The Summons

by John Passmore

Dr Mason was a distinguished rheumatologist. He lectured. People asked his opinion. He was much in demand. That was why he took up sailing.

In those days - and I'm going back to my 1950's childhood here - if you went sailing you were uncontactable. There were no mobile phones. Indeed in those days there were not even any transmitters on yachts. So no matter what crises were developing at the London Clinic, Dr Mason sat on his boat in the Essex backwaters, smoking his Senior Service, drinking his whisky (the combination did for him in the end) and remained oblivious to it all.

I thought of him last week when I was sailing around the Greek Islands and noticed a little red light winking at me from the chart table. Chart tables these days are a blaze of little red lights alerting the skipper to a myriad of emergencies. But this one was on the Blackberry and telling me an email had arrived.

And once you know that, curiosity gets the better of you and the next thing you're back at work.

So that was why I agreed to go to Sutton Coldfield on Monday morning, not six hours after arriving home.

But that doesn't mean the part-time business has to be on hold. We still have to complete our daily activity, don't we?

Actually I hadn't even had time to do my Business Development Plan for the week. It was literally a case of grab a handful of piggy cards and half a dozen DVDs and go.

So I arrived in what I understand is the posh suburb of Birmingham with half an hour to kill before my meeting. First it seemed a good idea to fill up with petrol. There was a salesman standing at the counter. You could tell he was a salesman because he had one of those huge pilot's cases and stood aside with a resigned expression while the proprietor served me.

Afterwards I turned to him: "Excuse me but are you in business?"

He was.

"Look I don't want to delay you but I'm always on the lookout for business people who are prepared to look at an extra income stream. Are you interested in extra money?"

He was - and so he got a DVD.

I cruised up one side of the street and down the other, handing out cards: "Have you had one of these?"

"No, what is it?"

"It's about money. Are you interested in money?"

If they were, I said my little piece and offered to send them an email. "Would you like that?"

Four people said "OK".

"Right then, what's your name? And do you have a mobile phone number? And your email address? And if I gave you one of these would you watch it tonight? OK I'll call you tomorrow..."

I was down to my last one and my last ten minutes when I came to a nail bar. Now a nail bar happened to be just what I needed. If we've shaken hands lately, you'll remember my right thumbnail is in a terrible state - all black and crumbling from its altercation with a kitchen door. For £3 the proprietor of the nail bar would fix me a new acrylic one and have me back on the street in five minutes.

As it happened I spent nearly all that time on the phone to one of the team in Norwich but finally I was able to make conversation with the man on the other end of the thumb. How was business?

Terrible, apparently. Nice nails are a luxury item. He didn't know how much longer he could keep going. So he got a DVD too. He had no idea when he would watch it - he was so busy trying to keep the business together...

But I left it with him anyway. The way he was talking, I could hear from him anytime over the next year or two.

I hope I don't. He did a brilliant job on my thumb.