Merry and not so merry lunches

By the time lunch was over at Wong's in Clontarf last week it was dark outside. It had, of course, been bright when we went in at one o'clock, but it was dark by five. Four-hour lunches with lots of wine used to be a much more usual occupational hazard than they are now, when anything stronger than Ballygowan can be fatal to the afternoon's work.

But Friday's marathon was all in a good cause. We were raising money for "To Russia With Love" a charity which works to help the plight of orphaned children in Russia and, as with all charities helping children, the stories that you hear can bring you to the depths of despair but can also renew your faith in human nature.

Having eaten more than was good for us, lots of money was raised for the charity and I'm delighted to say that the bidding was fierce for one of the auction items - the opportunity to have the buyer's name (or name of his/her choice) as a character in one of my next novels. I had been thinking long and hard about writing another novel - now I have no choice, as the right to be named went for (as we say in literary circles) a four-figure sum!

I didn't realise that so many people were prepared to be immortalised in print. And, since I have full character control, immortalised in a manner of my choosing. . . only that, but I've been reliably informed that my latest opus is selling like hotcakes in Dubai, so the successful bidder will have the chosen name read on an almost global basis.

However, to Clubby and to Pete, who valiantly drove the bid higher in time honoured tradition, an honourable mention in The Irish Times is surely reward enough. . .

December is usually a good time of the year for long lunches and, of course, there's been so much talk about business winding down before year-end that lots of people have felt almost obliged to depart from their desks, but it has been a busy time in bond markets what with a

number of companies all issuing corporate bonds and fund managers tidying up their books before the year end.

The issuance has taken place mainly in the States, where the spread between the price that governments pay for money and corporates pay for money has narrowed despite predictions that it would actually be wider in December. But fund managers seem to want to invest in anything that will give them a pickup over government yields and that has meant that some companies - which probably would otherwise have waited until the new year - have decided to do their borrowing in 1999 instead.

Some may be doing so because there is still speculation that the Fed may raise rates at its next meeting, rather tiresomely scheduled for December 21st. Bond markets didn't react especially well to the hike in November, with the long bond hurtling all the way back to yields of 6.30 per cent and having a knock-on affect on European markets too. But since then yields have come back to around 6.20 per cent in the States and European markets trade quite well whenever the currency isn't getting hammered. (Unfortunately it's still getting hammered. . .)

In the years when you were chastised for coming back from lunch with a client after only an hour, the Irish Budget would have had an impact on domestic bond prices but although this year's Budget generated more argument, counter-argument and hot-air since people believed politicians were in it for the national good, the advent of the euro has meant that it gets lost among the more esoteric items like EU Harmonised CPI and the like.

It caused a lot of heated debate on the airways, though, which seems to be how policy is conducted these days. Maybe the idea that people once engaged in rational debate is nothing but a misplaced memory, but bringing the tax measures down to a question of who is feeling the most "hurt" by lack of recognition from the Minister for Finance is mind-numbing.

In all my days as a single person being crucified because subsequent governments decided that I wasn't a family, it never crossed my mind to feel hurt. Fed up, hard-done-by and annoyed, yes. Hurt - I haven't had time to feel hurt! My friends with children are currently deciding who feels most hurt - the ones at home with only an RTE phone-in for company or the working-outside-the-home people who say they now feel categorised as feckless, tiger-riding, money-grabbing sops to mammon.

Meanwhile, my best working-outside-the-home friend would love not to have to get up at six every morning and begin the trek across the city (wouldn't we all) and my best working-inside-the-home friend would love to have a conversation that didn't involve Barney, Tellytubbies or Pokemon.

One of the advantages to being at home during the day, though, is that you probably have enough of life's necessities to make a sandwich at around one o'clock. Given that I've already mentioned my lunching arrangements in this piece you've probably guessed that a diet will be part of next year's life plan, but it was a one extreme to the other week last week.

The IFSC hit crisis point when the Spar foodmarket closed for refurbishment. Unfortunately the day it closed was wet, windy and miserable. Any of the dial-a-sandwich places were overbooked by eleven. Those of us who didn't know about Spar walked out of the office at 12.30 p.m. only to discover that 400 people cannot queue in Munchies and expect to get anything to eat within a time frame that doesn't have us all in a state of collapse.

And if you wandered any further afield you returned to your desk wet, cold and clutching a disintegrating paper bag.

For those of you who think it's all glitz and glamour and four-hour lunches I can recommend feeding-time in the IFSC to bring you right back down to earth again.

Sheila O'Flanagan is a fixed-income specialist at NCB Stockbrokers