The tempest

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

“It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.”

— Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The financial markets are cyclical. There are times of fallow, times of harvest, times of maintenance, and times of storm. The activity of all those hardy souls that till the fields of finance: farm-boys, the ostlers, the stable-hands, shepherd-girls; those that sow and reap, those that thresh, those that maintain the machinery by which we harvrest the fruits of the field and forest — it varies by season, by climate and by weather. We prune in the winter. We till the soil and plant our seed in the spring. Once the crops are underway and flourishing in the warm the summer breeze, we go away to Majorca. We are back in time for harvest: once the book is closed, for three months the senior farmers hunker down to agree how much grain each has earned and what pittance of it they should set aside for their sharecroppers. The interlocking cycles: annual, seasonal, cycladian carry on their ancient ways, interrupted by intermittent storms, when the workers in the agrarian economy put down their ploughshares and save, and batten down, what they can.

See also

• The Apocalypse