Date: 3
David,
I appreciate the points you have raised in your memo of today’s date. Having given the matter my fullest consideration, I remain unable to see how we could help Fitzharris & Price and their client. The prospect of introducing salmon to the wadis of the Hadramawt seems to me, quite frankly, risible.
I am quite prepared to back this up with the relevant science, should anyone at the FCO require further information on our grounds for not proceeding.
Alfred
Office of the Director, National Centre for Fisheries Excellence
From:
David Sugden
To:
Dr Alfred Jones
Subject:
Salmon?Yemen
Date:
4 June
Dr Jones,
Please accept this memo as my formal instruction to proceed to the next stage of the Yemen salmon project with Fitzharris & Price. I would like you to meet Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and receive a full briefing, following which you are to develop and cost an outline scope of work for this project for me to review and forward to the FCO.
I take full responsibility for this decision.
David Sugden
From:
Date:
4 June
To:
Subject:
Yemen Salmon Project
David,
Can we talk about this? I’ll pop round to your office after the departmental meeting.
Alfred
From:
Date:
4 June
To:
Subject:
Job
Darling,
I am being put under unreasonable pressure by David Sugden to put my name to some totally insane project dreamed up by the FCO to do with salmon being introduced into the Yemen. There have been memos flying around on this for days and I suppose I thought it was so bizarre I didn’t even mention it to you last time we spoke. I popped into David S’s office just now and said, ‘Look, David, be reasonable. This project is not only totally absurd and scientifically nonsensical, but if we allow our name to be involved no one in the fisheries world will ever take us seriously again.’
Sugden was totally stone-faced. He said (pompously), ‘This one is coming from higher up. It isn’t just some minister at the FCO with a bee in his bonnet. It goes all the way to the top. You’ve had my instruction. Please get on with it.’
I have not been spoken to like that since I left school. I am seriously considering handing in my resignation.
Love,
Fred
PS: When are you back from your management training course?
From:
Date:
4 June
To:
Subject:
Financial realities
Fred,
My annual salary is ?75,000 gross and yours is ?45,561. Our combined net of tax monthly income is ?7333 out of which our mortgage takes ?3111, rates, food and other household expenses a further ?1200, and that’s before we think about car costs, holidays, and your fishing extravagances.
Resign your job? Don’t be a prat.
Mary
PS: I am home on Thursday but I have to leave on Sunday for New York for a conference on Sarbanes-Oxley.
Memo
From:
To:
Subject:
Herbert,
