Twitches are Catching/the ship that never sailed.

Back in the day it was customary, in The City of London, for Broking Houses to stage small formal lunches whereby a director of a company would talk to a select group of fund managers about company progress etc. Events were not as well regulated as they are now (?!!). Typically the MD or Finance Director would give a review of activities, avoiding any price sensitive news of course, and then the invited guests would ask their questions.

David Harvey was 6 foot 6 inches tall and was The Finance Director of the Ocean Group a shipping company with a long history. David had a close relationship with Dan White, my boss and The City’s leading shipping analyst. Peculiar in their relationship was the fact that six months or so earlier Mr Harvey had been attending lunch at Laurence Prust, my firm, when he swallowed a fish bone. He nearly choked fell to the ground and turned red. Fortunately one of the waitresses was a former nurse and she performed the appropriate manoeuvre and Mr Harvey was saved.

There were twelve people around a very grand mahogany table with magnificent silver and crystal glass place settings on this day. Dan White had Mr Harvey on his immediate right and on his left was the most important guest, a director of Singer and Friedlander, I will not mention his name. I was directly opposite Dan and there were 8 other guests.

We ate a starter and the chat was general and social. The main course was served and Mr Harvey was asked to give us his thoughts on shipping in general and Ocean in particular. A particular point of interest was the fact that Ocean had built a huge Liquid Natural Gas Carrier called The Nestor. It had a fault in its tanks such that the too and fro of the motion of a ship in passage cause a ‘swosh effect’ in the corner of its stainless steel tanks risking dangerous fracture of a highly flammable product. Commissioned originally for a Californian based project, as far as I am aware, this ship never ever carried a serious cargo. As a capital investment it was huge for Ocean and therefore any snippet of news was extremely price sensitive and as a result my assimilation of all such minutae pertaining to this vessel meant a qualification by me for the ‘Bore of Britain’ award. Would we learn anything today I wondered.

Any way as Mr Harvey started I looked across at the senior guest. He sort of winked at me. Oh I thought how nice someone so senior is winking at me he probably wants to encourage me as he would know I was new to all this. So I winked back. He looked somewhat affronted and winked repeatedly one, two, three.! Alarm bell, it was not a wink it was a twitch and I had insulted the guest of honour. Mr Harvey’s monologue was now irrelevant. I did of course do what any right thinking man would do I looked at the man on the right of Mr Harvey and winked at him. He winked back. I then offered two or three faster winks, he panicked , thinking like me had made faux pas and he winked to the man on my immediate right. Soon the entire table was winking at each other. I introduced a shoulder shrug I have seen before in a ‘twitcher’ and someone made a sort of open mouth pout with a head flick. It was carnage . I am not sure what a collective of twitchers is but that day we were it.

I had no recollection of what Mr Harvey said. I was glad to get out of the lunch and when ever I saw the man from Singers I would make it my business to say hello but immediately afterwards affect some twitch or other just in case he thought my behaviour on that day was anything but natural.