Sunday 19 September 2010 - Sunday 26 September 2010
After eating our way through Israel, we decided to make our way over to the family chateau Mas du Rosier in France (also referred to by some elements of the dark side of the family as Fort Knox or Alcatraz) for number 13 on our list of 28. Here we met up with the Queen of the Castle, my aunt Ada, and my cousins Freek and Johan.
This also enables me to tell a story I was told when I was still a terrified (and mainly clueless) first year investment banking analyst and which I have been dying to tell ever since. So here we go. When the Dutch incumbent telecom operator KPN was privatised by the Dutch government in 1994, the management team was sent on a roadshow to the US to drum up demand for the soon to be listed shares. Unfortunately, nobody had given much thought to how the names of the Dutch CEO and CFO would sound to the North American pension funds. I still pity the accompanying US investment banker who had to utter the now legendary words "Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce Wim Dik and Freek Monster, the CEO and CFO of KPN". A gulf of laughter erupted as the US institutional investors tried to come to terms with the fact that two funny sounding blokes called Wim the Dick and the Freakmonster not only were running a company in some Western European banana republic but were also trying to get them to buy into it when it listed. It is probably funnier when you are still a clueless junior banker wearing green suits.
Anyway, this is also the only fun I will be able to make of my cousin Freek, who beat me fair and square 2 out of 3 times for our evening runs from Fons to Ailhon, a distance of probably about 5km but at a steep and steady incline of 126m. A distance I used to run in below 30 minutes when I was young, fit and pretty but I found out the hard way that 10 years in banking has added 10 minutes to my time (and that is on a good day). Below how we fared (Freek's time in between brackets):
Monday: 40.36 min. (40.51)
Tuesday: 41.18 min. (-)
Wednesday: 42.48 min. (42.33)
Thursday: 41.17 min. (-)
Friday: 37.50 min. (37.00)
What did we do for the rest? Not much to be honest. Em managed to finish a bunch of books, we dipped our toes in the freezing pool, I read L'Equipe every day and managed to locate Ajax's former Greek striker Charisteas, nowadays plying his trade at Arles-Avignon in Ligue 1 (seven games, zero goals, some things never change) and we had a good go at making a dent into Ada's wine collection.
Next stop: Destination #14 & #15: Shoe shopping in Edinburgh / Fly-fishing on the Isle of Skye
I remember Freek well. I worked for a London-based company that compiled names of financial executives at the time and received an angry call from the New York head office asking why this obviously fake name had been added to the database. I didn't get it at first because Freek (pronounced Frake) is not a funny name in Dutch, my native language. Monster means the same as in English, but it's also the name of a village. It took a while to convince them that Freek was a real person. The story has a twist: because KPN was state owned at the time, the Dutch Prime Minister was also involved in the road shows. His name was Wim Kok.
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