An Inspector Calls

Not really an Inspector, just a friendly pair of policemen who looked at the mess, asked for a list of missing items and called a locksmith out to secure the flat for the remainder of the night. In the morning I chased the landlord's agents for the cc tv coverage of the front hall (which later proved to be of such poor quality that the two suspects could have been French and Saunders or Brown and Darling), bought a new laptop and received a very worrying phone call from the helpful boys at Macace, my ISP, who suspected someone had been attempting to hack into my accounts.

It was a horrendous day: changing the passwords on everything from bank accounts to British Airways' exec club; notifying the Passport Office; clearing up the mess of papers and checking for more missing items whilst feeling oh so vulnerable with the memory sticks in my jeans pockets. I was fairly confident that the burglars had not got what they were looking for, which meant they would be back. James was adamant that for strategic negotiating reasons we should not reveal what we have on Vijay's transactions to LRI at this stage, so we could not preempt further attempts to seize the evidence  by simply sending the documents to LRI's Board, the press and anyone else we could think of, which was my first reaction.

James called in his firm's security advisors and his offices were swept for bugs. Then they came to my flat. They found two rather obvious bugs and a more subtle third. I was warned off using my mobile phone in the flat, or talking on the landline near the windows or using any nearby phone boxes. I could feel my stress levels rising and a sort of unarticulated panic. When I went out of the flat, I was constantly glancing over my shoulder; the skin between my shoulderblades burned from the pressure of unseen eyes; my ears were so tuned to footsteps behind me that I could not concentrate on conversation with shopkeepers. All I could think of was that 'they' must be watching me and 'they' would return.

By teatime I was in quite a state; I neither felt safe in the flat nor out of it and I thought wistfully of the peace of the past few days in the sunny woods increasingly flushed with spring. As darkness fell I packed, called a cab and raced down the stairs, certain I was under observation. By changing cabs three times, I made an erratic way to the mainline station and jumped on the first train heading in the right direction. After a long walk from the last bus, I wriggled through the gorse tunnel just before midnight.

The clearing was peaceful and the quavering hoots of tawny owls backwards and forwards across the fields were the loudest sounds. Moonlight feel on the tent which looked untouched, the inside zipped up as I had left it. I wondered where Stalky was. The biscuits I had left for him, expecting to be back within twenty-four hours, had gone and the 'porch' of the tent was untenanted. I crawled into my sleeping bag almost fully clothed and fell into sleep as densely as a smooth stone slipping into a pond.

The temptation of fate

The last time I posted, it seemed like the initiative was returning to me. My lawyer had prised a promise from my employers and for the first time in days I relaxed and began to look forward to the summer. 

For the next couple of days, James and I waited for the promised letter and with each hour of its failure to materialise, the tension rose. After 24 hours James lost patience and rang the head of HR, only to be told she was not available. Emails went unanswered, the head of the legal department did not return his calls. Things suddenly started looking very bad and I could hear in James' tone that he was worried as well as annoyed. After two days of the runaround from LRI, James started to put the pressure on with a threat of a claim on my part. In his letter he alluded to certain documents in my possession which were highly discreditable to LRI. "That should do it." He told me over the phone as I waited anxiously in the London flat. It certainly did.

When I returned from dinner with friends that night, the door of my flat had been forced and the flat ruthlessly searched. My desktop computer and the Asus mini laptop I have been using on my camping adventures were gone; filing cabinet broken open; cds and backup hard drive missing as well. My passport had been taken, yet the jewellery in the same drawer was untouched. Standing in the paper strewn mess of my office I rang James. His mobile number was engaged and I found out why when he returned my call a few minutes later. Security at his plush offices had just alerted him that his office had been similarly turned over. "Where are the LRI docs?" we asked simultaneously. His copies were in his office strong room which the burglars had not breached. Mine were on the USB drives which I have been carrying on me ever since I left London.

"It can't be a coincidence," I said, hoping he'd contradict me, "both of us being burgled at the same time." And then, "Where are you? Are you at home?" 

"Yes," he replied, "And it's all right, they haven't been here ... yet."

"Should I call the police?" 

There was a pause; finally James said "Yes, that's the right and proper thing to do. Besides, your passport has been stolen and that has important implications for the security of your identity. Call the police now and insist that they come round."

"How much should I tell them?" A longer pause this time. 

"You're shocked, frightened, confused. Your computers have been stolen and your passport. The burglars must have been interrupted because they didn't have time to  take anything else. We should talk about this tomorrow morning. I'll drop by on my way to work." As I said goodnight I caught the message in his words - my burglars might have left something as well as taking something - or perhaps my flat or phone had been bugged earlier. The feeling of security of the last few days had evaporated.

