Question: Why did the accountant cross the road? Answer: To bore the people on the other side!

 

One thing that Jane Gleeson-White's book "Double Entry" is not and that is boring! Indeed, it's one of the most elegantly written accounts of the history of accounting I have read.

It charts the epic journey of the humble device that showed how to count the cost of everything, from the Doge’s Palace to the acrobatics of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. It's the story of double-entry bookkeeping, from its first known origins in late thirteenth-century Italy to its takeover of the twenty-first-century global economy.

For sixty years I've been a 'Buchhalter', a 'Rekenmeester', a chartered accountant, a company auditor, a 'chef-comptable', a group financial controller, a chartered management consultant, a finance manager, a bursar, an accounting software programmer, and a lot of other things besides - my wife will be happy to tell you about all those 'besides' - and I wished I had read Jane Gleeson-White's book all those sixty years ago.

You can buy this beautifully presented book at www.booktopia.com.au, or you can read it online - or at least "test-drive" it - at archive.org.

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Life was so simple then

My office on the top floor of the Al Bank Al Saudi Al Fransi building in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

 

I've previously reflected on my past stripped-down working life. I liked it that way and my employers did too as it meant that no domestic chores distracted me from giving my full attention to their business affairs.

My office was behind the window on the far right on the top floor

 

My work was my life and my office was my home, and there was little else besides. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" was how I coped with life in the world's largest sandbox (a.k.a. Saudi Arabia).

 

Note my portable OLYMPIA typewriter, bought in Kieta in New Guinea in 1972. It travelled the world with me for many years

 

Not that there was much to play with: the television reception consisted of little more than re-runs of Walt Disney's "Bambi" and so-called 'newsflashes' of members of the royal family travelling to or returning from the fleshpots of the West denied to their own citizens. As for alcohol, there was none - but you could get stoned anytime.

 

 

My hotel room was equally spartan, trimmed down as it was to the basics of sleeping, eating and work brought back from the office.

 

The view from the room with no view

 

It was a room with no view and the only diversion was the men-only swimming pool, as long as the scorching sun had set behind the Red Sea and the hot desert wind didn't sandblast the skin off your face.

All up, it was an assignment that came at a huge personal cost to me and yet it contributed to what I am today. Thanks for the memories!

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A blast from the past

Roy, Sheryl, moi

 

On this day eight years ago, the phone rang and a stranger's voice said, "This is Sheryl from Brisbane. We're across the river at Nelligen and would like to come and visit you."

"I don't know a Sheryl from Brisbane", I replied. "Yes, you do", the voice said. "I'm Sheryl. We worked together in the ANZ Bank in Canberra in 1967." OF COURSE! And so we met again after 48 years.

Back then Sheryl and I not only worked in the same bank but also lived in the same boarding-house about which I had written here. She had found my story on the internet some years ago and contacted me then by email but I had promptly forgotten. She and her husband Roy were campervanning up and down the East Coast and calling in on friends.

Sheryl had been more of a teenage crush than a friend to me as she was by far the best-looking sheila in the bank. I had been in Australia for just over a year and owned nothing more than the clothes I stood up in at a time when possessing a car was 95% of a young man's personality.

With 5% personality and a thick German accent I never stood a chance.

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P.S. ... and to think that fifty-five years ago, I would've willingly given up on the idea of seeing so much more of the world, would've willingly stuck with my dull 9-to-5 job in the bank, would've had kids and a big mortgage on a small house with a white picket fence around it - as they say, "the full catastrophe ..." - IF SHE HAD ONLY SO MUCH AS SMILED AT ME!!! Are these just the faintest echoes of Somerset Maugham's "Red"?

 

Reflections

 

She was the one who waited patiently for you to come around, to finally give yourself to her completely and realise that she's the one for you. She was the one who supported you in everything you did and you just took her for granted. Now you've lost her and you regret not being able to tell her how much you cared for her and how much you loved her. Now it's too late for could haves, would haves and should haves.

You probably thought that she would never even think about leaving you because you knew she loved you with her whole heart. You probably thought that she will stick by your side and that you still had time to have some more fun. She may be patient, but she's not a fool, she wasn't going to wait for you forever. She's proud and strong and she knows that she's worth much more than you gave her credit for. She mustered the strength and walked away, even though she loved you truly. She just couldn't take your lies and excuses anymore and she couldn't wait for you any longer.

She was naïve enough to think that you will change over time, that you will realise she's the best thing that has happened to you. She gave you all the chances she could but you just took her for granted. All she did is believe in you and your love, and all you did is fail her trust each and every time. Time and time again she forgave your misgivings and she hoped that there will be no next time. She hoped that this will be the last time you've caused her pain and that you'll finally give her the respect that she deserves. But time and time again she was wrong. That day never came and she just couldn't wait for it any longer.

She walked away and never looked back and there's just nothing you can do to change it. She will no longer tolerate your egoistic nature, your insecurities and your foolishness. She will no longer sacrifice herself for someone who doesn't appreciate her, for someone who doesn't know how to express his love, for someone who hasn't matured yet. She will no longer accept your lies and deceptions because she knows that she can have something much better. She knows that she deserves something much better, something that you will never be able to give to her.

She may be hurting, she may be in pain, but once the crying is over, she will pick herself up, dust herself off and carry on with her life. She will wipe away her tears and promise herself that she will never cry for you again. She will never let anyone else treat her badly again.

Now she starts to live again. Now she starts to love herself again, to reinvent herself and to rediscover her passions. She is finally free of your negativity, of your toxicity and she can live life to the fullest again. She can enjoy the little things, she can be happy and she can search for her soulmate. One day she will find the person who will light up her eyes and fall madly in love. She will love again and she will be loved the way she deserves.

You'll regret losing this beautiful, amazing woman who was ready to give herself to you completely. You'll regret losing this one-of-a-kind woman who was ready to be your partner and to spend her life with you. She was going to give it all to you, but you just didn't know how to cherish her."

Knowing that someone else has put into words my exact feelings gives me the small comfort that I am not the only shit that ever walked this earth. Mind you, Abdulghani Mofarrij had his hand in this as well: he refused to give me her entry permit to Saudi until nine months later when in late December 1982 I raced back to Sydney to pick her up by which time she had given up the wait. We never saw a lawyer as everything was shut for Christmas; we simply walked into the North Sydney Policy Station and in front of a young female constable signed an informal handwritten piece of paper dissolving our six-year-old marriage after which I flew back to Singapore to supervise the loading of a ship with 50,000 tons of barley to feed the fucking camels of Saudi Arabia.

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The pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known

 

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, ever king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known."

Carl Sagan, an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences, first delivered his now famous Pale Blue Dot speech in 1994 at Cornell University as part of a lecture titled "The Age of Exploration". It is regarded by many to be his finest lecture. The video above is an extract of that lecture.

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