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.
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