: John David Keith Richards
: The Life and Times of a Teenage Scribbler
: novum publishing
: 9783991303176
: 1
: CHF 21.70
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 396
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Growing up in Roath Park, Cardiff, John Richards never envisaged a career in the cut-throat corporate 'City' - London, the world-renowned hub of trading, retail and financial marketing. Spending his childhood obsessed with trainspotting, music and girls, John had no aspirations to become a player in the arena of stocks and retail. But through a combination of luck, hard work and happy 'accidents' he found himself in the esoteric world of stockbroking. The path of John's career moved into retail analysis, and his experience provides a highly engaging and insightful account of the machinations and vicissitudes faced by some of today's most eminent retailers as they struggled to establish themselves in the ever-evolving twentieth century.

CHAPTER ONE

TIME TRAVEL

It is 1967. Think the game-changing Beatles ‘Sergeant Pepper’ album, psychedelia, the Summer of Love, and imagine my excitement at moving to London and starting my first job. Think again! I was starting work in the City, where pin-striped dinosaurs still ruled. You could still see them every morning among the multitude swarming across London Bridge, the bowler hats and furled umbrellas marking them out. It could be 1867 not 1967, the singular difference being that in 1967 a substantial proportion of the commuters were female. ‘Essex girls’ saw the City as a magnet, a short, convenient commute into Liverpool Street or Fenchurch Street stations, which opened the doors to a different world. The Holy Grail was a job as a telephonist, typist or better still a secretary in a stockbroking firm.

I should have known better. In the spring of 1967, I had done the ‘milk round’ of uninspiring job interviews while in my final year at Birmingham University. I was highly qualified to do nothing, although not as highly qualified as I should have been, having in my second year discovered bridge and spending weekends and evenings playing endless hands of cards. This had not, of course, been my fault or design. One evening I was sat in the faculty common room before going home and was seduced by three guys desperate for a four to play bridge. I protested my ‘virginity’ but learnt to play that evening through bitter experience and grew to love it.

My degree had involved a mix of economics, politics and sociology and a smattering of psychology, which only convinced me that I was ‘mad’, and I had a vague idea about wanting a job in marketing. My mother had insisted that I should do accounting because there would be a job at the end of it. However, at the end of my first year I switched courses. Accounting was dull, but what finished it for me was my friend, Phil, who patently did very little work. As I emerged from the examination room, bruised and fearful of the outcome, I bumped into a smiling, ebullient Phil. ‘That was easy,’ he said.

‘You have got to be joking!’

‘No,’ he said, ‘accounting is easy, because if you don’t know what to do, just do the opposite to what seems sensible. It works every time!’

That finished accounting for me, but I was yet to discover that the ‘dismal science’**was also fatally flawed. In many ways my switch from accounting to economics was akin to jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. I had already harboured doubts about economics, since its theories were often based upon tot