1 Belgium and London
A sow can farrow five to twenty-five piglets in one litter, and with some luck, and perseverance from the boar, she can do so two or even three times a year.
My boss, not himself a pig farmer, lectured.
My First Job
My professional journey started in 1983 in Antwerp, Belgium. I was living with my parents, and five brothers and sisters in the comparatively small house where we had grown up. I can still picture our telephone, positioned squarely in the middle of the living room. This was the only phone in the house and the only means of communicating with potential girlfriends, or potential employers. Either was tricky: "I will do anything to come and see you, tomorrow, by bicycle, if it is not raining". "I would be very happy to join your bank, but I cannot make it tomorrow." Things like that. Phone conversations took place within clear earshot of all my brothers and sisters: side-splitting for the listeners and toe-curling for the person making or receiving the call.
I had always done babysitting jobs for pocket money, and summer jobs to pay for train trips across Europe, usually to Greece via Yugoslavia or Italy. Together with my eldest brother Mark, we had run a DJ service for local weddings, birthday parties, and folk-dance festivals for several years. We re-invested most of the money we made in sound and light equipment, and records. We charged the equivalent of only 30 Euro per gig, and often got home as late as five in the morning. I had also been president of the law student society Sofia at the University of Antwerp from 1979 - 1980, organised a 24-hour relay marathon between law and medical students in 1982 and 1983, and was chairman of the student organisation in the same years. Thanks to this engagement and activities at university, and the exposure this had given me to the business world, three banks had reached out with job offers a few months before my graduation. In retrospect that was exceptional because the economic-financial situation in our country was really lousy at the time, and it was not easy to get job offers, especially not from a bank.
Of all the bank managers who made me an offer, Frans, head of his bank's Antwerp branch, was the only one to call me at home on this unique telephone in the middle of our living room, when I was trying to decide which company to work for after I completed my law degree. During the formal interview process, he had asked what was on the mind of the students at the University of Antwerp, at that time. I said, half seriously: "Most are trying to find a girlfriend, or boyfriend", and I think he liked my response, though it was not very professionally astute. This was the time when boys were still more or less exclusively looking for girls, and the other way around, or stayed in the closet.
Frans's personal touch swayed my decision. I joined his bank in August 1983, just 22 years young, and stayed for more than 40 years. I was desperate to get a job because my financial means were almost non-existent and I really wanted to move out, spread my wings, and become independent. I had always hoped that one day Frans would be able to read my books because he was at the start of my career. Unfortunately, he passed away before I published. He would have felt quite emotional to realise the profound impact of his phone call back in June 1983.
It was all quite new. I had grown up in a rather simple environment and did not know much about banking and business. It was a steep learning curve. I was enrolled in a two-year training program for newly recruited graduates. We were a group of thirty-odd youngsters fresh from university, who attended classroom-style training and were sent for three or six-month stints in the bank's regional operational or commercial departments. We made great efforts to try and pretend that we enjoyed it, but we merely wanted to get our 800 Euro salary at the end of the month. On the back of my second monthly salary, I moved out and started living in a small studio apartment in the centre of Antwerp. The move had been simple: two or three boxes of books, some clothes in a suitcase, and a large music collection. My future wife Brigitte had entered my life a year or so earlier. She would become an integral part of our global journey. From a relationship perspective, I became a rather normal and traditional kind of person. From most other perspectives too.
Anyway, as part of the training, and towards the end of the two-year period, the bank assigned me to work in a branch office that served the port of Antwerp. We were located next to some of Antwerp's largest shipping, stevedoring, and logistics companies. We did serious business, like financing the purchase of a fleet of container trucks, and the inventory of potassium and sulphates of a Swiss company. I learned a lot from Rene, the local manager, who worked hard and had a good sense for generating business. He was my first mentor in the banking business. This job in the port branch allowed me to get promoted to what we then called relationship manager for small and medium-sized companies (further: SMEs) in the regional head office. I was assigned to a sub-region called Kempen, to the north of Antwerp, which also happened to be the region of Frans's hometown and he tended to know all our customers and their families in that region quite well. That meant I had not much space for bullshitting, pardon my French, as they incorrectly say in the United Kingdom (further: UK).
Most mornings were spent in my chic private office, followed by client visits in the afternoon, usually a 40 to 50 kilometre-drive northeast of Antwerp. This was the time in Belgium before the proliferation of corporate cars, so I drove my own car and was allowed to charge a small amount for gasoline and depreciation - never enough, of course. I would see two or three companies a day and tried to chat with them about their financial situation and requirements. I had in my portfolio a diverse and bizarre range of local businesses. There were a few printing companies in the small provincial city of Turnhout, three or four pig stables, and two or three slaughterhouses for cows in the even smaller town of Geel. I even worked with the occasional property developer; a sector entirely unknown to me. Then there was a small funeral operator in Arendonk, a rural village to the north of Turnhout. His business was doing well, he said, and there was 'life in the business of death', but this dry sense of humour did not make a big impression when I repeated it in a credit committee meeting at the bank. My proposal to grant him a loan was vividly declined. "Over my dead body," Frans not so funnily said and probably not even with conscious pun intended. During the presentation of a credit proposal for a pig farm a few weeks later, one of the credit committee members forcefully asserted that the pig business is much trickier than the cow business because a sow can farrow five to twenty-five piglets in one litter, and with some luck, and perseverance from the boar, she can do so two or even three times a year. All this procreation means that the total number of pigs, and therefore their financial value, can vary tremendously. Any unexpected high increase of the number of pigs in a stable also increases the risk of diseases, much more so than in a steadier stable of cows and calves. "Even twins are unusual in the cow business," he added, "let alone quintuplets."
A decade or so later, most banks in the world introduced the concept of industry expertise and sector specialisation. It would not be my world. I would evolve into a country specialist. That process had probably started when I was a teenager. For the final exams at high school, I had written a paper about the impact of the revolutionary year 1968 on Flemish poetry. Okay, it was not very deep, but I loved it and it more than satisfied the requirements for my graduation. A classmate had spoken seven minutes about David Bowie, whom he knew nothing about. I had also been chief editor and publisher of our school magazine cleverly called Scriptor, which translates from Latin as Writer - a title my friends and I liked very much as we spent a lot of time studying Latin, and writing stuff, not necessarily publishable. I had used this platform extensively to publish my own articles about school reform, Elvis Costello, parodies about our teachers, and, I should add, some poems about my love life, and its frequently short duration. At a speaking contest at school when I was fifteen, I won a hardcopy of Richard Adams's Watership Down, a novel published in 1972 about cute rabbits who can talk and love each other, and who die in the most dramatic and melancholic fashion. I loved this and purchased the author's next book Shardik, published in 1974, about people in the fictional Beknal empire who adored a bear and positioned him as their divine leader, a tragic premonition of the true-life political events I was going to experience. I would come to see political leaders as Shardiks, and innocent, abused people like the rabbits in Watership Down.
When I was sixteen, I did not see the world and my place in it as Sweet 16. We wanted to change the world, and, with hindsight, we probably should have. We were upset with Nixon and the Shah of Iran, illogically adored Farah Diba, were against James Bond movies, cherished Steve Harley, secretly loved the ABBA girls, had no clue their English accent was terribly Scandinavian, and laughed with the late Joe Dassin (the latter is no longer possible as my wife is...
