Farepak and Me

The recent demise of Farepak brought a pavlovian response from me, Farepak in my mind is forever linked with a Monday in June 1990 and England drawing 1-1 with the Republic of Ireland in Italia 90. It was a date that would bring to a head a chain of events that had begun the previous October and which still have repercussions today.

Janis and I returned from our first joint holiday abroad on 30th September 1989, the date is easy to remember because it was her 28th birthday and we celebrated on the Caen-Portsmouth ferry. It had been a great two weeks which had begun horribly and gradually got better.

A fortnight before we were due to go to France I was driving up to London on a Saturday, I was on my way to the Society of Genealogists to complete some family history. Just as I arrived at Winchester on the M3 the gearbox on our Rover blew-up and I had to be collected by the AA and taken home with the car on the back of the trailer. I arranged for the car to be repaired, the problem was that getting the part and the garage synchronised left us with only one option, the new gear box and clutch had to be fitted on the Thursday before we were due to go on holiday the next night. Fortunately the garage came up trumps and I picked the car up on the Friday lunchtime, loaded-up and we set off for Portsmouth and beyond that the Loire Valley near Saumur.

Travelling so late in the season meant there was a possibility that we wouldn't get a great crossing that night but we'd decided against booking a cabin and had opted for a recliner - big mistake. The crossing was dreadful, in fact it was so rough we ended up sleeping on the floor and Brittany Ferries locked all the non-emergency doors to stop anybody going outside! When we arrived in France after an eight hour crossing we still had a six hour drive, the motorway south from Caen was only just beginning construction. After about three hours I went to put the car from fourth into fifth gear and I couldn't move the gearstick. My, or rather our, first reaction was that the gearbox hadn't been installed properly - we later realised that it was due to my tiredness from the lack of sleep the night before. Anyway, that aside the holiday was, as I said, great.

The Sunday night after we got back the phone rang at just after midnight, I knew it must be serious for somebody to ring at that time of night and I was right - it was my bosses secretary phoning to say he'd had a heart attack earlier in the day and was in Chalybeate Hospital, which is a PPP hospital next to Southampton General. He was to stay in hospital for the next three months and I was immediately given the title of 'Office Manager'.

I began taking my responsibilities seriously straightaway, too seriously in fact - it got to the stage where I would be at my desk every weekday from 7:15-5:30, I didn't appreciate at the time what effect this was having on me. When my boss returned to full time work in February 1990 he said that in recognition of my additional work he would set-up an annual bonus scheme, put me in a pension scheme and buy me a company car - as you can probably imagine I was chuffed to bits.

Now around December 1989/January 1990 one of our clients had sold off 90% of their business to Farepak Hampers - part of the sale agreement was that Farepak would collect our clients debtors (the people who owed our client money) that stood at the date of the sale. As auditors of the vendors we had to attend the Farepak accounting offices and ensure that all the monies were received by the end of May, any that weren't and a deal had to be done between the two parties. Although Farepak's administration was done from their head office in Swindon the actual accounts department was near Regents Park.

The date of the visit was fixed for a Tuesday in June 1990, myself and one of my juniors (a young woman called Julie) would travel by train to London on the Monday, stay at the Regents Crest Hotel for two nights and make sure that we carried out the post-agreement checks. The problem was that on Monday 11th Julie phoned in and said she wouldn't be coming back, she'd been offered another job and was starting straight away! It was too late to pull out so I had to go on alone.

The work itself was easy, most of Tuesday morning was spent talking to the Farepak staff about the game the night before and how embarrassing it was being an England fan after the poor performance (how times change eh?). On the Tuesday night, having discovered that the Regent Crest's idea of haute cuisine was a burger served with lettuce, I set off from Euston Road towards the West End. I had a good time, things were slightly surreal on the way down, some bloke offered me his girlfriend for a tenner and then when I said I wasn't interested he asked me if I wanted him for twenty!

It was on the way back to the hotel around midnight that things took a weird turn for, what would ultimately, the worst. I reached Oxford Street and then something happened that to this day I cannot explain although the possible cause has been explained to me and I'll come to that.

I forgot where I was. I forgot who I was. I forgot the name of my hotel, the name of my employers and I criss-crossed Oxford Street hoping to see something that would remind me who and where I was for what seemed like hours. Eventually I managed to find a record shop I recognised and from there worked out how to get back to the hotel, I was pretty shook-up by the time I stumbled into bed in the early hours.

I completed my work in London, returned home and although concerned by what had happened didn't really give it much more thought.

Then in September 1990 we went on holiday to France again and it all kicked off. I began shaking uncontrollably - one time was really embarrassing because we were at a wine tasting and I couldn't hold the glass still because my hand was shaking so much, our French host probably thought I'd had too much already!

When we returned home I contacted my G.P who saw me and put me in touch with a Stress Counsellor. I went along to see the woman, Sue (funny how these things stick with you) and we went back over everything that had happened over the past twelve months from the holiday via my bosses heart attack to London and full circle with the Holiday. She explained to me about fight or flight, about how following my bosses heart attack my body created extra adrenalin to cope with the stress of running the office, she said the brainstorm in London was a reaction to Julie dipping out at the last minute and that the holiday experience was due to the fact that my body was still producing too much adrenalin for 'normal' circumstances.

I was asked to attend a stress management course which I did and I saw people there who were far worse off than me in terms of their physical reaction to certain things. I was prescribed Beta-Blockers and they produced the worse nightmares and most vivid dreams ever. I survived a week on the drugs and went to see my doctor asking to be taken off.

The problem with the extra adrenalin stayed with me, ironically until my heart problems in 2003 which seemed to cure it - bizarre or what.

So there you go, mention of the name Farepak reminds me of a dark, wet, windy, place in the summer of 1990 - Cagliari or Oxford Street? I'm not really sure.

As a sort of postscript my boss at the time had two more heart attacks and died in his sleep in May 1997. The practice was sold by his executors to my current boss who took over all my employment contract details (car/bonus/pension etc) - so I ended up in a strange best of both world's situation, a new boss and new opportunities but a large chunk of the old client base. Who said accountancy was boring?