Booze

I'm half way through a bottle of wine made with a blend of merlot and cabernet sauvignon grapes. It comes from somewhere within the vast appellation of Bordeaux and apparently won a bronze medal at the international wine challenge 2010. It cost me about a fiver, after the 50% 'discount' skillfully offered by Sainsbury. In fact it's delicious (but the bottle that preceded it down my gullet might explain that).

Once upon a time I worked for an American bank, in the days when the uncognoscenti hadn't yet had it explained to them in one-syllable-words that bankers earn (no irony intended) twenty times what everyone else does, in exchange for a fraction the effort. They are also advised sufficiently well that they pay tax at about 15% on the proceeds, which explains why tax revenues to the exchequer go down every time the imbeciles in charge of the asylum raise the marginal rate of tax on high earners. Also they eat children raw.

At the height of the last boom my the boss's boss's boss arranged an 'off-site', a self-congratulatory circle jerk at a smart country hotel within relatively easy reach of London. Mostly I remember it for the poor bloke in IT, who got even drunker than me and ended up in the heated outdoor swimming pool, loudly fucking two bridesmaids from a wedding party staying in the same hotel. He was fired.

There was a dinner and therefore there was an after-dinner speaker. Some hapless wanker in HR had hired Roger Black to make the speech. For the 99.998% of you who have never heard of him, he won a silver medal, as part of the UK's 4 x 400m hurdles relay team, in the 1996 Olympic Games. Having peaked at the age of 27 in his chosen career (running, faster and faster and more-and-more pointlessly around an amphitheatre, jumping occasionally over barriers) he became a motivational speaker.

Roger's speech was all about doing your best. His punchline was about how, to him, the silver medal was really a gold, because it represented the very peak of the performance his pastey, white body was capable of. After the speech, he left, to huge sighs of relief. The boss's boss's boss (Fawzi Kyriakos-Saad was his name) stood up, glanced furtively at the door and said 'I don't know who the fuck that twat was, but I want you guys to win gold, gold medals, not silver ones'. Then we drank more, much more very expensive wine and went to bed, in most cases with a colleague. Those were the days.

Here's to capitalism, economies of scale and the fact that decent red wine is still available for less than a fiver.