I never thought the “reveal” would be easy. But, without a doubt, these past couple weeks have been unbelievably intense.
The night before the “big reveal,” I couldn’t sleep. How would the public react when they put my face to the silhouette? To my astonishment, the response was overwhelmingly positive and encouraging to my face, overwhelmingly catty and jealous behind it.
The silhouette I’ve been operating under these past 14 months has afforded me a fascinating kaleidoscope into the London psyche. I’ve had women write in with their own stories of discrimination and harassment in the City. I’ve had men profess their undying love for me, negating my previously held theory that it was impossible to fall in love with a computer-generated image. I’ve been cursed at, ridiculed, psychoanalyzed, and actually had people threaten to kill me!
A lot of my readers seemed to have had an image in their heads of the “City Girl” that didn’t remotely come close to who I actually was. In a nutshell, they expected me to be a female version of Geraint Anderson – a millionaire City Boy, preferably without the goatee – and many people felt betrayed when I didn’t turn out to be that. I was in my mid-twenties. And I was blonde.
They can be disappointed, but not nasty. In some respects, I am more of a typical “City Girl” than “City Boy” was a “City Boy.” The vast majority of people in the City aren’t multi-millionaires by the age of 35. We do well for ourselves. We earn far more than the national wage. But the City is primarily made up of non-millionaires - the compliance people, lawyers, settlements people, etc., who make the City run - not the top 15% who rake in fortunes.
I have absolutely no regrets about my time in the City, or, for that matter, my decision to leave. I am fortunate to have a “transferable” skill – writing – that I can take anywhere from now on. But most people in the City don’t have this. As a banker, you are good at Excel. You can utilize this skill only in New York, London, Hong Kong, or Tokyo.
The bottom line is: I’m not pretending to be something I’m not. I am not offering up a cure to the world’s economic woes.
My book simply offers a very human story of the financial crisis from the type of City insider who has always been an outsider - a view from the eyes of a “City Girl.”
At a party last Saturday, a friend from Ernst and Young relayed how one of his clients had been beaten up outside Boujis. “Column idea” alarm bells immediately went off – that is, until I realized, I didn’t have a “City Girl” column to write for the following week.
I miss the thrill of the kaleidoscope already.