It's who you know

London. Tuesday 14th. Not a good day. I struggled to open the door of my flat in London. There was a huge pile of post inside the door - unmissable offers, bank statements, dross. And a letter from LRI. I still can't quite believe it. blah blah blah "regret to inform you, you have been suspended on full pay pending investigation of serious allegations of misconduct on your part ...". I sat down on the sofa and read the letter again and again. No hint as to who making the allegations or the nature. No invitation to respond, no suggestion that I had a right to know what the allegations are.

I made a cup of coffee and reviewed potential courses of action. Then I picked up the phone and called LRI's HR department. The letter was signed by the deputy head of HR, but I don't deal with second liners. I asked to speak to the head, a woman I can't stand. She is the kind of person who gives business women a bad name. Vain, aggressive, duplicitous. She congratulates herself that she is playing in the deep pool with the big fish and is too thick to realise that they regard her as their disposable instrument, not their equal. That day she was 'not available' according to her sidekick who volunteered her assistance.

"Tell Sheila that she needs to speak to me now. I'll hold."

"That's not possible, she's in a meeting."

"She'll want to take this call, because if she doesn't, she'll be answering calls from my solicitor and the national newspapers ... not necessarily in that order."

"oh," there was a flustered pause,

"I'll see if I can interrupt her."

When Sheila came on the phone she attempted to take aggressive control of the phone call. I waited until she had run out of words and then, ignoring all that she had already said, asked "What are these allegations, and who made them?"

She tried to evade answering so I just kept repeating the same question until she offered "I think you'd better come into the office and we can discuss this." I smiled.

"I don't think so. This is a matter that requires legal support and witnesses. So we'll meet at my solicitors and you can bring with you all the background to this nonsense, if there is any. You'd better be prepared to name names. I'll ring back with an appointment time." I put the phone down and had a long hard think.

I didn't know any employment law specialists but I do know a man who knows everyone. Mac's a director of a City PR agency and an inexhaustible source of scurrilous (but true) gossip, essential names and very, very hardnosed advice. On an off-the-record basis I traded my knowledge of an unnamed insurance company lurking in the living dead zone, for the name of the top man in unlawful dismissal cases and ten minutes later was talking to my new solicitor, James. And so it was that James and I found ourselves facing Sheila and LRI's in-house solicitor that afternoon. I was glad to see it was the head of the legal department, not an insultingly junior colleague.

James began proceedings by reminding them that I was on sick leave, suffering from stress and suggested their letter amounted to harassment as there was no foundation to it. He's a bit of a stirrer. I really like that in a lawyer. I sat still looking thin and fragile (head swathed in a scarf to hide new hair and blue makeup shadows artfully brushed around my eyes) and said little, as directed by James.

By the end of an unnerving hour, it transpired that the allegations of misconduct had been made against me by a person who was himself the subject of a very high level external investigation, the substance of which could not be revealed to us. I can only hope that person is Vijay but it was clear that both Sheila and the LRI lawyer were completely out of their depth and were not party to that investigation.

It is also clear that no-one wants me back on LRI's premises until the big investigation is concluded and one or more people have been fired/thrown to the wolves/given a huge pay off/promoted or all of the above (cf Fred the Shred). And they want me gagged. I could see that James was having a "Gotcha, you bastards!" moment and thoroughly enjoying this as he launched into the attack. In fact, I was quite worried he would succeed in forcing them to take me back, just when I was looking forward to my leisurely summer under the flysheet. Then I realised that he'd expertly backed them into a corner from which the only way out was a graceful compromise that he proposed. They seized it with both snouts! The letter of suspension is to be formally withdrawn, with an apology; and I am to be granted a six month sabbatical (on full pay including bonus) whilst the other investigation proceeds. Result!

Champagne all round! After long hot baths, intensive clothes washing and general household chores, I shall be returning to my gorse field to try and second guess what is happening at LRI now. At least I don't have to skulk about in hiding from the media since if there are any leaks from the investigation, my name is unlikely to be in the forefront. Of course, if I wish to continue enjoying camping in the woods, I will still have to evade Farmer Giles, Larry the Lumberjack and Simon the Shepherd...  

Primrose wine

A recipe for Primrose Wine has pinged into the mailbox from an anonymous supporter. Thanks!

Primroses are a protected plant so I've been looking for a source of domesticated ones that I can pick with a clear conscience. More about that later. However, dandelions have suddenly burst out yellow all over and they certainly do not deserve or need protection from anyone. We used to make dandelion wine and it is certainly an effective way to get drunk. We were inspired by a strange pre-war children's book that Sky found in a box of junk. Some adventures involving children running feral and reliving the Persian legend of Sohrab and Rustum. They made dandelion wine but in retrospect I think it was more like beer.

Sunday was a long lovely day of sunshine here but we have been plagued by rain since. On the one hand, no water carrying - the flysheet captures enough. On the other hand, the ground is getting muddy again and everything in the tent is subtly damp. Damp hair, damp dog, damp bedding. I don't want to be disloyal about Stalky when he's not here to defend himself (sleeping off another rabbit I caught in a snare since apparently he doesn't 'do hunting' in the rain but lies in bed with a metaphorical crossword and cup of tea), but he does have a certain aroma in high humidity. He pokes his long nose cautiously out of the tent, collects a spot or two of rain on his nose, sighs philosophically and turns his back on the day.

