Storms bring fantasies down to earth

I could really do with spending a weekend at home. I can't remember the last time I wielded a duster in anger, my wardrobe is a disaster area and I'm running out of frozen dinners.

We had to take a trip down to Wexford on Saturday, where people are more concerned about the damage done by the recent storms than they are about the falling pound or the Asian crisis. Understandably so the Irish-sterling exchange rate palls into insignificance beside the fact that there's a massive chestnut tree lying across the driveway and a pothole the size of a small cavern at the bottom of the road.

The sunny south-east hasn't quite lived up to its name recently the last time I was there was the August bank holiday weekend and we were lucky to get back.

What they need in Wexford is a company owned by the Indonesian royal family which would sort out the tree problem, the pothole problem and the flooding problem no problem, payment accepted in hard currencies.

Circumstances are looking somewhat reduced for the royal family since the IMF imposed an austerity package which also controls the monopolies which had been the domain of President Suharto and his children. No more money for old rope and especially not US dollars.

Apparently the royal children have handed over dollars for rupiahs so as to be seen supporting the local currency. It's not something that Charlie of the zipped-lip has encouraged here yet, but who knows, the Central Bank could yet be handing over other currencies to support the Irish pound.

The biggest crisis facing me this week was not, however, the state of play of the currency, or even the current spread on the Korea Development Bank debt, but the fact that Dion Dublin was linked with a move to Middlesborough.

Dublin is the top scorer in my fantasy football team, currently lying a respectable third in our office league and nicely poised for an assault on the title.

Monday, being a US bank holiday, was on the quiet side which was why I took some time out. I was meeting some booksellers for lunch (my next opus, Caroline's Sister, appears on the bookstands in March) and had promised to bring them on a tour of the IFSC.

It's interesting to see the centre from the viewpoint of people who know nothing about the general business of trading or banking. The main concern of the booksellers was the damage being done to their business by an exchange rate of .8400 bringing a £6.99 sterling paperback into the stratospheric levels of more than £8. Very few people are prepared to shell out that kind of money for a paperback. (Good news, though, for home-produced authors.)

Hardbacks are even more prohibitive and the fear in the book trade is that the cross will drop to .80 which will play havoc with the summer season.

We went to see the trading floor on FINEX. It was the first time I'd been there and, allowing for the fact that on a US holiday it was always going to be quiet, it was still very interesting. The comment from the booksellers was that they'd always thought moneymen and women wore Armani suits and shiny shoes and they were surprised at the coloured jackets and the whole idea of open outcry.

Anyway everyone got a good grounding in the basics of futures and options while we were there and I have a feeling that booksellers might start looking for cross options rather than buying sterling forward sometime soon.

The whole Nick Leeson and Barings Bank saga got an airing again I guess if Nick did nothing else he brought an interest in the area of futures trading to a whole new set of people.

Over lunch we talked about women in business interestingly most of the booksellers were women (actually, only one male among us) but the stories were still similar the upper echelons are still male dominated and it's damn difficult to change. Most of us had read the piece in the Sunday Times which told the story of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell which, apparently, hired 40 women from an agency to mingle at its Christmas party.

This was, we were told, because DMG doesn't have enough female executives which meant that the evening was very male dominated. Obviously if DMG had a few more female execs the evening wouldn't have been so male dominated. Self-evident, I would have thought.

I've been to hundreds of events where female guests were vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts, but I didn't realise that this was actually off-putting for the men. I always thought it was the females who felt slightly overwhelmed by the number of dark suits around the place. But, according to the Sunday Times report, the hostesses employed for the night were there to help the evening "go with a bang".

Their job description was to talk to "the short fat bloke in the corner". It seems that these senior executives don't know a lot of people and might be left standing on their own which would be very embarrassing.

Nobody has ever worried in the past that the lone female standing on her own might feel embarrassed. Nope she has to get in there and mingle.

Anyway, if a company is top-heavy with one gender, then it should reap the consequences and have an evening dominated by talk about soccer or rugby or whatever. Mind you, if any of them had Dion Dublin on his fantasy league team I guess I'd have an animated discussion about it too. Still, I'm glad my leading points scorer didn't move from the Premiership to the First Division. I would have been as sick as a parrot . . .

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