Forgive my typing, but I’m hungover. There was a soirée last night, with several of you in attendance. There was a guy there with a beard. He runs some other trade magazine. His name was Frank or something.
Anyway, apparently, he used to run this title. I seem to remember him, vaguely. Felix, or whatever his name was. However, he appears inescapable. There’s a double-page exclusive by him on the moves at Frontline Solutions in our news section and his mail from some of the most important people in the industry keeps piling up in my inbox.
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One of his last acts at Motor Finance was to host our round table discussion this month on collections, sponsored by Burlington Group. It was a wide-ranging and honest discussion about the nature and examples of contemporary debt management, a burden this industry will not always talk about in an open manner, so I hope you will understand the need for several attendees to remain anonymous.
Actually, that soirée last night with Fernando immediately followed three solid days of editing the discussion into the format you will read later in the magazine. Given a prolonged amount of time reading about debt management, raising an elbow with Ferdinand and others reminded me how much positivity there is in the industry right now. Independent and captive, prime and non, every attendee spoke of just how much finance they are writing, with no signs of abatement. Just take a look at our Data Bank pages. New registrations are up, year-on-year, for the 15th month in a row and the rolling 12-month figure for new car finance penetration has been climbing each month for more than two years now. The expected dip in used prices has failed to happen just yet and second-hand average values have regained their £7,000-odd level. As one guest told me: "There’s never been a better time to be in motor finance".
It also reminded me, seeing representatives of banks and manufacturers talking together, how high the level of camaraderie is in this business, when some of their parent companies would be considered fierce rivals. Speaking of which, I almost found myself being pleasant to that old boss of mine, Felipe. You know, the guy who looks like a wizard who’s fallen through the men’s department at C&A, bless him.
It’s only this morning, through the haze of last night, that I’ve put my finger on what I miss about him. It wasn’t his editorials, I wrote those. It wasn’t his feature interviews, I wrote those, too. It may have been my diary piece, he wrote most of the jokes for that, did old Finlay.
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By GlobalDataActually, I think it was his constant bellowing I now miss. Of course, this morning, wrestling a pig in my skull and manually entering the data for all three pages for the Data Bank, like a torturous discount Sudoku each month, not having Fenton cry out ideas for features and demands for press images was a relief. The office seems empty, quieter, peaceful, anaesthetised without him.
No more so than late into the night all this week, as I am every month close to press date, squeezing together the latest issue. I realised I’d been swearing and throwing coffee at an empty desk opposite mine for a couple of minutes. That’s when I realised this would be the first with my name attached to it and not Fabio’s. That would also explain why nobody was arguing back, covered in coffee.
So, if you were wondering if this month would see a swing in editorial direction, it won’t, because I’ve been doing all the work for the past year. The difference is Floyd isn’t here for the emergency morning-after run to a chemist. In fairness, the baton has been passed, somewhat. I got the new intern to write this while I nursed myself on Lemsip. If I could just get them to sort through those data pages, too…
richard.brown@timetric.com
