Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

there now. Got to roll up your sleeves and just get on with it, haven’t you? Good for you, Cassie.’ I was just trying to get over the weirdness of Nicholas being so nice to me when Gabriella appeared at his elbow.
    ‘So glad you could make it, Cassie, you look lovely. I see you’ve met Nick?’
    ‘We used to work together, Gabs, would you believe it?’
    Work together ? Not exactly the way I’d have put it. Not exactly the way I imagined he’d have put it either.
    ‘Fantastic secretary, Cassie was. When the firm made her redundant it was like they’d cut off my right arm.’ He patted me on the back heartily. Forget drunk, was he on drugs?
    When Gabriella threaded her arm through mine and escorted me away to meet some of the other guests, I was mightily relieved. Nicholas was being so nice it was starting to scare me. I met Gabriella’s husband, Bill, a tall and distinguished-looking man in an immaculately cut blue suit, and Gabriella’s ‘oldest and dearest friend’, Milena, a voluptuous Bulgarian who ran her own catering company. I was relieved (and touched) to be introduced as Gabriella’s ‘new friend, Cassie’ rather than ‘Thierry and Theo’s new dog walker, Cassie’.
    ‘Cassie used to work in the City, but she is looking for new opportunities, yes?’ Gabriella said.
    ‘That’s right, I’m just … between jobs at the moment.’
    ‘What did you do in the City?’ Bill asked.
    ‘Oh, I was just a PA.’
    ‘Not just a PA,’ Gabriella cut in. ‘She worked for Nick Hawksworth and he says she was fantastic.’
    ‘Christ, coming from Nick that’s high praise indeed. Nick’s one of my oldest friends but I can think of few things worse than having to work for him,’ Bill said with a grin. ‘I bet you’ve got some stories to tell.’
    ‘Not at all,’ I lied, ‘he was a great boss.’
    They all laughed heartily.
    ‘Discretion, you see,’ Milena said. ‘This is what you want in an assistant. You must call me,’ she said to me, giving me her business card. ‘My company must be one of the only ones in the UK that is expanding at the moment. I am not taking on anyone full-time right now, but we often have need for people to come in, just from time to time, you know? Ring me on Monday.’
    This was turning from a good into a great party.
    The guests were an eclectic mix, media types and entrepreneurs rubbing shoulders with bankers and artists. Fortunately, Nicholas aside, I didn’t spot any of the Hamilton Churchill crowd. I was chatting to Gabriella and Milena, who were commenting on the fact that, judging by the quality of the champagne people bring to parties, it would appear that the artists were making more money than the bankers these days. And so the conversation turned, as it so often does now, to the state of the economy. There was, unsurprisingly, a certain amount of gloating from the more arty guests at the party that the bankers were‘finally getting their comeuppance’.
    ‘Sorry, Bill, sorry, Nick, but you boys have had it too good for too long,’ a man with a goatee and Red or Dead glasses said. ‘The bonuses you people earn for gambling with other people’s money are ridiculous. The whole culture of the City needs to change.’
    ‘Absolutely,’ his wife agreed. ‘It really is difficult to feel sorry for all those boys in two thousand pound suits driving their Maseratis home after they’ve been laid off.’
    ‘But it’s not just boys in two thousand pound suits who drive Maseratis,’ I piped up. Everyone turned to look at me. ‘I worked in the City – I was an assistant on a trading floor. I earned a modest salary, I certainly didn’t earn a bonus, and I lost my job a couple of months ago. I’m still out of work. It’s not only the City boys in their flash cars who are feeling the pain, you know.’ There was a moment of awkward silence. ‘I’m just saying …’ I mumbled.
    ‘Too right,’ Nicholas chipped in, relieved that the focus had been taken off him and his alleged fat-cattery.
    ‘Aren’t you angry, then?’ the woman asked. ‘With your bosses, with the way the whole system works?’
    ‘Well, obviously a lot of mistakes have been made,’ I said, ‘but it’s actually fairly difficult to apportion blame, isn’t it? You can blame the government, you can blame the regulators, you can call the bankers greedy, certainly, but you also have to remember that it was part of their job description to make money fortheir masters as fast as they