Underwritten Weekly

Last Thursday morning, I had slept for two and a half hours.

Not two and a half hours less than I would have liked. Two and a half hours in total.

This was unfortunate, because Thursday last week was not an especially good day to be operating on the neurological equivalent of emergency lighting.

We had some tricky meetings. My brother was over from Singapore and I’d arranged to meet him for lunch. And, in a piece of scheduling that had seemed perfectly sensible when I was well rested, I had also promised to take my friend on a tour of Lloyd’s.

By lunchtime I was shattered. Not charmingly tired. Not “I could do with an early night” tired. Properly, comprehensively exhausted. The sort where every conversation feels as though it is taking place through several inches of glass and you begin to regard stairs as an unreasonable personal demand.

Then I walked into Lloyd’s.

And, somehow, I was fine.

Within seconds I was pointing things out, explaining the Room, telling stories, darting towards objects my friend had not asked about and providing historical context she had certainly not requested. Apparently whatever part of my brain had spent the day refusing all non-essential services had decided that this counted as an emergency.

At one point I apologised.

“Sorry,” I said. “You’re getting the low-energy version of the tour.”

She looked at me.

“If that was the low-energy version, God knows what the normal one’s like.“

Fair.

The strange thing is, I really had been exhausted. I didn’t suddenly acquire the missing five hours of sleep somewhere around the escalators. I was still tired when we left.

But tired, I discovered, is not quite the same thing as empty.

And apparently there is a building in Lime Street that knows how to tell the difference.

A brief warning: the nonsense stops here. Normal service resumes next Sunday.

The next morning, people gathered in that same Room.

Lloyd’s, Aon and Marsh came together for the twenty-fifth anniversary of 11 September 2001, to remember those who died in the attacks and all those whose lives were changed by them.

There were no risks to quote during the service. No deals to be done. No premium to negotiate. Just people standing together in a market which had learned, very painfully, what the things we insure can actually mean when it is no longer theoretical.

The Lutine Bell rang.

One note.

It had rung once on 11 September 2001, too.

Marsh had offices in the North Tower. They lost 295 colleagues and 63 consultants. Aon were in the South Tower. They lost 176.

More than five hundred people, from two firms.

They weren’t claims. They were our colleagues, who had simply gone to work.

The market itself had suffered a terrible loss, but it still knew its job was to help other people survive theirs.

So on the 12th of September, the market re-opened.

And through the revolving door, up the escalator and into The Room walked our colleagues from Aon and Marsh, to keep the promises they had made to the people they insured.

That’s heroic.

No one alive would have blamed them for taking a few days off.

They came in anyway.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But my God, I hope the rest of the market applauded until someone told them to stop.

Then they carried on anyway. For 25 years.

Have a good week,

Rob