Because it's a sort of anniversary for me (it's almost a year since I wiped my feet on the mat of financial services to write full-time), more people than usual have been asking me what the transition has been like.
The question I'm asked most often is "what do you miss?" Usually the person who has put it to me looks at me hopefully as though I'm going to break down and confess that I miss everything and that this writing lark has been a huge mistake.
Those who ask me think writing is such a solitary pursuit, whereas anything to do with dealing-rooms and finance is a maelstrom of noise, activity and excitement. Therefore, I must be pining for the hustle and bustle - at least some of the time. But, in many ways, it was the hustle and bustle that I was quite happy to give up.
A great myth of this age seems to be that we must constantly be in a hurry or under pressure to be part of the economic miracle. My life is just as busy now as it ever was. I travel a lot to promote my books, I'm always working on something new and, to be honest, I'm not really very good at sitting around doing nothing anyway.
I don't feel inadequate because I can manage my time better than before, yet there is a subtle cachet in our society about having no spare time. For some reason it has become a sign of success. It's only in the past year I've begun to wonder if it isn't a sign of failure.
Nowadays we have lots of money but little time to spend it. We are at our places of work earlier, stay later and spend longer getting to and from them. Activities have to be squashed in to a schedule which is already overflowing with must-do things, all of which have to be done at breakneck speed. But we can't do everything at breakneck speed because it's difficult to get around the city at anything faster than a crawl - unless you're prepared to walk.
However, if you've finally managed to buy the top-of-the-range Mercedes or the latest Range Rover, you don't want to walk, you want to sit in your status symbol and be symbolic. You'll probably have plenty of time as you sit in the traffic jam to use your WAP phone to keep in touch with what's going on too, in case something important is passing you by. Thank goodness for technology and the information age!
That, though, is another great myth. The accepted wisdom is that you need to be able to get quick access to whatever you need to know, but the corollary of instant information is that you need to know everything. Actually, you don't. There's very little that you need to know, although quite a lot that you'd like to know and far more that you're stuck with hearing about, whether you want to or not.
I was afraid of turning into an informationless vegetable when I left the IFSC. Dealers are probably the best informed people on the planet, since they see every news headline scroll in front of them in real-time. History-making stories can be squashed between the price of crude oil and the daily schedule of New York's mayor. But the information is available. Now I find out about things a little later. If I'm out I listen to the news stations on the car radio because I prefer them, but during the day I don't bother.
So when I sit down in the evening the news is, well, new, and it hasn't made me less informed or less competent not to know everything all at once. Although I needed to know less than a quarter of everything that came up on screen when I worked in a dealing room, I ended up reading vastly more than I ever required to do my job, in case I missed something. That's the fear on which the information age plays. Actually, an excess of information is becoming a serious issue in the workplace. Apparently in the US, the average worker spends more than half the day processing documents.
E-mail has made things worse because information that wouldn't have been delivered before is now whizzed through at the press of a button. It's hard to accept that you can't read everything.
Just because you have access to all the information you could possibly want, it doesn't mean you have the time or the ability to process it. I'm told that a weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person would have come across in a lifetime in 17th-century England. No wonder we're struggling to keep control.
I used to have a mountainous pile of "to read" documents. When I cleared out my desk in January 2000 I realised that some were nearly two years old. Information is one thing, knowledge is something else. Most of us still haven't come to terms with the difference between the two. But I'm trying. Anyway, my transition hasn't always been a smooth ride.
Despite everything, I do get itchy to see scrolling headlines sometimes, and I'm still not entirely at ease about being in control of my own time. Although I never really enjoyed wearing suits, I sometimes get bored with being dressed down all the time too.
Nor has my life become suddenly stress-free. There are other ways of getting stressed besides looking at the long bond. Obviously, though, I don't miss the long bond.