This morning I had a meeting at my bank with Alan Goodman, who is my Premium Manager. I donÂ’t know what that means exactly. Whether itÂ’s that heÂ’s better than the other managers, or IÂ’m better than the other customers. And whether, if I was better than other customers, this had been judged on financial or personality issues. I hope it was the latter. It would be nice if banks gave you a pat on the back for being a good bloke. ItÂ’s not all money, money, money.
Anyway, I hadnÂ’t been very clear about why IÂ’d been invited in.
It became apparent that essentially under the guise of checking through my details, Alan Goodman was trying to sell me stuff.
Alan Goodman seemed a very pleasant man. He was mild-mannered and polite, attempting light humour to put me at my ease. I liked him even though we are very different people. HeÂ’s been working in banking for 17 years and oversees the accounts of 700 people. I write about cocks.
He is a bald man in a suit, I am a hairy man in jeans. HeÂ’d probably had a shower this morning, I hadnÂ’t had time. And the office was small and hot. Sorry Alan.
There could be no two more opposite men on the face of the earth.
I felt very quickly that I was not his typical customer.
He had filled in the details he already knew on his form. When he got to occupation he said “I’ve put this in pencil, ‘writer and comedian’. Is that still what you do?”
As if being a writer and comedian was a fantasy job that no-one could ever make any money at. Something that I had claimed to be, whilst unemployed, but had now accepted that would never happen.
Not that I think he was being unreasonable. HeÂ’s worked hard to get to the position where heÂ’s the Premium Manager for 700 (premium?) people over a period of many years. I write about cocks. You know maybe if heÂ’d realised that you could make a living out of doing that 17 years ago he might never have got into banking.
Even so, it was still quite a kick to say, “Yeah, I’m still doing that. You can probably put that in pen.” He said he’d do it later. It would be neater. He was going to rub out the pencil and write it in again in ink. That was the kind of man Alan Goodman was. A good man. Like he’d been named by the uninventive mind of William Thackeray.
He inevitably asked me what I’d been working on recently. I told him about Time Gentlemen Please. Like most of the population, he had never heard of it. And although he didn’t ask, I couldn’t resist telling him that I was currently working on a show called “Talking Cock”.
He literally spluttered and said something like “Is that what it sounds like?” He attempted to write it in his notes, but his hand resisted him. When he came to write “Cock”, he stumbled and got the letters all mixed up. He laughed at this. “I can’t even write it!” he said.
Two worlds colliding, that were never meant to meet.
I hope it goes in his final report.
I was going to ask him at the end if I’d been called in because of having some money in the bank or because he’d heard I was a good laugh or something. But then he tried to persuade me to sign up for Nat West Premier banking, where you pay £150 a year in order to look like a swanky tosser (as far as I can tell from reading the bumph).
So he sort of answered my question.