I've been to the local library and used the computer there as the batteries aren't charging in the rain. A PC. How do people manage to run businesses on Microdaft? The demned thing kept crashing and faltering. Or maybe my fingers were shaking with shock - I've been spotted, electronically speaking, by a cousin. Well what the hell was she doing on that website? I thought she was married and in Australia, but clearly not!

Easter approaches. There are real easter eggs here or at least fragments of shells from all the noisily nesting birds - blackbird's egg like an improbably turquoise piece of sky. And there were rare Clouded Yellow butterflies before it started raining. 

A good deed is never lost. He who sows courtesy, reaps friendship

One of the benefits and drawbacks of home education is the acquisition of huge amounts of knowledge quite outside the Government's definition of education. Apposite quotes? Don't get me started! Lesser works of unfashionable Victorian writers? Reddit!

Anyway, last night's good deed did reap a reward. After I had cooked, consumed and cleaned up supper, and offered the dog some water in the billy can, I retreated to the comfort of the sleeping bag and Thermarest (plenty of product placement in this blog! Perhaps I should get sponsored by a camping equipment shop?), leaving my dinner guest outside. I suppose I hoped he'd push off in the night. The remains of the rabbit were suspended in a nearby silver birch, above the level of interest of the local foxes. I read for a bit, trying to ignore the odd scratch and reproachful whine outside the tent and presently fell into the usual dreamless sleep of the clear conscience and the psychopath.

In the morning I rather hoped for a steaming cup of tea, freshly brewed by Stalky, if he was still hanging around. No such luck. Another beautiful morning and an empty clearing. Entirely dog free.

However, by the time I had brewed some tea, eaten a bagel inadequately warmed by balancing on top of the kettle thingy, washed in the remaining water supplemented by baby wipes, collected up the rubbish and decided to go for a walk, it was 7.15 am and Stalky had shimmied back into the clearing, too late to bear a cup of tea. Soundless, he took up position beside me, looking up expectantly.

I didn't have a clear idea where to go - thinking that it would be sensible to get an idea of the topography, but Stalky seemed to be subtly leading me his way, deeper into a deciduous forest, interspersed with holly thickets. He trotted soundless by my side, his ears relaxed, head down, seemingly uninterested by his surroundings.

Then, with a rustle, he had vanished between the bushes. For a moment or two, I waited on the path but there were no sounds of dog pursuing prey and eventually I walked on, to be startled when he suddenly rejoined me from a bramble thicket, dragging a limp pheasant with him. The corpse he dropped at my feet and then stepped back. I picked the dead bird up; there wasn't a mark on it's warm body. Payback for last night's meal? He shrugged and trotted off back the way we'd come.

Needless to say, that afternoon found me at the nearest Pets@Home, stocking up on flea treatment, wormer, tick tweezers (2 pairs - his n'hers) and some doggy treats; and that night found a heavily medicated and much cleaner dog on the inside of the flysheet and the outside of the remaining rabbit. The upside for me was warm feet.

The poacher's companion

On Friday I moved to exclusive new premises; desirable; detached and strictly single occupancy. Well that was the plan.

A cheerful bus driver dropped me off at a crossroads a couple of miles from my gorse field as the light was fading on Friday afternoon. It was that time of the evening when the deer emerge from their daytime cover to the edges of fields and rabbits flash their white scuts. The birds are closing down but two owls were hooting mournful, wavering notes to each other. The pack was heavy with water, a couple of bottles of wine and food and I wasn't paying much attention to the road when a shiny black four wheel drive rocketed past. In it's wake it left the the tumbled body of a careless rabbit.

It was a decent size - young enough to be tender, big enough for a couple of substantial meals and I didn't waver long over the concept of a roadkill meal. I picked up the warm body and blood dripped onto my boots and jeans. Not clever; it's not like I have an inexhaustible supply of clean clothes. After some consideration, I found the big penknife in a pocket of the pack and scrambled off the road to clean the beast on a handy tree stump. Skinned, paunched and jointed it was quite pile of meat and luckily I had a clean plastic bag to carry it in.

When I emerged from the gorse tunnel, dusk had settled on the clearing and the tent was in shadow. But something seemed wrong. The solar charger was still hanging on the tent side, but the tent doorway was unzipped, and I distinctly remembered zipping it up. I bent to look inside and my eyes met an unfriendly gaze in the shadowy space. Lounging on my sleeping bag, was a motionless dog. Shreds of coloured paper indicated it had found my teatime biscuits. The dog and I looked at each other. When I inched closer it raised a lip in a grimace revealing very long, very white teeth.

