'Ah, Ms Telman?'

'Yes, Raymond.'

'Some bad traffic up ahead,' he said.  He glanced at the car's navigation screen. 'Take a different route, aye?'

'Okay.'

Raymond whirled the steering-wheel to send us down a side road leading to the river.  Raymond took this sort of thing seriously.  Personally I have no interest in my route to a given destination, but some people like to be told why they're going one way rather than the other.

I scanned the newspapers.  Mid-term elections in the States.  Dow up.  British chancellor makes an announcement today about extra government borrowing.  Interest rate cut expected later today.  Footsie up, pound down.

Death and destruction in Central America, caused by the remains of Hurricane Mitch.  Thousands buried under mudslides.  Part of my mind scanned a mental list of company assets in the area, wondering how we might be affected, while my conscience shook its metaphorical head and tried to dredge up some human sympathy for the victims from the depths of my corporate soul.  I could have logged on to the company's encrypted Website and found out what exposure we had in Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras — and, if our Web people were on the ball, what damage we'd taken down there — but I preferred to finish reading the papers first.

General Pinochet's appeal against his extradition to Spain was due to come up in the House of Lords that week.  This was of more than academic interest for us as a company.  Frankly the fate of one old fascist mass-murderer was irrelevant in business terms (though I don't doubt that as a company we kept on good terms with whoever was in power in Chile throughout the Allende years, Pinochet's regime and subsequently), but the whole issue of diplomatic immunity was one that exercised us at that point.  Hence what Mike Daniels referred to as 'the Pashific shing'.  Personally I thought the Pacific thing was all a monumental irrelevance, but it was out of my hands — and I was probably not invited to the rumoured shindig in Yorkshire that weekend, no matter what Mike might think.  That was Level One stuff, the preserve of the Hazletons and the Parfitt-Solomenides of the Business.