Graveyards Of The Banks: Nyla Nox

Nyla Nox is a pseudonym. I don't think the author is hiding exactly- she gives public readings and interviews- but it's probably wise to keep a low profile when you've written a three volume attack on the investment banks. These guys have willingly embraced the dark side; you don't want to draw yourself to their attention and have them zeroing in on you, not nohow.

The genre is fictionalised memoir- and- while names have been changed to protect the guilty- and rough edges smoothed in the interests of narrative flow- there's no reason to doubt that working for "the most successful bank in the universe" (now who could that be?) is as miserable an experience as Nyla says it is. Think of any line of work that involves the systematic and deliberate brutalisation of the work force- breaking rocks in Siberia, picking oakum in a 19th century jail- and investment banking is very much the same sort of thing- only with better pay. Unsurprisingly the process is inefficient and wasteful and the end product hardly worth the huge prices that bamboozled clients are paying for it. You think you'll get good work out of people who you've reduced to a stew of fear and hatred? Think again.

I've made the books sound grim- and so they are- but not as a reading experience. Nox is sharp and terse and funny. I've just finished the first book- I Did It For The Money- and I can't wait to find out what happens next.

Undertow

What is it about the word "undertow"? I just stumbled across it in a friends blog- and here we go again- the familiar, unexplained emotional response- a longing and a regret- and the reason for it just out of reach.

Suzanne Vega has a song called Undertow. I used to play it and replay it. The single line- "I am a friend to the undertow" brought tears to my eyes. Still does.

Perhaps I was lost at sea in some former life. Perhaps I was lost at sea more than once.

Saved By Her Imperfections

This lovely, sinuous thing is a great rarity- a medieval English statue that didn't get smashed by the iconoclasts. I suppose it was permitted to survive because it very obviously doesn't represent a deity or a saint. What it does represent is The Old Covenant- and it has a partner on the other side of the doorway- representing the New Covenant- which is stiff and bland and almost certainly a Victorian replacement for a medieval statue that was smashed because it did look like a saint.

The Old Covenant has her eyes bandaged because she's blind to the light of Christ; her staff is broken and she's holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments upside down. How ironic that her state of theological delinquency was the thing that saved her.





We're in Rochester and the door opens onto the cathedral library. The experts say its one of the finest things of its kind in the country.