I backed off to consider things and realised I had a solution in my hand. Removing a piece of rabbit from the bag I tentatively waved it in the mouth of the tent and was rewarded by a scuffle. With lightening speed the meat was seized from my hand by the passing dog which retreated to the far side of the clearing to consume its prize. Out of the gloom of the tent interior, I could see more detail. It was a small greyhound or lurcher type, long-nosed, long-legged, painfully thin.

Its blue-grey coat, the exact colour of the cats we had had in the barns at one of our many homes, was dusty and scarred, but there was a shabby elegance about the animal. He had the air of a gentleman fallen on hard times. The rabbit piece was soon consumed, bones and all and the dog showed no signs of leaving. in fact he was gazing at me expectantly, his long, slightly crooked tail waving very slowly in an ingratiating manner. I prepared to throw him another piece of my supper but he came softly towards me and took it from my hand as gently as a feather falling on water. After the second piece he seemed satisfied and lay down in that peculiarly gazehound fashion, front paws extended neatly forwards, hind legs tucked beneath body, long nose resting on fore arms.

With his steady gaze on me, and a glass of wine ito hand, I lit the gas stove and cooked the rabbit with onions, wine, courgettes and baby potatoes. It was delicious and for the first time I began to believe that this strange experience could be enriching and fun rather than a bizarre ordeal.

Deep in the furze

Up betimes, and out of the door by six of the clock. Or, more accurately, out of the tent flap. Packed and left the conifers without breakfast. It was a long hard slog over to the gorse field with so much to carry. Definitely more weight in the packs since I arrived but probably less on my body.

It was a still and silent morning, a thin mist softening the landscape like a watercolour wash. A pheasant erupted from almost beneath my feet with loud carks of alarm and the drumming of woodpeckers accompanied me for the first mile through the woods. A long hard pull up to an escarpment edge and then two counties were laid out before me, as indistinct and imaginary as an ancient map. 

The gorse field is separated from the woods by a rusty barbed wire fence whose untensioned strands hang from rotting posts. Hardly a barrier for determined livestock but awkward to negotiate. Lowering the packs over the fence, I wriggled underneath it and then surveyed what appears to be an impenetrable barrier of spiny, prickly gorse. At my feet a very faint track led through last years dead bracken between some trees and vanishes from sight. When I followed the track delicately, a small fox-sized and fox-scented opening appeared in the vegetation. Like Beetle,  pursued by Stalky, I wormed my way into the gorse, through a fairish tunnel that after a few twists and turns, opened out into quite a large grassy clearing. Perfect.

With the maturing day, the clearing is a warm and sunny spot and there is enough room for the tent, a fireplace sunk in the turf and to loll around with a book, undisturbed by gamekeepers. However, rations were low and  so the afternoon was devoted to a trip into town and a search for internet access.

Up sticks....

Blimey! Riots in the City! The Queen patting Michelle Obama's bum! The Stock Market up! What am I missing?? Well, clearly not a recovery in world stockmarkets - that's not going to last.

Turned on my mobile phone this am. Still nothing from LRI. Very suspicious. Had a quick browse for news and salacious rumours on the usual websites and ... nothing. The quarter end has come and gone; whatever happened to 'mark to market'?

On to more important things. Oh yuck, I'm going to have to move camp or go to the vet. Found a tick this morning, on me. Worse than that, full of me, well my blood anyway. A big swollen chestnut body with little twitching black legs at the business end. I had to pull it off with my eyebrow tweezers and that jolly well hurt. Hope it's not left its nasty little mouth parts behind as it was in a pretty sensitive location. The woods are full of deer and the deer are full of ticks ... and the ticks carry Lyme Disease. Can I use Advantage (from the vet - to deter dog fleas and ticks) on myself?

Actually, Mrs Tick's drop in has just reinforced the feeling that it is time to move on. A distinct path is being created to my camp by my comings and goings and the clearing is awfully gloomy. My solar charger is not really doing the business in this claustrophobic spot and I never really did like conifers. Did I mention the solar charger? Fabulous thing, got it from the States. It's a flexible array of solar cells that folds up to the footprint of a sheet of A4. Pitch the tent east-west, spread the solar charger on the south side and plug in the laptop. 

I've found a new spot - a derelict field being reforested by massive gorse bushes and scrubby little silver birches. There are little paths and sunny grassy clearings kept mown by the rabbits. It smelt of coconut oil in the warmth of the sunshine. I have one fear - I think it's private land, rather than Forestry Commission or National Trust, so I've no right to roam and may be surprised by Farmer Giles, out with his gun for a bunny or two. At least on public land the workforce is only active in normal working hours and there are usually signs up warning where they are felling trees. The muscled young treefellers (should that be treefellas?) who whistled at me yesterday probably wouldn't report me if they found my camp, but they might turn up for late night drinks without an invitation.

