WEDNESDAY 24TH NOVEMBER 1999:Polar Bears and Pissed-off Consultants

Jane has important work meetings and daughter has tonsillitis, so I take the day off to be a caring modem father. We make Christmas cards, and I read her some Agatha Christie short stories. She is a fast and voracious reader, so I hope Agatha might solve the "what is she going to read now" question for the next 6 months or so. Then we decide to act out the stories, using part of her huge collection of polar bears as characters. So it is that Fluffy Bear (Miss Marple) solves the brutal murder of Belle Bear (the young actress) by Peter Bear (her wicked husband), much to the admiration of Mrs. Marple's friend, the young Mr. Petherick (played for some unknown reason by a small luminous pink-haired troll.) This is much better than working! Perhaps I will become a children's entertainer if Bank of Scotland doesn't want me.

My head of strategy calls. He has talked to a number of the surplus NatWest Consultancy people and they have, almost without exception, told him to get lost! Some have put it slightly more politely, some less so. They are highly disillusioned with the way NatWest has treated them, particularly as quite a few were only recruited a few months ago, and don't want to consider an internal move. They just want out as quickly as possible. They are also finding that the job market is pretty buoyant and (as I suspected) we were probably paying them less than their market worth. Oh well, it was a nice idea.