottle
of wine a week, or thereabouts, coupled
with the rigours of dry January had a major
impact on business in this critical first
quarter of the business cycle.
“Not so long ago demand for craft
beer was insatiable. Now beer and wine
suppliers are really feeling the pinch. It is
literally as if the tap has been turned off.
“The timing could not have been worse
and it is particularly difficult for the small
independents,” said my client, the tone of
resignation hanging like a pall of dark cloud
over a Sheffield coal pit.
I think back to my national newspaper
reporter days, hunched over a keyboard,
invariably swathed in reams of dense
tobacco smoke while fellow reporters
twitched and paced around in anticipation
of ‘lunch’ – a euphemism for a three hour
drinking session interspersed with a pork
pie and a packet of crisps, perhaps, but
lunches on the publications where I cut my
journalist teeth were primarily liquid.
As a financial writer I was privileged
in that my invite to lunch usually came
from City-based fund management firms,
bankers and players. Fast buck merchants,
as one of my former colleagues would
have it.
I wonder what the team who came
up with the current abstemious alcohol
guidelines would have made of those
sessions in the late 80s-90s?
Those stories you have read about
drink soaked hacks, slurring and stumbling
back from epic sessions on the sauce,
sometimes ending in clumsily thrown
punches following some perceived insult
or other, are, I can report from my front line
experience, by and large true.
After months of attrition, I decided to
trade the lunches for the sobriety of the
gym. I took up marathon training. It worked,
more or less, as I managed to evade the
worst excesses that characterised that era
of heroic Fleet Street drinking.
I suspect the carnage I witnessed from
the microcosmic realms of the newsrooms
were replicated in other notoriously heavy
drinking industries, such as insurance and,
back in the day at least, private banking.
There were many stories, and I shall
not detain you here with them; although
I can share with you my encounter with
the senior news editor of a major Sunday
newspaper that occurred early on in my
career.
It was a Friday morning, and I was
assigned a ‘Royal number’ – which is
newspaper code for fact checking and
reporting on the financial comings and
goings of a prominent member of the Royal
Family.
The story – if I got it right – was destined
to be the splash (front page) for that
coming Sunday. I just had to qualify various
issues that the newspaper’s legal team was
understandably twitchy about.
Dozens of rapid fire phone calls later, I
wrote the story and filed it. I thought it was
good.
Minutes later, I was aware of a large,
thickset man in his late 30s, hovering
behind my chair, breathing very heavily. And
reeking of alcohol. Ah, Friday afternoon.
Late. Probably just back from the pub.
Correct, Andrews.
‘Did you’, he snarled, waving a wad of
closely printed A4 pages under my nose –
‘write this, this CRAP???’ Now ferocious,
his intonation rising to a bellow, the news
editor then proceeded to go berserk. I
feared he would punch me.
‘What’s the problem,’ I asked. ‘You don’t
rate it…?’
Fortunately for me, my entirely sober
desk editor intervened on my behalf,
claiming my work to be one of the better
financial stories they had encountered for
many a long month.
I was, reader, vindicated. My story led
the Sunday section, and was followed up
by the rest of Fleet Street and TV news
after publication. We were not sued,
and my reputation as a splash-breaking
journalist was beginning. I became pretty
good mates with the legal team on the
newspaper after that initial incident, and,
as I rose through the reporting ranks, the
trickier, hard to break major financial stories
were invariably assigned to me. And while
nothing was perhaps quite as hard as
reporting on the state-of-the world stock
markets, in the immediate hours following
the September 2001 plane strikes on the
World Trade Centre, toughing it out with a
drink-hammered national newspaper editor
will always stay with me.
I wonder how Hemingway would have
dealt with it? I think I can guess…
The recognised standard in credit management
www.cicm.com April 2016 15