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.