Anyway, I'm going to risk it. It's rather a hike from here but I'd like to get moved before the weekend when this woodland becomes quite busy. The other lure is a water tap on the back of a farm building quite nearby.

Growing up with the Fey

Yesterday I finally turned into the girl my mothers wanted me to be. After the haircut and the swimming pool session, I was rather shaken and retreated to a Costa coffee shop to regroup and test my new appearance on strangers. She's rather striking this girl and maybe attracts a little too much attention.

Demonstrations in the City, more Building Society woes... why isn't anyone talking about the insurance companies? Or is the truth being suppressed because the insurers represent the last stones still apparently standing in the collapsing building of our global financial systems. Whilst I'm in town I take advantage of the mobile phone coverage to listen to my voice messages. Quite a few. Friends asking where I am. It hurts to listen to people I care about, who yet I do not trust with the truth of my situation. Or do not want to involve. If they have not heard from me they can truthful. Nothing from my family - well, no change there. I suspect that some of my siblings are enjoying the huge party that is the G20 demonstrations.  The rest? Well, they live in their own worlds, which only tangentially touch ours.

Did I mention that I have eight siblings? There's us seven sisters which is rather a special number, and then the identical twins - the boys. I use the words siblings and sisters loosely because it is not at all clear how we relate to each other. 

My mothers were 1960s hippy chicks who have never moved on. Willow and Sky. They look extraordinarily alike - they could be sisters, but I don't think they are. Between them they have raised 9 children but none of us kids are sure which, if indeed either, of them is our biological mother. The space on my birth certificate for Mother reads Catherine, which I share with all my siblings but neither Willow nor Sky will answer to Catherine. There's no father implicated on our birth certificates though there have been men trailing through our complicated caravan of life who have been pointed out to one or other of us as 'father'. 

Willow and Sky dragged us through a childhood of fantastical invention. We lived on isolated farms by the goodwill of the farmer or on rented fields and waste ground, at constant battle with planners, social workers and the suspicious. Oft times we were described as gipsies or tinkers yet Willow and Sky both speak with educated and upper class accents and instilled in us formal manners and behaviours worthy of a finishing school. Indeed, that's probably where they met. We seem to have no genetic grandparents, uncles or aunts and yet our early years were filled with eccentric individuals casually introduced as relatives with a vagueness that forestalled further enquiry.

The Willow and Sky menage must have been frustrating for the social workers to deal with. The girls may have cultivated an aura of otherworldliness but they were formidable opponents to those whose tidy-mindedness would had had us placed under permanent roofs - whether home or school.

Willow has a comprehensive grasp of the benefits and legal system and we have never been obviously short of money, not that she and Sky find much to spend it on apart from mysterious packages of seeds that arrive by mail order and are planted with the waxing moon, or occasionally and more sinisterly, on moonless nights. Sky was and is an inveterate attender of auctions and farm clearance sales. Sometimes we were pressed into going with her to carry home the results of her meticulous bidding. Bantams in a box, a frame for making hazel hurdles, old horse harness, pretty old crockery and small household items which Willow often sold on at a profit to local antiques shops.

Willow is the commercial one; she has a website now selling the herbal cures she makes and a range of benignly occult products - the kind of things that are artlessly attractive rather than threatening, such as the Witch Ball that Sky found at the clearing sale of a remote Northumberland farm. It's a beautiful object, a mirrored sphere of the soft, blotched silver of ancient looking glass. It's hard to imagine what technology made it - it's clearly very old. It looks as fragile as a blown bubble but my brother Adam dropped it once and instead of shattering into minute shards of glass, it rolled slowly back to Sky's feet and she hung it up out of reach above the doorway. Those were the horse-drawn caravan days before my younger siblings arrived.

As children we were evidently well-fed and cared for. Our clothes were no more scruffy than the average active country-living child; we had footwear appropriate to our environment; our mothers were punctual attenders at the local GP surgery for our vaccinations. We did not suffer lice or rickets and our injuries were largely of the 'fell out of a tree' variety.

The authorities would dearly have loved to get us all into school. Periodically Willow would come back from town, where she had a PO Box for our mail, brandishing another letter requiring an inspection by the local education authority. This usually resulted in a trip into the local town's library where we would be lined up with our exercise books to demonstrate our grasp of maths or natural sciences. For us maths came in the guise of astro-navigation taught by Willow who'd sailed round the world on a Tall Ship; and natural sciences was a rather loose term for what Sky taught us about horticulture, botany and wild animals. Now my siblings are scattered to the winds, armed with these curious skills. Oenone makes award winning wild life documentaries, her skill at observing the intimate lives of shy animals honed by our mosquito-ridden badger watchings. Mithuna is the most obviously whacky. She's a fashionable astrologer and sooth sayer though she admits to me that most of what she 'predicts' to her rich and restless clientele is reassuring nonsense. Her sight does not penetrate the brittle shells of self-regard and self-obsession enrobing her most famous celebrity clients. Phoebe is the Head Gardener at a glorious National Trust property whose gardens are rightly famous.

