Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie

This is probably the closest I'll get to this blog intersecting with what, for sake of a better term, I call my professional life. I deliberately keep the two separate, normally. But the events going on in the world of finance are such that they probably deserve a mention.

I'll tell you something for nothing - the last eighteen months have led me to request a new keyboard on my PC at work, with the word 'unprecedented' accessible through a single keystroke.

Anyhow, the news broke recently that one of the largest banks had managed to lose something like £28billion in the space of a year. Which was, apparently, a new record. Although I don't suspect Roy Castle, were he still with us, would applaud their dedication, it certainly shows at least one sector of British industry that's happy to push the envelope.

And it got me thinking. 28 billion quid in one year. That takes a lot of planning to get through. I mean, they could have just drawn out 1,400,000,000 £20 notes and put them through the shredder instead. It would have saved all that 'pretending to run a bank' malarkey, for starters.

But even my shredding plan wouldn't have been a walk in the park. I mean, to get through all those twenties, you'd need to be going pretty much non-stop for the whole year. You'd be blitzing 117,000,000 of them every month. No time for weekends in this brave new banking world, though, you'd be too busy grinding up 3,835,000 twenties every single day. At 160,000 per hour, no time for sleep, either.

In fact, to duplicate the performance of one of our leading banks, you'd be shovelling £20 notes into the Rexel at the rate of 44 per second. Every second, for a whole year.

And it was when I'd considered this that I had a blinding revelation. I know what I would have done. How I could, using plain old-fashioned British common-sense, have measurably improved matters.

If I'd been in charge, I'd have been using £50's. They would probably have been able to knock off by the end of April.

That phone call from the Treasury must be imminent.