You Can Bank On It

Now, my children, my darling son and daughter, do come and sit on daddy's knee for a few moments, because I want to give you some career advice. It's never too early for career advice. Myself, I never received any career advice - so it's hardly surprising, the mess I'm in now! More than 50 years old and I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. Careers advice at school consisted of a bored Modern Languages teacher occasionally rifling through a dusty drawer full of out-of-date leaflets about safe, pensionable jobs with the council or the magic of accountancy - hardly the stuff of inspiration for a head-in-the-clouds, poetically inclined schoolboy. And at university in the 70s you just never mentioned the word "career" - it was almost an obscenity - students studied for the intellectual purity of it (which I rather liked). Nor did any positive career suggestions come from my father, though he did give plenty of negative ones (for God's sake don't become a teacher, or a journalist, don't go into the armed forces, estate agents are all sharks, plumbers are corrupt, rock musicians immoral, artists spongers on society and possibly criminal etc.)

Yes, my naive and innocent daughter and son, I don't want you to make the mistakes I've made, so please take careful note of the advice I'm just about to give you. Forget the law, the church, the teaching profession. Don't be swayed by the enticements of IT and the blandishments of bureaucratic local government. Ignore the soft sell of the carpet salesman and the arousingly oil-flecked overalls of the muscly car mechanic. What you both must be, without a shadow of a doubt... are bankers! Just think about it. People give you freely and willingly all their hard-earned cash. Which you can play around with, speculate with, gamble with and generally enjoy. And this will generate for you lots more cash to play around with, speculate with etc! And if it all goes wrong, and you screw up big time, and you somehow lose all this money, then the government (or rather that's the people again, as the government's money is our money raised by taxes) will reward you by giving you even more cash to bail you out, money which you can play around with, speculate with and so on and so forth! So my advice is: choose banking as a career. It's a win-win situation. You know it makes sense.