unlike Vincent, he wasn't quite taken in by the outbreak of hopefulness on all sides. After all, nothing about the tanks or the process had been resolved; an air of doom still hung undisturbed over the project.

Think of banking today and the image is of grey-suited men in towering skyscrapers. Its future, however, is being shaped in converted warehouses and funky offices in San Francisco, New York and London, where bright young things in jeans and T-shirts huddle around laptops, sipping lattes or munching on free food.

I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following, but I will not eat with you.

Two of the younger men carried him there on a stretcher of stringybark.