After years of scepticism, I now accept that Willow and Sky are a pair of modestly successful white witches, who have enthusiastically embraced those aspects of modern life which make their lives more fun and (by their own standards only), effective. For example, Willow has a mobile phone for conducting her business. But regardless of her telephonic availability, just as many people turn up as expected or unforeseen to buy or trade with her as did in her telephone-free past when she relied solely on a sense of an imminent visit. 

I'd like to know who I am. Does my upbringing direct my destiny?

More disguises than Inspector Clouseau

Another frost! The wood is sheltered but it was still bitter overnight. In the early morning it was magical; a bleached landscape with a watery sun drawing a thick mist up from the ground to treetop level before burning it away to a warm clear day. That wonderful texture of half-frozen soil, like hot chocolate fondant - a firm crust through which one's weight breaks to a softness beneath. 

There are purple and white violets on the banks, mixing with the primroses and enamel-shiny celandines. The birds are so noisy at dawn that sleep is hopeless and its better to be up and out when no-one else is around, enjoying the hedges hazing green with the bursting leaves of hawthorn and bobbled with the tiny white flower buds of blackthorn.

Today I decided to venture into the local town for supplies. The cleaner pair of jeans, a hat pulled down over my long hair (which is beginning to show the absence of hot water, expensive shampoo and even more expensive conditioner); sunglasses; towel and dirty clothes in the small backpack - maybe there will be somewhere to have a good scrub in the town. Ready.

There's a bus that passes along the lane by the woods. I looked up the timetable online last night. So it was not such a hike to reach ****leigh, which is not so much a town as an overgrown, single street village. On impulse I walked into a sad little hairdressers and asked if anyone could cut my hair. A thin, silent girl clicked and combed, long strands fell to the floor and I tried to avoid thinking about how much I loved the weight and feel of my long hair. I wasn't expecting much from the cut but I was surprised by the transformation. A stranger looked back at me, with a short, feathery cap of hair that makes my eyes look huge and my face sculpted and fragile. It's the face of someone older but more vulnerable.

The transformation was partial; something further was needed and seeing signs to a swimming pool gave me an idea. Quick stop at Boots for hair dye and fake tan and then into the rather luxurious ladies' changing rooms at the pool. The place was deserted and I was able to lurk in a shower cubicle with today's newspaper whilst the dye 'took'. A wild, gipsyish girl met my gaze. She doesn't resemble anyone I know but I think I like her. She looks capable but fey; a practical fairy who with the herbs of the fields cures headaches and transmogrifies cats... maybe I am at last coming to terms with my heritage?

Another dawn, another frost

Remember building secret camps as a child and wishing you could spend all night, all the holidays there? Our mums were right; it's not quite the same after dark, when you are cold, tired and dirty and there are strange noises in the woods. Actually, it's more fun! The feeling of triumph of another day survived! Forget all those TV buckaroos, helicoptored into the Brazilian jungle with nothing but a penknife and a film crew. This is the real thing! Endurance in the home counties! Must start brewing my own intoxicating beverages! (Anyone have a recipe for primrose wine? Or bluebell vodka?)

It's lonely, though. Maid Marion had Robin Hood. And his merry men. The closest I'll get to that is the travellers' mobile home park away across the fields, ferociously guarded by cross-bred bull terriers with torn ears and attitude. I long to be a conversation. My voice is a sad murmur in my skull. Hence the blog! A bit one-sided at the moment but perhaps someone will stumble across it and post a nice comment (or wine recipe!).

Actually, the real problem with living in the woods is not the lack of intelligent conversation but water. The lack of it. Whilst in many respects my camp is ideal, there's no source of clean water for a weary portage.

Discreetly tucked into a pine plantation, the trees are tall enough to hide the flame and absorb the scented smoke of my night time fire. There's a house, fortunately bull terrier free, about half a mile away, whose unsuspecting inhabitants have an unsecured wifi. They must feel they are too remote to be troubled by hackers and freeloaders! It doesn't take long to slip out under the darkness and from the shadows of their rhododendrons, upload the day's blog. Off it goes into the darkness like a space craft launched towards the stars. Is there anyone out there, listening? Can you hear me?

Water.

Everyday I will have to go in search of clean water for drinking, cooking, washing. It hasn't rained so flysheet collector is touched with dust, not liquid. The water supply to the animal troughs in the fields has been turned off, probably to avoid frost damage. I've tried several of the  galvanised troughs filled with stagnant green slime, but pressing the ballcock down does not release a gush of clean water and I am left dirtier for my efforts. At last, trespassing round isolated cottages, I found an outside tap on the garage of what seems to be a weekend cottage. I'll use it occasionally but its a long walk back to camp carrying 10 litres of water.

Nothing in the news about LRI. Just endless chatter about G20...

