Original literature: Banker Bashing
Anthony Burrows graduated from a well-known and prestigious university and began to work in an equally notorious bank, whose name you can probably guess even if I don’t tell you. He was happy there, at first, and with his honest face and candid way of dealing with clients, he got along just fine with the management and the general public. He led a harmless life of devoted work, for which his family was proud and justifiably so, never knowingly cheating or committing any real or lasting damage to another person in his life, to the best of his recollection, nor was it ever his intent to do so. Yet he is merely a face to a name. Whether it was Anthony or Stephen the manager, Beatrice in accounting or Ethel on the cash desk, these people were bankers, and were punished as such.
It was on a particularly chilly November night that Anthony was walking to his car, returning late from the office of the aforementioned infamous establishment to find his way to his wife and child through the perilous fog of a city renowned for its poor visibility. Wrapping his overcoat about his plump frame, with a red woollen scarf swathed about his prominent neck, Anthony cautiously stepped out into the cold air, and exhaled, pleased with the sight of his breath as it hung about his corpulent head in wreaths of disintegrating grey vapours. Satisfied that this great power was still his to own, he made his way across the street in front of the bank and set off on a merry pace towards his BMW. Upon reaching his pride and joy, however, he noticed that the expected glistening sheen of the dark expanse that usually took place before his eyes was covered over with a sickeningly yellow-brown tint, no, more than that, huge masses of rust-coloured liquid were slowly spreading themselves inanimately over his freshly-polished, not to mention expensive, car in a cruel bastardisation of the word ‘banker’, where the first letter of the appellation he deserved, due to his chosen profession, was mutilated into some semblance of an upside-down ‘M’. This seen, Anthony touched the material, smelled his finger, and vomited into the street.
Unfortunately for Anthony Burrows, this was only the beginning of his hardship, as other crude bodily-functions were to take place on his front step, his back-garden, even on his office desk, and a morose sense of melancholy beset the once loveable character, changing his visage and his outlook for the worse. This happened, as I’m sure you can guess, after what is now less than affectionately termed the ‘crisis’, during which money changed hands and dripped through fingers of grubby, greedy people that might all be termed ‘bankers’. They might well be these things, but what else are they? Fathers, sons, husbands? Surely not real people?
It was on a particularly sunny day in August that Anthony Burrows was found dead on his living room floor, wrapped no longer in his overcoat, nor his red scarf, but bloated, afraid, and alone, covered only with a thread-bare dressing gown. Left by his wife, and illuminated solely by the few rays of light that dared permeate his den of self-loathing and fear through the boards that covered his windows, Anthony stands as a lesson. Don’t become a banker.
Read more by James on his blog; http://metcalf1992.blogspot.co.uk/
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