"Archer, Jeffrey - twelve red herrings)txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Archer Jeffrey)

I once expressed the view, during a downturn in the market, that
we should be looking further afield in search of new business - perhaps
even as far as the Continent. But my father wouldn't hear of it. "Not
a risk worth taking," he declared. He distrusted
anyone born south of the Humber, let alone those who lived on the other
side of the Channel. "If God put a strip of water between us, he must
have had good reasons for doing so," were his final words on the
subject. I would have laughed, if I hadn't realised he meant it.

When he retired in 977 - reluctantly, at the age of seventy - I
took over as chairman, and began to set in motion some ideas I'd been
working on for the past decade, though I knew my father didn't approve
of them. Europe was only the beginning of my plans for the company's
expansion: within five years I wanted to go public. By then, I
realised, we would require an overdraft facility of at least a million
pounds, and would therefore have to move our account to a bank which
recognised that the world stretched beyond the county boundaries of
Yorkshire.

It was around this time that I heard about the CBI seminar at
Bristol, and applied for a place.

The seminar began on the Friday, with an opening address from the
Head of the European Directorate of the CBI. After that the delegates
split into eight small working groups, each chaired by an expert on
Community Law. My group was headed by Jeremy Alexander. I admired him
from the moment he started speaking - in fact, it wouldn't be an
exaggeration to say that I was overawed. He was totally self-assured,
and as I was to learn, he could effortlessly present a convincing
argument on any subject, from the superiority of the Code Napol(on to
the inferiority of the English middle-order batting.

He lectured us for an hour on the fundamental differences in
practice and procedure between the member states of the Community, then
answered all our questions on Commercial and Company Law, even finding
time to explain the significance of the Uruguay Round. Like me, the
other members of our group never stopped taking notes.

We broke up for lunch a few minutes before one, and I managed to
grab a place next to Jeremy. I was already beginning to think
that he might be the ideal person to advise me on how to
go about achieving my European ambitions.

Listening to him talk about his career over a meal of stargazy pie
with red peppers, I kept thinking that, although we were about the same
age, we couldn't have come from more different backgrounds. Jeremy's
father, a banker by profession, had escaped from Eastern Europe only
days before the outbreak of the Second World War. He had settled in
England, anglicised his name, and sent his son to Westminster. From