"I feel sorry for the managing directors - they were paid about 50% of their bonus in stock, that's been written off."

This man's job let him and his fellows cause the credit crunch.

Many years ago I was sitting at a desk in an office near Kingston Upon Thames. As the clock on the wall crept past 18:00 hours I rose from my chair, locked the document I was reviewing in the desk, picked up my bag and strode out into the car park. Driving out of the office complex and up the main road I pulled into a layby opposite a few shops by the roundabout. I walked into one shop bearing the logo of a certain pizza company. Which one ? Think Duff Beer and a family, (indeed a whole town) with severe jaundice and you'll get the idea.

This company 'make' the pizzas for each order starting by making the pizza base from a lump of proven dough. And in this shop the staff did this in front of you, to give you and them the chance to engage in conversation, a lost art in greater London I can tell you.

The woman deftly spinning my pizza base out caught sight of the magazine under my arm. 'Oh, you're a contractor' she said. This caught me unawares. "yes" I replied, and started telling her what little I could of my work across the road without risking getting us both in the old bailey for the same reasons Maggie put Clive Ponting there.

Without breaking stride in her pizza-making, the woman multi-tasked the twin operations of laying out black olives in a symmetrical pattern and looking wistfully in my direction. As she finished and consigned my supper-to-be to the main oven, she sighed, turned to me and said ...

"I wish I could go back to doing what you are doing now, but ever since we got thrown onto the street when the Torus project collapsed I haven't had the nerve"

That was almost a decade and a half ago, but the details of that conversation are etched on my mind. I'm ashamed to say the woman's face isn't. She was one of thousands of people who I paid to prepare or serve food to me in my days as a warrior of the road. Their faces blur into a gestalt, the surroundings blur into a greyscale of memories. But even today her voice uttering those words calls back to me across the years.

When the Torus project was canned it was the Stock exchange's largest IT project failure to date. People were called into a mass meeting and as they waited there, men in peaked capped uniforms entered their offices, unlocked their desks, took out anything apparently personal, put it into a cardboard box and brought the boxes on trollies to the doors of the room in which they were gathered. Only when the trollies arrived did someone stand up and tell the assembled multitude that they were being shown the door. Each person was then taken out of the room, led to a trolley, handed "their" box of posessions and then "escorted" out of the building and into the street.

The fools have not learned. As this BBC news web page points out. The tale os told of many people leaving Lehman Brothers in Canary wharf cardboard box in hand. Some had not even got their feet under the desk. 24-year-old Edouard d'Archimbaud had only just arrived in Canary Wharf from paris for his first day at work. He expected to collect £45,000 a year (plus fat wads of bonus) as a trader. Instead, he got a P45. "I do not know what I will do now. I've taken out a six-month lease on a flat and I don't know how I will pay for it," he said. My heart bleeds piss for him.

But Andy Bevan, three years his senior and thus a man half my age, is my nominee for 'most bizarre quote of the year'. Bevan "works in equity derivative finance" which the correspondent on Radio 4's 6 O'Clock news last night translated into English for me. The Andy Bevans of this world made money by taking all those sub-prime mortgage deals whose borrowers had been allowed to take against unaudited, self-certified declarations of income, wrapping them up with other products into "packages" whose wrapping was so tempting the suckers buying the product - and paying the fat fees added on top - failed to notice the stench of decay and corruption that poured fourth from the rotten core. And others took those packages, added some more, tied them up with more string, added a further fat fee, and found another sucker.

It does not take much intelligence to see that after a few such "derivations" you end up with "derivative packages" that are, like their sellers, all mouth and no trousers, mini-ENRONs all ready to explode.

It is people like Andy Bevan who created the situation where bankers saddled with bad debts in the form of worthless mortgages taken out by people not challenged to prove either their worth or their ability to repay, were not only unaware they were standing in the street wearing just their underpants but were also unable to tell how much of this bad debt they had on their books.

The andy bevans of this world had done the job of selling the king his new clothes to a degree unheard of in recent days and now everyone will suffer as a result.

And what does Andy think ? Well, in one of the most bizarre quotes on the whole story, he says "I am lucky - I don't have any dependants or a mortgage to worry about. I feel sorry for the managing directors - they were paid about 50% of their bonus in stock, that's been written off". And he says he is off back to his team, drinking one last drink in the Canary Wharf Slug and Lettuce.

Enjoy the drink, Andy. I know what happens next. And I can't seem to muster the slightest bit of compassion for you.

Don;t worry. There won't be a Tsunami in Cardiff Bay

Hot off the press from the BBC News Wales Website is the news that this man who will, they say, later today, kick off the Large Hadron Collider, has promised there will be no Tsunami in Cardiff Bay this morning. Or this afternoon.

Hmmm.

As a raw recruit to the ranks of the scientific profession, with the ink still wet on the piece of paper headed "Universitas Cambrensis" granting me "Baccalaureus Im Scientia Magna Cum Laude" I recall picking up a copy of The Sun from the tea room. Yes, we had the printed word in those days. On the front page was a Sun style enlargement of a very grainy greyscale photograph. A prototype of the sort of photograph now handed round offices across the country by grinning mums-to-be. And underneath that, in typical "Soaraway Sun 48 Point Type" were three little words :-

"IT'S A BOY"

About a fortnight later LOUISE BROWN was born.

You have no idea how much I hope that the stories peddled over the past few days by the successors of those journalists who couldn't tell an umbilical cord from a penis are equally flawed.

But if you'll excuse me, I'm off to prepare to kiss my arse goodnight. Because the chap above is absolutely right. There will be no tsunami in Cardiff Bay, because if it does go horribly wrong all the earth's seawater will fall through the event horizon (!) And remember folks, dive in head first. That way the last thing that will go through your mind will be YOUR arsehole. Jump in feet first and the last thing that will go through your mind is the arse of some like-minded stranger.

But I leave you today with the following two rather pleasant thoughts.

If everything does turn to shit later today, the EU commissioners will go down the black hole into non-existence a few millionths of a second before we do. So UKIP will have delivered on their policy after all. Leaving is to die well, and die free. And better than that, we die knowing Alistair Darling won't get a sodding penny in inheritance tax.

Ok people. It has been a pleasure and a privilege blogging for you. I am going outside now. I may be gone for some time. Or maybe. like Arnie, 'I'll Be Back'. Who knows ? Certainly not the chap pictured above.