The Lady Vanishes

Sunday. Somewhere in a wood. Minus 4 degrees overnight. 

Not a great start to my new life in the open air! Sometime around 3.00am I was so cold that I had to light the little gas stove and boil up some water for my hot water bottle. Even with all my  clothes on I was too cold to go back to sleep and lay immobile, feeling that the slightest movement would disperse my slight body warmth into the chilly tent. What on earth was I doing in a tent in a wood in a frost?

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On Saturday I had woken from troubled sleep to find my home staked out by the press and the announcement of the financial collapse of my employer apparently imminent. When the phone rang around 9.00am I let the answerphone pick up the call:

"Ceres, it's Brian,*" the head of PR at Last Resort Insurance plc* paused as if waiting for me to take up the call,

"Ceres, this is important. There's a few rumours around about LRI today. I'm dealing with it, but don't be surprised if you get the odd call - don't comment, just refer them to me. Standard procedure! You know the drill." He laughed in a rather strained manner, "I'll leave a message for you on your mobile too in case you're away for the weekend." He rang off. Sure enough, within minutes, the phone had rung a couple of times. Business journalists , leaving their names and numbers on the answerphone, expressing the urgency of calling them back. I ignored the calls and focused on my decision.

To leave my comfortable warm flat in London, my job, my friends and disappear... Somehow, I thought that my unconventional childhood might have equipped me to opt out of the surveillance society vanish into the landscape. Very 'Rogue Male'!

It was clear from the stake-out in the street below and the phone calls that I was not going to be able to walk out of the building unobserved and would have to leave disguised.

First I assembled the bare essentials for a few weeks survival. It was a depressingly large and bulky pile.

'Four seasons' sleeping bag, tent, camping gas stove and billy cans, a few plastic food storage boxes that fitted neatly into each other, knife, multitool penknife thingy, pasta, rice, porage oats, loo paper, clothes, thermal underwear, anorak, baby wipes, toothbrush, torch, headlamp, hotwater bottle ... the pile in my bedroom overflowed the bed and began to flood across the carpet. Camera, iPod, radio, Blackberry, laptop, mobile phone... mobile phone? Was I mad? Who was I going to phone? TrustBusters? At this point it began to dawn on me that I was about to leave behind not just my routine life, but my identity itself and for a moment the excitement of this mad adventure ceased and the fears crowded back with tears of self-pity.

Armed with a cup of tea, I went back to my task. Passport, driving licence, credit cards. Pointless really and yet essential when I needed to reassume the Ceres I used to be. £1,000 cash - considerably more useful. How long can I survive on £1,000? Weeks? Months? All the flat's bills are paid by direct debit. The flat is more self -sufficient than I am! I paused to transfer funds from deposit to current account - enough to keep the utility bills paid till winter. Presumably at some stage LRI will stop paying me. Back to the laptop to ping off an email to personnel "... regret not able to come to work for an indeterminate spell ... blah blah ... stress... blah blah ... advised to avoid pressured situations and contact with the hostile workplace .... will be in touch in due course" No idea how long this will keep them off my back. Presumably they will expect doctor's certificates but perhaps my implication of mental injury suffered in their workplace will buy me some time while they take advice as to whether contacting me to ask for proof of illness could be construed as harassment.

By now the big backpack, the one I used for Peru, was bulging and the small day pack didn't have much slack under its waistband either. Lighten up! Out went the Blackberry but I kept the mobile, intending to buy a pay as you go sim card for emergency use. In went the solar charger for all these electronics, 17 essential ounces, plus the 2lb mini-laptop. I thought longingly of the old-fashioned left luggage lockers, beloved of the movie industry, into which a generation ago I could have anonymously stored other essentials for later collection. Gone, all gone, as far as I know. The last one I've seen was in Basle train station. I can't remember seeing one in London for years, removed perhaps because of their attraction for other, more clandestine and violent storers.

By lunch time I was pretty much packed with two bin bags ready with which to disguise the backpacks and a grungy outfit including face-shrouding hat - hopefully more Cleaning Lady Chic than City-suited high flier. And then suddenly these precautions became unnecessary.

Movement outside in the street caught my eye. Peering discreetly through the sitting room's net curtains I say my TV surveillance crew were packing up. Quickly loading themselves and their kit in to a van, they were gone in moments, leaving behind a number of squashed paper coffee cups and stubbed out cigarettes. When I turned on the radio, I learnt the reason: the Dunfermline Building Society has crashed. It's only a poxy little thing - hardly registers on the RBS scale but it looks like it's enough to divert attention away from LRI or even, the rumours being so vague about the identity of the failing corporation, to be mistaken for the real culprit. LRI's exposure to toxic assets dwarfs Dunfermline's! We're trapped in a massive whirlpool of falling values and somewhere along the line the good ship LRI Main Board is going to get sucked down that spiral and spat out on the sea bed.

What on earth was a dour, prudent Scottish building society doing buying up £274m of crappy Lehman loans? How could that ever have seemed like a good idea? Yippee! Thanks Jim Faulds! 

I was out of the door like a greyhound on a rabbit, albeit lugging two enormous bin bags. Round the corner to the cashpoint; extract the max; into a taxi and off to the railway station. One way ticket to the centre of one of those orange and green maps. Quick sprint round Boots and then M&S for something for supper that didn't need microwaving and onto a train. Phew! A couple of hours later, tired already, things didn't seem so much fun. So much weight in the back pack, so many miles from the station. It was cold. A very strong northerly. And two showers had already brushed across me with icy sleety fingers. It was a relief to walk into the woods out of the wind. One good thing. Not many people around. No sane person out dog walking in this weather.

Deep in the Forestry Commission woodland I came across just what I wanted. A dense wall of conifers about 15-20 feet high. Within a yard or two a person would be invisible. Taking out my compass (I didn't mention that going into the pile, did I? There will be some other unmentioned items emerging from the Tardis-like backpack in due course), I pushed my way into the trees until I found what I was searching for.  A small clearing where a couple of trees had died some years ago leaving a grassy hole in the plantation. Dusk was falling, the tent was up in a flash and soon I was curled up inside, boots off, with a cup of tea, the newspaper, radio on softly and supper simmering in a billy on the gas cooker. 

*All names have been changed of course. Not necessarily to protect the innocent.

Cracks in the dam

I've not slept. It's getting light and outside the tightly drawn curtains, London is rising and going to work and play. Not me. I can never go to work again. I'm going on the run.

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Last night I left the office in a daze. The markets are exploding. Our portfolios have been shredded. And that's just the equities - where we still have real interests in real companies. The derivatives funds are wiped out. They just don't exist any more - the emperor's clothes revealed. I though my funds were safe. I had resisted my new director's attempts to browbeat me in to investing in companies that existed only to borrow and invest in other companies' parcels of toxic assets. But apparently not. Somehow, despite my vigilance, he has engineered a massive exposure to possibly the most highly geared, toxic collection of US assets of all time and IT'S GOING TO BRING OUR COMPANY DOWN! All those householders, paying their insurance premiums to secure their lives, their homes, their old age - they're going to lose everything. Last night the only people that knew this were me and my Director, Vijay. Today he'll tell the Board and they'll look for a scapegoat. It won't be Vijay, he'll make sure of that.

Which leaves me. The innocent one. The one that told the Board we should have nothing to do with these juicy, lucrative investment opportunities. The one that turned down countless proposals and was berated for being too cautious. The only one, it seems amongst the entire senior management who remembers the fortunes lost in the dotcom boom and was determined not to repeat the mistakes of investing in a product you didn't understand, couldn't touch and smell, managed by a 20 year old whizz kid.

There are rumours, there have been for days, that a major insurance company is about to announce huge, unimaginable losses. Is today the day we find out who it is?

Last night, as the office closed down around me and colleagues turned off computers and went home or off to Friday night drinks, I scoured the system for evidence, loading files and email strings onto a USB drive. Hope to god I've got it all: the bullying emails from Vijay; my damning research notes; my diary; the pdfs of the sale and purchase agreements I finally tracked down when I hacked into Vijay's computer. I've got it all. But I don't think that will save me from the Directors when they realise they will be held accountable if they can't put the blame solely on some rogue trader.  Framing me is their only chance to leave with their pensions intact like Fred the Shred. 

I look at the papers in front of me - should I send them to the FSA or the Serious Fraud Office, or even Gordon Brown? It all seems pointless, the SFO has not yet managed a decent conviction; the FSA has bee powerless to control the City, whose grandees have just taken their payoffs and run! Gordon Brown is on a lecture tour in Brazil and now that his role is reduced to soundbite generation on everything from Jade Goody's death to healthy eating, no-one's listening to him any more. 

It occurs to me that that is what I should do. Run. Whatever happens, even a full exoneration, will never lift the taint of such disaster from me. I'll never work in the City again.

Walking into the darkened sitting room to fetch my Blackberry, I glance out of the tall window at Cornwall Gardens below in the growing light and stiffen. Standing on the pavement outside is a small group holding fluffy microphone booms and video camera. Christ! The press are on to me! I picture vividly my tense figure displayed on the news, trying to hide my face, looking guilty, the cynical, gloating commentary, my face becoming public property. Recognised and vilified like Fred Goodwin. Car vandalised, flat windows broken. I can't help myself,  I start to cry from fear and self-pity.  Yet the tears free up a fresh determination. I will disappear. Deprived of a visible target and with so many competing ill news stories, the media will move on. Six months, a year from now, perhaps people will not remember and recognise me. But where do I go till then? In my haste, pacing around the flat, I have knocked against a bookshelf and it has shed its contents to the floor. Bright orange and green covered Ordnance survey maps lie pooled. A shred of an idea gleams in my mind.